The Condition of Humanity

Tuna Durak
Aug 22, 2017 · 2 min read

Humans are complicated creatures. We love life, yet we are enamored with things that potentially kill us. We hate discomfort on an unrealistic level, yet we believe anything worth something achieved with it. We are more confused than ever, with thousand of options to choose from - let that be products, ideas, or even people - yet we become more single-minded than ever, believing that despite that diversity we need the correct weight or career or opinions to matter.

Why this matters is that despite all the information we have on human body and the outer world, we can’t seem to change much about our nature. The duality of human experience is intact, even though we complain that everything has gone digital, or fake, or hollow. Despite our adaptation skills, we might not be ready to experience this much change in this little time, so this can be the source of why we believe virtuality destroyed us, but when we look a little deeper, it is obvious that the human experience hasn’t change that much. We still want similar things and have similar dilemmas and even similar fates. That is the journey of the hero with a thousand faces, the varied actualizations of different possible human conditions, yet the range of that possibilities are limited.

The only thing that might change today is that we know our limited capabilities. Postmodern philosophy, in its core and its best intentions, tries to remind us that we have limits; no theory would encapsulate the complexity of the world or the path to the pure information is sealed with structures like language and human mind, the very things that allow us to describe information for the first place.

What I expect from us, the humans, is to be a little smarter. We should know that the world is full of inconsistencies, dualities and events that are inexplicable, at least from our point of view and be fine with it. Most important, however, we should let go of the idea that everything has a proper beginning and a proper ending. We are always in the middle, and that is okay.

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