Why I Stopped Being Bothered About That Which is Not Ideal

Life is hard at times. There being a labyrinth of tragic alleys, the journey entails a lot of roads not taken. And what makes it even tougher to traverse, with a blurry vision secondary to teary eyes, is injustice.

There is something tumultuous which happens in our brain whenever we perceive injustice. Your boss ignoring the facilities you are authorized, your colleague minting money with corruption, your professors vomiting their sadist personality in the name of teaching or that pretty but dumb girl getting selected for something you perspired for.

Unfairness is the abstract form of a dagger stabbing right through your heart and getting pulled back only to hit the other side. Living in a society where what a human desires — if righteous — is termed ideal but what manifests in reality is termed practical, it has been an arduous journey growing up.

But gradually as the fruit of your thought ripens, you realize perhaps life was never about the ideal situation. It was never meant to be a static of all honest people everywhere never knowing what’s under the table, but a dynamic of corrupt minds thriving in the event of an opportunity along with some zealous, candid people sprinkled like salt and pepper giving life its taste.

As I stepped into college, I was always the ideal, by-the-book person. Always establishing rigid boundaries for what is right and what is wrong. The past-me thought life happens in absolute blacks and whites but it wasn’t long until I could spot the shades of gray.

The deviation from idealism exists because we have evolved from animals who had to survive in the wild. The selfish animal who could amass food by hook or by crook had the longest lifespan and could mate with the most number of opposite sexes. This ensured greater number of progeny and hence, survival of the species. So it is no wonder that people with vices were naturally selected.

Now this doesn’t mean that a selfish, corrupt state is the most naturally favored one. In fact, mathematical models have shown that sharing withing a community leads to much greater prosperity as compared to selfish behaviors. Perhaps that’s the reason human beings evolved to be kind and moral to support their community?

It requires no genius to understand that no matter how intellectual a person may be, it requires connections to rise and shine. No man is an island and no mind is a tree. Communal support is quintessential and for it to be ever lasting, kindness is the strongest weapon.

But when everybody is kind, the only one self-centred person gets the cake. It is like every country developing lots of nuclear weapons but then agreeing to never use them and dispose them all. Let’s say one nation turned out to be a crook and decided to hide its weapons until everybody destroyed theirs.

Now when every other country stands defenseless, this evil nation appears as the mightiest and threatens everyone with a nuclear apocalypse. We know in reality every nation would do what our fictional crooked country did. And that is why there is no ideal because what happens is the natural state of entropy.

In a world of all saints, the one evil would produce the most babies and nature would select its genes in the gene pool. In an attempt to maximise reproductive success, the ideal upshifts to the practical. Is there really anything ideal anymore? Where do you draw the line?

Photo by Anna Pelzer on Unsplash

“It is righteous to go vegan because animals have emotions”, said the one eating the plant’s womb and throwing away its foetuses in the dustbin. Perhaps the pineapple and the chilly screamed its emotions out by evolving a chemical that stings your tongue so that you don’t eat it? We happened to be real jerks and ate them anyway is a different story, though.

Right and wrong has a reference point. It is all about the perspective. As ‘Wynne McLaughlin’ said, “The sinking of the Titanic was a miracle for the lobsters in its kitchen”. The success of antibiotics was a tragedy for the bacteria. The death of a man is a feast for a vulture.

Shades of Gray. Nothing ever is truly ideal.

The Unknown Doctor