IT IS WHAT IT IS: Coach De Bruyns’ Philosophy in a Nutshell (eBook)
What is the nature of existence? What does that question even mean? Existence of what? Of who? Let’s try to get to the heart of the matter and aim to describe the nature of nature. In other words, the nature of everything. What is the underlying condition of everything in existence? What is its inherent goal? What is it trying to achieve? Why is it trying to achieve it? What is it? This book will be an exposition on everything functionally relevant in a concise format. Everything in the world of writing today seems to be long and drawn out.…
We know that the collective goal to survive supersedes the goal to survive individually by observing the nature of many species. It is not uncommon for mothers to sacrifice themselves for the survival of their babies. It is not uncommon for fathers to risk their lives to save their families. As you and I share this moment, we are sharing countless moments with everyone because we are all intertwined in a big web. We are all trying to do one thing: survive. But we are not really trying to survive individually. How many people commit suicide? They’re not trying to survive at that point, but more often than not they are thinking of others. There are men who commit suicide to get the insurance money for their families. There are people who commit suicide because they feel unloved by OTHERS. There are people who routinely risk their lives to save others. Policemen and fighter-fighters do that as a job. Why? They do it for the sake of society. Policemen attempt to keep the streets safe so that innocent people aren’t harmed. These innocent people aren’t relatives. Similarly, firefighters run into burning buildings to save total strangers because we are wired to survive as a collective. When one person is killed in cold blood, there is outrage by everyone. Why? Because in a very real way, we share something with the murdered person and we know instinctively that our lives are impacted by it NEGATIVELY. We all desire positive outcomes which will best ensure our collective survival. We are part of one ecosystem and one collective and we want to ensure that we survive because we can in essence only survive if we band together.
You might say that survival is easy. I have a job and a car. I have food and clothes. I even have hobbies and free time. You might say survival is difficult. I have debt and sicknesses. I have fear and anguish. I am poor and unable to work my way out of poverty. I am, I am, I am. From the perspective of ‘I’ survival can seem easy or difficult. From the perspective of ‘we’ survival is always difficult. We have seen that one sick person could make everyone sick. One poor person can impoverish many people. One disenfranchised person could destroy entire communities. But also one greedy person can destroy the world.
In the world we live in today, it is easy to imagine the extinction of the human species along with many other species through a simple act of starting a nuclear war. We are never very far away from such a reality. Failing that, we can destroy the species through the ill-gotten advice of people who say that to have children is destroying the planet. It takes only two generations of not procreating to potentially destroy the entire species. We could also endure another pandemic that will not have a cure, or one of the many viruses could leak out from military facilities that hold them as biological weapons. Any number of things can go utterly wrong at any point and yet here you are?
Every person alive today is the culmination of millions of years of hardships endured, through every generation, to protect children so that they grow into adulthood. Consider that you were a sperm cell that out-swam millions of others to make it to your mother’s egg. You came into the world having fought to come out of the birth canal. Your very existence came through struggle, pain and suffering preceded by the pleasure your parents had in conceiving you and in having possibly first fallen in love. You are the culminationof countlesspeoplewhocameoutontop.Manypeoplefellbythewayside, didn’t procreate and ended their genetic legacy, sometimes in favor of your survival. After all that, you would believe that your legacy of a million battles through an almost endless line of ancestors should end because it is your duty to save the planet? Then again, if you do believe that, isn’t it perhaps part of the plan that your legacy should now be eliminated to make way for people who are smarter than you?
The ecosystem we live in is one of inequality. The rich need the poor more than the poor need the rich. In fact, being rich necessitates the existence of the poor because by definition being rich is the opposite of being poor. In fact, we compete for resources to the extent that we cannot define anything in and of itself without contrasting it with something it isn’t. In a village where no one has electricity, the guy who has electricity is considered rich. In a village where everyone has a new car, the guy who has an old car is considered poor. Our definitions are relative to our other definitions, and that in turn is relative to the context we find ourselves in. That is because we are competing with each other for resources since we all are resource reliant in order to survive. Hence, we associate the likelihood of our survival with the amount of resources we can accumulate. Yet, when we’ve accumulated so much resources that survival seems not to be a direct goal anymore, we begin to feel sick and we become depressed? This happens because the nature of our existence is to experience pain along with the reward of pleasure in cycles. We were not designed to offset pain so long that the pleasure no longer feels pleasurable. That brings us to another rule:
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