How many days in a row can I write an article before the content becomes an incoherent pile of garbage? I guess I’m going to attempt to find out. So far day 4 seems to be getting close to this result. What is the point of all this? Not just my writing, I mean all of this? From unfulfilling work just for an income to other countless complaints about life being hard, is there really a point?
Leo Tolstoy was haunted by similar questions and wrote about them in “A Confession.” His disdain for his own existence grew to the point where he didn’t trust himself alone in his barn with rope or firearms. The picture he paints of himself is of the man in the ivory tower. He was the man who searched for nothing and found it, a staunch atheist.
I wrote yesterday about the difficulty of self-reflection. This book is a great example of the arduous path that lays ahead if you start questioning the way that you were brought up to think. This path has a tendency to lead to the total denial of everything that is held sacred. With the way that things are now, and really have been all throughout history, I find it hard to blame a person for coming to this nihilistic conclusion.
One of your rewards for questioning the status quo is a long battle with agnosticism. The search for facts and for proof can often parallel the story of Sisyphus. Once you start to see the top of the hill of wisdom the boulder of logic becomes too much to bear and smashes all of your beliefs and values.
The temptation to turn this struggle outward is strong. It seems to be part of our nature to try and offload a burden by taking it out on others. This particular struggle can be manifested in the criticism of those you see as beneath you, such as the working man who just keeps his nose to the grindstone and doesn’t look up to ask any questions. Tolstoy confessed of this outlook, however, in his eventual turn toward belief in the Orthodox Church, he discovered wisdom in this type of approach toward life.
He found that the working man was lead toward the answers because he was serving his master. Essentially, participating in the natural hierarchy and having faith in the “Man in charge” leads to much more fulfillment than just sitting around and questioning everything. So the question that I was left with after reading “A Confession” is why not both?
Over the past few years, I have come to see that there is value in hard work. You often have to start at the bottom if you really want to learn useful skills and better yourself. But, I cannot help myself from questioning the purpose of things and maintaining a sacrilegious view of certain parts of society. It seems that we were given the ability to reason and the ability to better ourselves through hard work. So for the moment, I will continue to try both, until I either burn out and give up or find some of the answers that I’m looking for.