One of the hardest things to do is to clear the mind. The noise in my head when it's pin-drop silent does more damage than external noise could ever do to my peace. We're living in a time where clarity is so hidden from sight. It's so hard to focus. It's so hard to drown out distractions.

The ideal mindset of the modern man is one that is centred on meeting expectations and achieving goals. I must say that at first I was smitten by the idea of a world that idealises capturing results. We envision these successfully met expectations to be the solutions to our problems, the answers to our questions. Is it really? 

What do we think about the world we live in?

We're never slow to judge the way we live - self-diagnosing the fact that we live in an era where all generations now coincide to breed and nurture what is 'negative'. 'Negative' cultures and mentalities that only seem to be getting even more backwards. We're enslaved to worldly possessions, feed off labels and have now evolved to be incapable of respect. 
We give ourselves the right to possess so much power. Look at us humans - the very structure of our beings having so much potential and so much ability. We can do everything that can realistically be done because we decide on what is realistic and what is not. There's so much authority granted on such tiny specks in the universe. So much authority granted by us, for us.

We're supposedly everything the world should not be.

How does that make you feel?

For most of us, we don't feel anything at all. We don't feel anything at all because we acknowledge society as the problem but not us. We express, so eloquently, our disgust or intellectually backed opinions on how humanity has deteriorated. But are we not humanity? Are we not the catalyst of our own fate?

Have these problems occurred because we as people have lost sight of ourselves?

I'm starting to realise how flawed my reality is. My mind drifts off sometimes and instead of drowning out the noise around me, it ends up maginifying aspects of the life I live into definitions that I don't feel ready to see. It has shown me that I truly do not understand what the meaning of quality life is, and being a person of this current age, I'm not sure if I ever will. 

I'm caught on the fence. 

I sometimes envy the people of the past. I envy the age where philosophers believed they should be leaders, because they proclaimed that they had the intellectual ability and knowledge to understand what the 'good life' was. At the end of the 6th century BCE, philosophers were talking about their concept of the 'good life' in which 'living well' was beyond measurable materialistic achievements but instead was defined by the virtues you live by. I envy how they were driven by studying idea of life as a whole how it would make them genuinely happy. 

We've built an age flourishing with new discoveries. We're supposedly smarter and because of that constantly seeking for change, justice and equality. We're the now. We're the advancements that they dreamed of. But we're sadder, exhausted and afraid of everything. 

I feel like the definition of what it should mean to be alive has been blurred. I find it scary how truthfully speaking, it looks like a majority of the human race does not go by each day with their own ideas of what a quality life is. We're too busy worrying. Worrying about standards, worrying about comparisons. We look around ourselves before we base our direction to follow. And yes that is necessary, but why is it so hard to stop, shut everyone up, and look at ourselves first? 

Even if our cities are bustling with life, and if our future economy is as steady as a mountain of rocks - if there was no such thing as money, and if materialism was only a dream and not a reality, who would we be? What can we use to define ourselves, be it good or bad, if I took away your academic qualification, your job, the size of your house, your car, your wardrobe and the balance in your bank account? 

What would we be left with besides our name and our age? 

Our passions? What makes us happy? Or are they gone as well because all it goes back to were those elements that I had just taken away? 

So many of us are so used to having a structure, that we don't know how to break free and be free. We don't know what makes us happy anymore because we don't even have the time to find out. We're constantly battling a big clock, running a race against deadlines, due dates and final calls. And when we do find the time, we're way too tired. 

If we were interested in the idea of rediscovering ourselves, like how the people of the Renaissance period rediscovered their art and culture to flourish and shift their lives, maybe we would be able to clear our minds and to drown out that noise. Maybe then we would be able to use our brains for the better, to appreciate and expand our knowledge and truly understand what we love to do. Maybe then we would stop milking it dry to succumb to our reality's standards, and mistaken that as being smart or being an achiever. 

In a lot of places, it's a luxury to even have a dream. In others, people are handed their dreams on a silver platter. Like myself, most of us fall in between - working towards a dream. Everything I do, contributes to my dream. Writing this now, coming up with this topic and playing with words, contributes to my dream. 

But I must say, that I don't know what a dream is anymore. I don't know what it's like to not be blinded by the idea of comparisons, standards and materialistic achievements. I do know though, that no matter hard it is going to be, I will try to give myself more substance. I want to rediscover myself yet again through religion  and gain knowledge on people and the world around me for the sake of pure pleasure, because it would help me understand myself and the situations I live in. 

One day, I want to be so sure of who I am, that if I'm stranded in the middle of nowhere and stripped down to nothing, I know what I'm worth and what I live by. 

Maybe that should be my dream.