The secret of life is not really a secret.

It’s just SO utterly random, that we don’t want to accept it.

The secret of life is that there is no secret.

Nobody knows what the fuck we’re doing here, although we looove to pretend.

And that’s why we admire and believe the people who pretend the hardest and the loudest.

They seem to know, they write the books and create the courses and the concepts and the podcasts, and that is good enough for us.

They talk about science this and ancient wisdom that, and we fall for it.

We really, really want to.

There is so much hope and promise in believing there’s a system, a way, a tradition.

And if we walk the way for a bit or test the system for a while or dwell in the tradition for some time and none of it delivers, we just shrug and forget about it.

There are always new pretenders.

Ready to tell us what to do or what to don’t.

And we buy it, over and over again, at least for a while.

The secret of life is not a secret.

Life is SO incredibly vague and magical and elusive, that we can believe whatever we want about it, even if none of it is universally, ultimately true (and we wouldn’t even recognize True if it sat on us with burning pants, by the way).

But that’s something we don’t like very much.

We want to grab life and wrestle it to the ground and make it ours and squeeze it for what it’s worth, floating in juicy success and hard-earned happiness.

We want to master life.

Which is totally cool.

Cool, but totally undoable.

And also not The secret.

Because nobody knows.

We just try shit and sometimes it does what we want and hope for, and even if most of the time it doesn’t, we turn it into a system.

A system we then start to sell.

And the system becomes our gig, as self-help figurines.

And we promise that it’s the only thing you’ll ever need for the rest of your life, forgetting or denying that there are millions of people claiming the exact same about something completely different.

It’s like saying ‘Peas are awesome and divine!’, and claiming them to be the ultimate truth.

‘Peas changed my life, look at my before and after photos, look what happened when I switched from carrots to peas, LOOK!’

‘Oh, and peas were already on the menu of hunter-gatherers, so they are automatically better than anything else!’

And of course, ‘Science has now shown the importance and power of peas, and ‘peas’ even sounds like ‘peace’, how amazing is that!’

We can literally make everything important.

But nothing really is.

Which should be a relief.

 

Maybe that’s the secret of life.

 

—

 

(Photo by @pickledstardust, for Unsplash)