What happens when someone extremely talented dies?
With their death begins a series of eulogy, inquiries, theories and too many posts going viral including this one 🙂 Now if we think ourselves to be bots each programmed genetically and predisposed to individual interests and vulnerabilities, do we simply shut down when the optimum domain is compromised? Taking another dig towards general humanity, is that act done in a good, bad, or sheer helplessness.
I started excavating the internet for the question ‘why do people kill themselves?’
As someone who has done a bit of science, this question bewilders me. Sadly, I couldn’t find a definitive answer, and I don’t think there is one. The human spectrum is so weird, here we have a crowd of humans working tirelessly on ‘how to prolong one’s life, and one subset goes for its wilful termination. I am not intelligent enough to find justifications to either of these. Considering the human neural circuit pretty complex, its untenable to map out the mechanistic pathway for this perhaps. But as someone from middle-class Indian society, I am perplexed.
Why does such an event unleash a cascade of emotions in everyone?
Yet again this itch lets me take another dig on our sensibility, and the questioning mind can’t stop. My reaction to such events is triggered and stays afloat for a few days at least. Now when someone intelligent and inquisitive dies? Why it bothers me? My vanity makes me relate to them to a certain extent but had not met them and was not going to. What bothers my core is that such data points become complete outliers of the cultural theories that were fed to me in the last two decades-strive hard, work hard, stay focussed, be the best version of you, chase things, and you will be happy! What after doing all this there is no happiness? The irony is whoever told this to us, parents, media, the teachers, were they ever able to quantify that very happiness they were talking about while training us? Is it quantifiable? Is life just a chase? Are we on earth to strive towards goals and targets? Is the irony that this ‘goal’ is a shapeshifter? How do we aim for it when we simply can’t quantify its coordinates?
