Curse of the complex mind

The mass man wishes to make a success of his life within the system in which he was born, the complex man wishes to transcend it.

To be acutely aware of life is something rare. By this, I don't simply mean to have faculty of the five senses, guided by intuition, as this is simply human. I mean to have what most do not possess, a complexity. It is this complexity that separates the many from the few; the NPC from the main character.

While we all view ourselves as the protagonist of our own story, not everyone can fulfil this role. This is, after all, an elitist sentiment. If hierarchy is natural, and if hierarchy is to be the governing mechanism of human organisation, then by the de-facto law of nature, only a few will be complex. Only a few will not be content with the meat grinder of the nine-to-five, and crave more. Only a few will create art, build new technologies, understand and disseminate the core truths of life. In days long gone, only a few would have conquered new lands, built empires. Only a few will truly own themselves.

It was the belief of the existentialists that we are not born to chains, but rather that we are terrifyingly free. Life is what we make of it. Though, given that I do believe, wholeheartedly, that the NPC does indeed walk among us, this notion of horrifying freedom is too an elitist sentiment. Though, in the name of politeness, and a general disliking of meme terminology, I shall refrain from using the 'NPC' title any more, and instead use 'the mass man'.

And yet, ask yourself who is happier; the complex man, who can see the ashes and walks among them daily, or the mass man, who is distracted by plentiful circuses and accessible bread. Is it the man to whom life in the 21st century offers nothing but cruelty and alienation - the twitching corpse of a glorious yesterday -, or the man whose week is made by Champions League football and happy hour. Who can spend his weekend drinking to excess, watching mind-numbing television, and gorging on kebabs and considering the whole thing a success.

The mass man will spend most of his life in the middle. With the exception of personal tragedy, and occasional anger, he will only ever be content, 'alright', 'decent'. He will be satisfied by little, because he expects little from life. He will happily work until he retires, living in supernovic bursts at the weekend, and then lounge until he is dead. He will pay his taxes, watch his approved entertainment, go on his package holidays, and laugh at his approved panel shows and Hasbulla memes. He will probably marry and father children, send them to state school without a care in the world. He may even look back at the end of it all and see his life as a success. And in many ways it was, he passed on his genetics, his favourite football team, he did his bit. He is blissfully unaware.

Fate is a little different, and much crueller for the complex man. He will experience the beauty and the truth of art, he may even craft it himself. He will read the greatest of literary works, listen to the sweetest of music. Every field, and hedgerow, and pretty little vista will make his heart sing. He will discover new things, within and without. He will crave more from life, and with luck he shall achieve it. He will also flit, forever, between joy and misery; for they are his only options. There is no joy without misery and no misery without joy. He is the novelist, the poet, the painter, the magnate, the architect, the craftsman, the connoisseur. He is the nostalgic, the romantic, the futurist.

The mass man does still know that something is wrong, he can see it every time he fills his car with fuel, buys food, or rents a flat. He may even be aware of the progressive behemoth that swallows his land, and will one day spit out a dilapidated waste of what it once was; but he will blame the 'wokies', without truly knowing what that means. The complex man knows exactly what is wrong; he can see the behemoth and follows its every movement. Yet he is powerless to stop it and from here flows his misery. His joy, it seems, comes almost entirely from a romanticised past, and a future forever around the bend. Yet both are still there.

At the end, he shall be far harsher to himself than the mass man. He shall hold himself up to a significantly higher standard. If he does not create meaningful art, conquer a section of the world, leave some ripple in it, implant his name into its shared memory, then what was the point of it all?

And so I return to the beginning. To be acutely aware of life. It is, in essence, the curse of the complex mind. To be acutely aware of life is to be acutely aware of death. And death shall sit in the corner of every room. The uninvited guest who won't leave. It is what drives us. It is the final whistle, the point at which one must have sufficiently escaped before he can escape no more.

The mass man and the complex man crave different things. The mass man wishes to make a success of his life within the system in which he was born, the complex man wishes to transcend it.

And I haven't even started on the midwit...