Roland Michel Tremblay

I used to believe I was following a destiny. I could even tell you what that destiny was.

I asked my Mentor what value I should put on one’s life. I asked my Mentor what meaning I should give to my life. You must have asked yourself the same questions recently, or else, are you sure you are worthy of being such a good Citizen, such a good Christian? Would you like to know what my Mentor told me? You are dying to find out, as we are dying to find answers to these questions. Well he told me… nothing, as I have no mentor. I am my own master.

That’s the secret of this existence, you are your own master. You make out of this life whatever you want. Let’s just hope you are an ethical and moral human being at the core and cannot so easily be influenced into believing anything and everything floating around in the heavens. Or you will quickly be joining the ranks in the never ending extermination of all Muslims from this Earth. And what will this achieve in the end? I’m not sure.

When it comes to the value of your life, both governments and religions have proven through history and even today that they don’t believe it is worth much. Just about the cost of sending a soldier on the other side of the planet to kill another human being with the Church’s blessing, and that soldier being killed right after. Their meaning of life for us seems more like ensuring their power over us through mass control and conformism. They have hardly ever proven they had our best interests at heart, have they? So easily we doubt everyone nowadays, what have they got to sell, what type of slavery are these groups in the market for? This is certainly the capitalist mentality.

If someone cannot value the life of another human being no matter if it is our enemy in war, that someone certainly cannot value your life either. And all the headlines in the daily news prove it time and time again. Your life is worth nothing in this world, you could never possibly be on any right side of the fence. You can always only be the next target.

Governments and religions are responsible for so many deaths every year, so much of our global misery, should we really put a price on someone’s life and follow some meaning of life coming from them? They are responsible for soul-destroying us all, until we all become mindless machines stressed to death, incapable to even think, let alone living a meaningful existence. At least this is how I see it, after all that has happened in recent years.

I don’t need to get into the details here to justify how and why, just open any history book, even the biased ones, it is all there to see. I am that confident that you will find exactly that in any history book you will ever read, until at least you take control over your own existence, over the existence of us all, as you can be powerful enough to have quite an impact upon this world if you want to.

One day we will have to free ourselves from such conditioning, we will have to value all life and come up with our own meaning to this existence. Perhaps even just to keep our own sanity, as nothing is even remotely moral or ethical in this world right now. It is obvious that evil has taken over, in a world where the ones speaking against evil are the evil ones.

And then ask yourself, is your Mentor perhaps promoting evil? It should all be about love and peace, being peaceful and happy. If your leader does not speak in such terms, he or she is evil, and you are corrupt just like he or she is. You can believe me as I speak for God, the very words he spoke to me. And if you can believe that, then there is no hope for you or for a better world.

Do you need to be patronized, treated and spoken to like a child? Do you need to be told what the meaning of life is and what to do? Or can you wonder, research, question, debunk and debug all that comes your way, in order to develop your very own understanding of the meaning of your own life? It works for me, and I’d like to think that I am more ethical and moral than most.

What is life? Note that I am not talking about existence. The difference being life in general and your day to day achievements, against a biological existence and how you suddenly came to be in this world, with some weird conscience that there is a universe out there that makes absolutely no sense. So what is this life?

I would say it is the sum of everything you have done in your lifetime, for which on your death bed you will look back and assess globally what it is that you have made of your existence. Of course, it will be filled with regrets if you have not managed to do anything you thought you were destined for. Or you may actually even be satisfied that you have achieved all the small and larger goals you have set for yourself, including realizing your childhood dreams.

There is no reason to wait until you are on your death bed to look back and assess your life, what you have done with it, what are your regrets, what are your achievements. In the end it is all relative. It depends on how pretentious you really are, what sort of potential you thought you had inside of you, or that people thought they saw in you. It depends also on how much vanity you are capable of and how greedy you are.

Failure to achieve anything after being born with such a drive to succeed and get somewhere usually brings you closer to God and Jesus Christ. That’s fine by me, I only suggest you stay away from any religion and keep your freedom of thought and action.

We are no Mother Teresa, did you think you could become the President? Or a simple Member of Parliament or a Senator, someone who could never make any difference even if he or she tried very hard to do so? Someone who would never make it after trying for so long, or perhaps a one hit wonder type of person? Or were you aiming to become Madonna, Michael Jackson, George Michael, never mind their flaws? Better be completely out of one’s mind and achieve something great, than dying remorseful and unknown in utter poverty.

If your dream in childhood was to marry a respectable man and have three babies, and you successfully achieved just that, then I guess your life will be fulfilled at the end. This is where the problem starts. How much did your parents pushed you into becoming God reincarnated upon Earth? There is no cure for that, parents will always push it as far as they possibly can, but you don’t have to listen to them. Won’t be easy, but you don’t.

This is key, the meaning of your life can only be defined by yourself, or else there cannot possibly be any enjoyment or happiness for you within this existence. Listen to your parents, to your teacher, to your priest, to your political leader, and you will end up committing suicide. I know, I’m an expert on such things.

You can only listen to yourself after dumping them all out of your ear and sight. Free yourself, right now. Or this is all that will torment you later on in life, even after they are all dead. It is the very first step towards identifying what is the real meaning of your life. Free yourself! Only then will you see clearly about what motivates you to even continue to exist in this world.

I wouldn’t mind being a rock contemplating the universe structures for an eternity, or something similar. That is what I truly always aspired to be, but no one around me would ever say it is acceptable, that this is what I should do with my life. And then, it has thrown me into a permanent existential crisis. Is this how we could describe your actual neurosis? Smile, finally someone understands you. You can stop the drugs now, it’s normal, you’re normal. They are the neurotic ones.

Some people have incommensurable dreams, larger than life, they need to become the most successful person ever in their own field, whatever that field is. Every single movie has this premise. If you’re a lawyer, you’re the best damn lawyer there ever was, or you certainly work hard to become it. You’re striving to be Top Management, to be on top of the world, this is life for the ambitious ones. And for the rest, well, 1.8 children in average and a successful marriage out of three ought to do the trick in order to die happily, and shame on you for having such low expectations in life. So shameful you are, we might have to hide you from life.

I am an ambitious one, I have been boosted to the max by my family and my environment, and I hope to never have to look back and feel that I failed. I was born driven to get somewhere fast, and yet, after all those years I’m still nowhere. It can be disheartening, this feeling of utter failure. If I were on my death bed right now I would think: better die quickly and forget the whole thing ever happened. If only I had set myself smaller goals, a simpler purpose to my whole life, I guess I could die happily at any moment.

I can’t even have children and suddenly solve my problem, here is certainly an easy meaning to one’s life: popping babies into this world like if there was no tomorrow. Trying to remain proud whilst watching them wrecking their own existence and going nowhere fast. At least I’ll be spare such disappointment, such despair of having fathered human beings more useless than I am. How in the world can you sustain such a double failure?

What have you done wrong? Oh just about everything, starting with how you picture this world and any kind of significant way of giving any life any worthy meaning. The thing is, whenever a parent or a mentor reaches a stage where he or she can be proud of his or her child, it is when the child usually reaches breaking point and is about ready to give it all up, ready to kill his or her parents and mentor in fact, and start a whole new life. Such is life without freedom.

Half the planet will die happy, the ones from whom no one is expecting anything significant, the ones expecting almost nothing from this life, feeling lucky to be alive and that is enough for them and everyone else (they mostly live in the Third World). The other half will die disappointed beyond belief, having failed to achieve any of their dreams or the dreams of their parents and any other authority around. Because only a few will succeed in any given field. The probability that you will be the big winner is very slim despite hard work. It would be like winning the lottery and we all know by now that no one ever wins the lottery. You can only be destined for failure, this is a certainty, no matter how brilliant you are. The days when even mediocrity could reach superstardom status are long gone. Such notoriety was meaningless at any rate anyway.

When I was young I thought I had it all figured out. I knew exactly what life was about, and on my own I came to the same conclusions that many other philosophers and religions claimed life was. It was about learning from your experience, being stuck until you understood why you were stuck, learning something from life so you could finally move on. I see now that it was naïve of me to believe that life could be just that, a training ground, a long learning process, figuring out what all these people and these obstacles were all about. Well I did learn a lot, I did seem to be stuck until I finally opened my mind and my heart and accepted a few things, and then I did seem to move on with life.

Writing your existence I thought gives you an edge, you figure out much more that way. It seemed to me that my life was moving much faster, faster than I could have ever dreamt of. I was figuring out everything along the way and I never got stuck in any place or with the same horrible people for too long. And so I felt great to have figured out the meaning of life, learning, learning to accept your nightmare, learning to love the next ones at any given time and no matter what monsters they were. Have a whole diagram of your whole existence right there in your mind, where you were before, where you are now and where you are most likely to be in the future: at the very top of any pyramid you could come up with.

It was naïve indeed. Because when you look back, everything about your life seems so insignificant, boring, useless, that whatever you may hope to have learnt in your lifetime, whatever wisdom you may feel you have acquired, all of that quickly amounts to nothing. Does not seem to warrant the miracle of life as some put it, or such an existence of deprivation.

If only I had discovered God on a lone street corner of Manhattan one rainy night, after being mugged and getting the fright of my life, I would be now celebrating my salvation. Could it really be that easy? Or would it not be to simply choose the easy way out.

Why should I think about the meaning of my life when I know it’s hard, since the answers are never forthcoming, when I can just let others think for me? Why should I even make any decision in life when I can let others make them for me? So simple to just then live blissfully ignorant and unaware of everything about the universe we live in and any purpose humanity might have within it.

If Christianity could have had its way, we would still be living in a flat world, and that flatland would still be the very centre of the whole universe. Religion is a three dimensional world for two dimensional people in a one dimensional thinking process, welcome to paradise. You should quote me on that.

In time it appeared to me that life was more like an accident than anything else, and we were struggling to get somewhere to survive, waiting for our day to die or be destroyed. This is another way of looking at life. We were not meant to be, we’re like parasites, and somehow we built things, discovered sociology and philosophy one day, and yet, it all amounts to nothingness and absurdity. Oh look, here comes the bug who most distinguished itself in that certain sphere of interest. How impressive! I’m going to puke now. I will always remain totally unimpressed.

We as humans don’t distinguish between smart ants and stupid ones. They all look the same to us, we all crush them to their death, exterminate them when they decide to build their nest under our wooden floor (just like a nest of Muslims perhaps?). The same way it is not uncommon for the smart ant, I beg your pardon, the smart human being who succeeded where most others failed, to still feel unaccomplished, goals unreached, with still something missing in their life. I’m so sorry, have I lost you now?

I know enough of success and great achievements myself to have learned that much, you still wake up the next day as empty as ever, wondering what life is all about. Which is why a few great ones became what could only be described as lunatics in their late years, jumping into weird religions or secret sects, never to be heard from again. After all their success, they still had not found their reason to exist. Perhaps because there is none, except maybe surviving the best way we can without any kind of expectation.

And so, you can only make the best of it and die at the very end of it. Sorry if your life was filled with regrets. Sorry if you were highly successful and discovered that it was all meaningless. That life ultimately must have been about something else, something you could never have figured out on your own, something no one could ever figure out.

Has your Mentor not told you it would be just that? Or has your Master showed you all the Disney’s VHS tapes in 100 languages from “Cinderella” to “Snow White” to “La Belle au Bois Dormant”? Or even simpler, no one has a VCR anymore, here’s a PC interactive game of the Old Testament, Henry the VIII tyrannical version. That ought to keep you occupied and out of my way for a few hundred years of war.

There are many religions out there, new age and spiritualist movements, who will tell you exactly what life is. They can easily brainwash you and you might die completely fulfilled in the illusion that you knew what life was all about, and you will live exactly the way they meant for you to, that every single human being was meant to according to their definition.

If I wanted to I could start such a movement, I could create a new religion, I could ensure you will all die believing you have fulfilled all the requirements of a perfect existence. You better believe me because, as I stated earlier, God speaks to me and he told me what your destiny was going to be. Now do you believe me? Will you die happy? How could you even doubt. Should I throw some fireworks and magic tricks in the package to make it all more convincing?

No one has any answer, because no one on the planet could tell you who is right and who is wrong apart from yourself. If there was only one religion in this world, only one main religious book, then perhaps we could hold them as the authority upon the subject. But there are too many religions, too many religious books which all claim to detain all the answers, even, too many different versions of the very same religious books, and they all contradict each other. There have been too many wars fought over them and too many deaths. They have successfully defined the value of your life to a naught. Christ! Father! The meaning of my life is not to go halfway across the world to kill all Muslims! Who knows, maybe one day they will fight back and humanity will simply annihilate itself. I bet you will be cheering then, whilst brandishing your burnt Bible.

Remember that your life is worth nothing in the eyes of anyone around you, even your parents, until you think like they and become what they expect you to be, to conform to the rest of them. If you don’t, you will always be but a pawn to be sacrificed at any given moment until such time that you take control of your own destiny. There can’t be any truer words ever stated in this world.

Did you really think the meaning of your life was to become a suicide bomber? Well, I think we have all become just that, even under Christianity, or what is exactly the definition of a soldier in the US or UK army, if not the one of a suicide bomber? Human beings, no matter the nationality, the faith or religion, are all but just the same when they are blinded by any outside influence or authority, political and religious leaders.

You can only be but a rebel if you wish to be free. This is what you have been struggling with for most of your life. Until the very day you will finally say loudly: I am free! I am free to find my own meaning to my own life and follow my own destiny.

There is not one right religion, there is not one right religious book, until the whole planet can agree that there is one, assuming that the whole planet would not have been held hostage into believing so, through fears and guilt and wars. No one has the answer, no one knows what life is about, assuming it is about something other than surviving it all as long as possible.

So where does this leave me? Where does this leave you? The truth is not out there, you do not want to believe all that you are told. Not one religion or government or person will come and save you and tell you what life is all about. If they do then perhaps you should think twice, when so many others could do the very same thing with so many different answers. It would be like picking at random one solution out of a million ideas: here is what life really is, this is the purpose of your existence. Really? I’m so mindless myself, I believe you, I’ll believe anything.

This would be delusion, and if you’re gullible enough to embark on any such journey with strangers, then my God, contact me right now and I will easily turn you into my own personal slave. I could achieve great things this way, I could become filthy rich. I believe I could write a Bible and create my own religion within six months, and I might one day, who knows? I met people in Los Angeles who thought just like that, they have become highly successful and filthy rich since then.

We are six to seven billion people on this planet right now. We are all wondering what life is all about and we all have a different opinion or vision of what it is. Many of us have been brainwashed by some philosophy or other, but most of us who are still free, are still wondering, thinking, trying to find the purpose of our existence, assuming there is one. Is there meaning to this life or not?

There is only one possible answer to what life is when you truly sit down like me tonight and try to figure that one out. Life can be as many things, have as many meanings, as there are human beings on this planet with a working brain. What life can be when all is considered, can only be what you yourself make of it. So what is life for you? What is the purpose of your existence? And there you have your answer.

But wait, is this what you truly feel it is inside, or are the answers coming from some dodgy book you read at some point in your life, or some dodgy religious or political leader who gave you all the answers so you never even needed to get your brain into gear in the first instance to try to figure it out for yourself? That is most important. What life can be, what life is, can only come from deep inside of you, not from any other charmer out there.

So after all that, what is life for me then? What is the purpose of my existence? Great question. I don’t think I will ever find the answer within my lifetime, this quest has become the meaning of my life.

I could end here, but that would be too easy. I must have some sort of idea of what my life is all about? I do, I always did, even though the answers have changed many times since my youth, and will hopefully still change many times before the day I die. Because if we are supposed to evolve as a species, then surely the meaning of life must evolve as well?

Or are we created as one thing, and can only die as that thing? In that case there is nothing to learn anymore, there cannot be a purpose to our existence. We just follow our destiny, the path all laid out in front of us by others. No evolution, everything is as it should be. Just don’t question anyone, just obey.

If your potential at one time can only be to reach the first step, then that must be the reason for you to exist. If eventually you develop or find out you have the skills, knowledge and aptitudes to reach the top of the stairway, then the whole meaning of your existence just changed. And if one day you reach the top, you will have to set new goals, figure out once again what life is all about, where it is you want to go, that you feel you should reach within this lifetime. Don’t seek too much guidance, you must know deep inside what you want from this life. Just reach out and do it.

The most important thing ever is that you let no one decide for you, tell you what your life is all about or should be about. You make your own life, you make it what it is. Only you have the answer. If your own meaning of life is to get drunk every night until you start destroying everything, or to ensure you always find a large black hole to fall into, instead of being a loving person helping the old lady next door, then this is your meaning of life and it is as valid if not more than whatever anyone else might tell you. Because then it would come from you, you would be free to seek out those answers for yourself. Your only destiny is the one you build yourself. You make it happen as you go along, as you think it should be. If it feels right, then you must be following the very destiny you yourself set for your own life.

I used to believe I was following a destiny. I could even tell you what that destiny was. I even reached out to it, made it happen, in the end I simply constructed my own destiny. I thought of it, I made it real. Was it meant to be this way? Was I meant to succeed, fail or be in between? It is all up to me, whatever I can imagine, whatever I will think to make it happen.

I just wish I had not an unbounded imagination, as my destiny should get me very far indeed, and at this point in my life I’m not sure if I will ever reach that destination. Of course I believe I will, I’m not prepared for failure, we never are. We will not be cured from such ambitions implemented since birth by the ones surrounding us. It might take a while but I will try to reach my goals before I die.

But truly in my case, I understood too late, I have been contaminated beyond salvation. I will follow the path all laid out for me by others. Unfortunately not even my parents will ever be proud of me. I guess it’s their own fault, if they wanted Jesus Christ for a son, well, they should have been born Gods.

This article is dedicated to a friend of mine from Kansas who just died of smoking too many cigarettes in his lifetime. I only hope he will be an example to me. I hope he had the time to figure out what the meaning of his life was, and his faithful wife tells me that he did. Now I wonder, what was the meaning of his life?

Life can only be what you yourself make it to be. Life can only be what you feel it should be. Careful though, you don’t want to have any regrets on your death bed. At the same time, you don’t want to follow the destiny others have set for you, when you know deep down that you have absolutely no interest in such a destiny. Then you are free indeed to identify your own meaning of life, follow it through and die happily in the end. Your own life is worth more than any government statistic, or any religious war.

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“Without irony, this life would hardly be worth living.”

Roland Michel Tremblay

http://www.themarginal.com/destructivism.pdf