By Attiya Karodia
Everyone complains. Whether it’s you on a bad day or me when I’m fasting. If there’s one thing the human population in this day and age is great at, it’s complaining. You’d think that having water and electricity (unless Eskom) would keep us content, but if the sheer number of twitter rants per day are anything to go by, we’re slipping deeper and deeper into the sludge of pessimism. So why? Why do we have everything but repeatedly express our state of nothingness?
Secularism is something that’s been hailed as the ultimate success of the modern world, and in a bid to keep with the times we’ve separated every aspect of our lives. It isn’t just the Church and the State that are separate anymore. We keep our work lives away from our personal lives, our time with our kids scheduled away from our workouts and our soul’s happiness away from our physical being.
Humans respond to the tangible first, and with our compartmentalized lives, the superficial takes priority over inner contentment, so here we are, working on our bodies, taking makeup and hair tutorials and spending all our money on what will look great on Instagram, but our souls remain sad and untouched, neglected with the only outlet registering in our minds as tangible aspects of our lives to complain about.
Social Media doesn’t help the situation either, with the disease of chronic oversharing it brings to our waking moments. 10 years ago, you wouldn’t turn around to someone walking behind you and say “omg, I woke up this morning with the biggest zit on my face #FacePalm”. We don’t think about what would be worthy of sharing, because we believe that judegement can’t be passed onto us and if it is, we’ll throw a tantrum under the guise of Freedom of Speech.
The more we focus on what we see in the mirror, the more our souls will wither away until we’re clinically depressed, ripping our marriages and friendships apart and tweeting all day long about how unhappy the state of the world makes us.
You have food, you have water, you have warmth, you have friends and family. You are able, now you just have to work on being willing to be happy.