*yawn* Another day. Revival of old days. So much to do, so little time. 'STOP TALKING, START DOING'

Today was a little different. Instead of waking up at 9 Am, I woke up at 12 Pm (please tell me you give a shit). Had s00per cold milk with chocos, and nothing since (this time it is not because I'm lazy, to know why I'm starving read ahead). I need to go to the ATM because I don't have money to buy food (and I've run out of food).

I'm feeling like I felt a year back. A year back, I had nothing to do. I would use the internet for 10+ hours at a stretch, listening to some of my favourite music which, at that point of time was Tech/Prog Thrash, especially Annihilator, Nevermore and Savatage. I'm doing the same things now, sitting in the same room, on a new computer though. I'm listening to the same music now. Rediscovering the music you loved is probably one of the best feelings ever, this feeling of deja vu is unmatched!

Random digression #1

You may not agree with me, but I feel that blogging constitutes a good way of 'keeping in touch' with your friends. The number of friends whose blogs you can track (realistically) are obviously
lower in number than the friends you can handle on facebook or orkut. However, the beauty of blogging is that you get to know what your social circle is upto if they choose to blog about it. You don't need to send them messages/scraps/wall posts asking what they're upto. If something significant happens in their lives, they will usually post about it. You read their blogs and stay 'in touch' with them, without actually communicating with them! Obviously, they might not post secret stuff which the whole world is not supposed to know, but by and large, blogs give you a much more comprehensive answer to 'whats up' compared to a response you would receive to that query on a social networking site. And if you want that secret info, you can always ask for it :P.

Random digression #2

The enormity of the world wide web never ceases to amaze or engulf me. I have around 60 tabs open in Firefox now, and each of them is worth bookmarking. Lately, I've started exploring a lot of blogs. It's amazing how blogs cater to everything - be it music album download links, daily accounts of life by journalists in Africa (which really make you feel lucky), a stupid emo chick whining about how she is going to slit her wrists because she got too influenced by My Chemical Romance, a 40 year old woman going through a mid life crisis, tech blogs telling you how to do everything from saving wikipedia on your computer to spying on your boss to downloading entire magazines for free and so on and so forth.

NOW, just have a look at the hierarchy. There are n types of blogs. Blogs account for just a minuscule fraction of the WWW. Just like blogs, there are other there are n other aspects of the web. Then there's wikipedia, which bears testimony of the power of mass-collaboration. And a thousand such things. The internet itself is a shining example of the power of mass collaboration. It belongs to nobody. Everybody contributes to the internet, be it for personal gain or mutual benefit in the WWW. What we have is a marvel of modern civilization and the power of mass collaboration.

If you were to explore everything that was interesting to you on the internet, I'm sure this lifetime would not be enough.

Coming to think of it, the Internet is just one small aspect of our otherwise diverse lives. Think similarly about other aspects of life, and you realize how enormous the answer to what-can-a-human-do is. It belittles individual entities like you, me or any human being.

Let us take education and careers as another example - I'm sure there are a lot of people who are interested in pursuing careers in more than one field, but are constrained by the one lifetime available to them (if you discount people who change careers, I'd say they are exceptions). And there are SO many fields available.

There's so much more that we associate with making the most of life - Food, Travel, Music, Movies, Art, and so on (the list will vary depending on the person's interests)...and each of these entail a lot of subdivisions and categorization. This leads us to one conclusion - You cannot experience and learn it all. There are so many things that the world and civilization offer to us. We cannot experience and learn it all. Out of those offerings, we are interested in some. The sad part is that we cannot experience and learn everything we are interested in, too.

We owe a lot to our ancestors and civilization in general. We possibly can't experience everything life has to offer in one lifetime, or maybe in a thousand lifetimes too. Such is the enormity of what the world has to offer to us, it is belittling.

The collective progress of millions of humans around the planet in a short time span has led to this, to a point, where you begin to think - 'Is having too many options a bad thing?' I have an ambiguous answer to this - Yes and No.

No, because, atleast from my perspective, we have a lot more to do, learn and experience than our ancestors did.

Yes, because after a point you start feeling bad about missing out on so many things in life.

All this just leads me to one inevitable question : How should we live our lives? There's so much to do in such less time!

This is a perplexing question which one must logically answer. IMO, far too many people do what others like, and not what they would ideally want to do. In such a short life, can you afford to do that? NO! Identify your interests, and pursue them till death, that is the only way you can die a satisfied man (Random digression #2.1 or woman, just in case some female chauvinists are around... maybe I should replace 'mankind' with 'humankind' everywhere, but I'm sure they'd have a problem with why a term like 'huWOmankind' does not exist, anyway I'll leave my opinions of shiv sena/jihadi-esque breeds to another post. Disclaimer : I am not against gender equality)

Lets get back to the point. I'm 19 years old now, and I feel that I've wasted a lot of these 19 years in fruitless pursuits dictated by society (read : Do what parents say, study for school, Disclaimer : I am not one of those angst ridden, anti-social-anti-establishment rebels without a cause, I just put forth my opinions). Given an opportunity, I would love to be reborn again with a to-do-before-i-die list, and live life from day one like the way I want to live it now, do things which I now wish I had done back then.

I think the first part of the post should have been a random digression, not Random Digression #2. I'm too lazy to change it though.

Note to self : Stop wasting time, you're running out of time. Maybe I should really abandon laziness, pull up my socks and do as the IBM advertisement says - 'Stop talking. Start doing.'