I'm thirsty

I don’t know why. I don’t know how. But somehow fate manages to do it. It manages to dry this world of happiness. It manages to flood us with tears. It manages to make our parched souls hike around in an arid air of unrealized misery.

No. Shut up. Sorry. Misery’s not the word to describe it. Unfulfillment is.

There is something terribly wrong with life. It’s the fact that we are all thirsty and no matter how much water we drink, we remain insatiable. I’m not just talking about the literal H2O water – I’m talking about every single thing we are determined to get, only to find ourselves wanting more and having to work even harder once we actually do get it.

A year ago, while my new house was being constructed, I would think to myself how great my life would become upon its completion – how I can be finally proud and happy to live in a comfortable place. Fast forward a couple months. I’m all settled here, and it’s as usual to me as the old crypt I used to live in was. Now downgrading to the place I was fine growing up in would seem like an earthly hell, and I still find myself envying others for their ‘superior’ properties.

It’s not just that. A year and a half ago I told myself that I’d be satisfied with my academic life once I got the scores superior to a fellow colleague we like to call ‘sway.’ Ever since I did, I have only since found myself proven wrong again, as I still find myself in frustration and envy of that other girl’s one extra IB score, while stressing over how I am supposed to sustain my already high grades for the next terms.

I can only tell myself that I am already very privileged – that millions out there don’t even have the hope of getting into college; that people live under bridges – but that reassurance means nothing to me. I keep wanting more and more. I suppose it’s the same for everyone else - wealthy celebrities who have everything but are no less miserable than we are; popular jocks who secretly wish they were geeks.

You see, life is cancerously self-destructive. You are constantly told to put in insurmountable amounts of effort and determination into being somebody, blind-sighted and completely oblivious of this fatal flaw of human nature. For people like me – those caught up in this vile vortex of determination and thirst - the more you put into it, the harder it becomes, because you can’t ever give up, and you put in more and more of your energy into life until you eventually die an exhausted death. Success isn’t hard to find. There's a goldmine of it right next door. But no matter how deep you dig, you’d have to have all odds going for you to find a single drop of contentment.