Left, right or center ?

It started innocently enough. I was listening to an interview, it was Eileen Gu (go watch the Winter Olympics if you don't know, she is brilliant, intelligent & lovely to say the least), and suddenly, my brain decided to abandon its usual daily itinerary of deciding what to eat next weekend, and instead boarded a bullet train to Existential Crisisville. 

We are, after all, fundamentally absurd creatures. We build these complex societies, invent labyrinthine politics just to keep ourselves from biting each other's heads off, and then create a 24/7 entertainment media machinery entirely to distract us from those politics. We convince ourselves that the world revolves around the economy, the stock market, and whatever materialistic bauble we currently have sitting in our online shopping carts. But then, just when you think you have it all figured out, your perspective zooms out. You look up, or you read the morning paper, and you realise that while we are arguing over parking spots, NASA’s Artemis mission is actively trying to put boots back on the moon. You read about some far-off exoplanet, four times the size of Earth, completely engulfed in a global ocean. 

And speaking of water, isn't it wildly humbling to realise that our own planet is 70% water, and we are practically clueless about it? We have been walking around on two legs for a few million years, but we still don’t really know what is going on in the dark sea, you know, those pitch-black depths where the sun simply gives up and goes home. Who knows what prehistoric creatures, whales, and dolphins are holding their own underwater United Nations down there, blissfully unaware of our human nonsense? But my mind, being the restless pendulum that it is, swings right back to dry land and the sheer volume of us occupying it. Population. People love to throw that word around like it’s a dirty napkin. Yes, there are billions of us. Yes, we are crowding the planet. But doesn't that also make us an incredible asset? If we could just stop stepping on each other's toes, imagine what billions of collaborating minds could do. We know we are running out of room, so we adapt—we consider adoption, we choose to have fewer kids. 

Then you look across the map to places like Japan and South Korea, and you see the absolute inverse. The population curve isn't just flattening; it’s practically in free-fall. Governments are wringing their hands, wondering why the youth aren't multiplying. Well, if you look closely, the answer is steeped in a very exhausted, very modern feminist reality. Women are looking at the centuries-old deal they were handed, work a full-time job, raise the kids, manage the house, and smile while doing it, and they are collectively saying, “You know what? Buzz off. We choose ourselves.” From the #MeToo movement in South Korea to women simply opting out of the marriage market in Japan, it’s a quiet, profound revolution. 

And then, just like that, you fall down the rabbit hole of human duality. We are a species capable of writing poetry to the stars and building spacecraft, but we are also the same species that engineered World War II and nuclear tests. We are a walking, talking paradox of breathtaking scientific achievement and bizarre, heartbreaking cruelty toward our own kind. So, where does that leave me? Sitting with a cold cup of milk, wondering if it is perfectly fine that my brain does this chaotic jingle-jangle across the universe. Is it okay to jump from dolphins to world wars in the span of a single breath? I think it is. 

It makes you ask: Am I a socio-political being? Am I a humanist? When I look at the state of the world, what kind of politics am I even subscribing to? Am I a democrat, a communist, a socialist? Am I right, left, or centre? Honestly, I still don't know. But I suspect that being a human means you don't actually have to pick just one box. You can just be a tiny, bewildered creature, trying to find your centre while floating on a wet rock in the middle of a very dark sea.

In much simpler words, I am hungry. Also, if possible, why doesn't someone offer two brain cells to the world "L-E-A-D-E-Rs"? 
Good night until next time.