Daipayan Mukhopadhyay, What makes the world go round?

What makes the world go round?

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By Daipayan Mukhopadhyay

In my youth, I often had the opportunity to speak about issues to my peers. However, when I found myself writing this speech, I realised that there were many prominent themes that I could write about. I did a quick Google search, typing Prominent World issues into the search bar and I got a list of results which were both expected but also superlatively horrifying.

Roughly 24% of world issues right now are due to religious conflicts, 23% about world government instability and a major world issue that has risen with dominance, especially in the last few weeks, 48% has been related to climate change. This propelled me to think of a certain yet unanswerable question. What makes the world go round? So I began dissecting my question with a simple list of dangerous and probable answers.

Purpose. Without passion, without commitment, without purpose… humans and animals would be even more similar than our DNA already suggests.

We shoot for the stars whether it be playing NBA 2k on PS4 or Xbox or taking it more literally and remembering the day when Neil Armstrong uttered those famous words “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” on the moon. Famous scientists and eloquent writers have revolutionised the way in which our existence is recorded and transcendently passed down to the next generation to continue. We have gone from learning how to make and control fire 1.4 billion years ago to Nobel laureates who create batteries that ultimately power our homes, phones and computers. All because, we have purpose.

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Photography: Daipayan Mukhopadhyay

Our curiosity and tenacity to make life easier for ourselves has led us to build instruments of our salvation. However, salvation has become our damnation when we lose sight of our purpose. Take alcohol for an example. A few pints of your favourite beverage and laughter and joy flow like there’s no tomorrow. However, one too many pints and regret and the deep yearning for the beautiful and irreplaceable gift that is H2O and Berrocca or Hydralyte soon follow.

Yet we make this mistake repetitively. A classic phrase heard across many college parties and events. “I’m never drinking that much again”. V-day ends. Buckets full of vomit. Beds full of people. Windows with shades pulled down so not a single ray of sunlight can reach us. Eduroam failing us yet again due to the amount of Netflix being watched. V-dinner comes around. Morgan tells us that the bar tab will close in 30 minutes. Suddenly, a beverage appears in our hand.

We are powerless to stop ourselves simply because our purpose in life, is to be ourselves. We are confident, we are proud and at the end of the day we are human.

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We are human because the choices we make are our own and we can justify them. Our beliefs and opinions in deciphering the question that is us, leads us to making mistakes and errors. Some errors are never made twice, and some continue to emerge periodically like a sine curve oscillating between -1 and 1. Which leads me to my second answer.

Chaos. Humanity thrives on chaos. Since time in memoriam, we have been driven to achieve the darkest depths of pain, anguish and chaos. We have devised wars, weapons, conflicts and thrived on the desecration of each other to ultimately find some form of purpose. The earliest examples can be seen in rock paintings where cavemen made axes and tools but ultimately resorted to violence to settle their disputes. The most recent can be seen in the form of ISIS using radicalised propaganda to drive innocents from the safety and security of their homes into the wide arms of bullets and shrapnel.

Yet this instrumental torture of the Middle East and its inhabitants seems to be one of the most discussed issues in the last decade. We decide to talk about it in our classrooms, lectures, in the news, in the government.

Our economies, health care systems and societal structures continue to thrive on the fact that there exist people in our society who struggle. If we think about it in the realm of climate change, we’ve singlehandedly created a situation in which success right here, right now, ensures our survival for many years and failure ensures death for us and for our children. Chaos, therefore, seems to be one of the methods that humans need to justify our behaviour and one of the ways that the world keeps changing, Love. In this dichotomy that we establish between humanity’s desire to find purpose and its quintessential character trait of descending into chaos to find it, only one element helps us establish any sense of normal and navigate either. Love. We spend our days falling in love with people, places, books, food and music or even insignificant, indescribable feelings. We derive meaning and purpose out of who and what we choose to fall in love with. We traverse through life tossing and turning between emotion and objectivity, light and darkness, sun and moon. We express our affection by our gifts, by our touch and by our expression.

We read books and magazines to gain knowledge with our purpose being, to learn something. We love what we read and hope that when the time comes, the knowledge that we’ve acquired will serve us in casual conversation, in the desks in the Royal Exhibition Building or as we demonstrate our willingness to write about our ideas and beliefs to further the knowledge we’ve acquired. When we fail, we descend into chaos. So we establish a cycle.

What makes the world go round? This same cycle. An endless loop. Purpose. Chaos. Love. The order need not be solidified into the mould that I’ve made it seem to be, it can be any permutation of these three words. One thing is certain, however, the world only goes round because we choose to keep living and I think that’s the most human thing of all. True beauty through humanity making choices.