I remember when I first heard this question as a child I felt I immediately knew the answer, and that answer was something simple like playing Pogs, completing the collection in my Zelda sticker book, getting the latest “Back to the Future” micro machines or playing on my Sega. As I grew older, and hit my teens I defined it as kissing girls and learning how to talk to and understand them, and now that I’m married and in my 20′s I feel it is to explore the world and expand my knowledge and experience of everything while I still have the energy, the willpower and the means to do so. I’m sure as I progress into middle age and beyond, what meaning and purpose I put on existence will also change accordingly.

In personal nature, I’d say I’d define myself as a Utilitarian. If an action brings a person happiness, or brings happiness to the majority then it has intrinsic value. I think the capitalist society we live in, in the developed West at least, has clouded are, again clichéd, pursuit of happiness. All too often more effort in our lives goes into accumulating wealth rather than thinking about what we could be doing that would make us happy. People spend a huge chunk of their lives hating the work they do, or the people they work with all to maintain their income and status. They then look down on the vagrant smiling on the side of the road as if it’s impossible for that individual to of obtained happiness without scrambling up the capitalist ladder.

More and more, as I travel, I see a commonality becoming increasingly apparent amongst humans everywhere. The less bloated peoples lives are with wealth and objects the more happy they are, as long as they can comfortably provide themselves with the bare essentials of clothes, food and shelter then everything else is excess. I’ve been on this roller-coaster of getting better jobs, working on my career and experience, all for this false peak of happiness that seems to always be on the horizon. I finally stopped and looked at my life in the third person. Why do people in the West spend so much of their lives in these pollution choked cities, working tedious jobs with little personal satisfaction for a wage that goes into paying the mortgage on a house in a street where they don’t even know the names of their neighbours. Yet when they choose to go on a holiday, for the majority, we all do the same thing. We want to simplify our existence. We go somewhere where we can connect with nature daily, whether it be beaches and water, or forests and mountains. We all think that if we can just make enough money then we can retire from work and do what we actually would enjoy waking up to do everyday. Why can’t we do it now, today?

The truth is, there is very little right now, even in this supposed “world recession” stopping us from uprooting our lives and completely changing how we live. After a recent trip in Thailand I’ve started to see just how bittersweet my situation in life actual is. On one hand, I’ve been fortunate enough to of been born and raised in a developed Western country which allows me the options to travel wherever I want in the world. The options for what I do with my life are huge. On the other, the people I seen in Thailand, who will probably never be able to earn enough to leave their country where happy with their simple existence. I have been afforded options for my existence, but the adverse affect of this is that you are born into the fog of capitalism. Some people will never be able to see their way out of it, and constantly spend their lives scrambling towards that false peak of happiness. I hope, at least in the near future, I will be able to get off this hamster wheel. The first step towards this for me will hopefully be to travel more, without strings. I spend years living and working and feel, as a person, I barely grow at all. But travelling outside my comfort zone for merely a few days or weeks and I feel I’ve grown a mile.

Anyway, if all these reads as jargon, pay it no heed. I’m sure my opinions and thoughts on all of the above will be almost completely different a few years from now.

“When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence

Also, it’s great when a song you’ve been listening to on the radio or off a CD wraps up and fades out just as you are reaching your destination.

I think monotonous things like commuting need a soundtrack. I never understand people who don’t listen to music in their car or don’t even own a music player (most phones come with one built in nowadays anyway)

I find music has a way of tagging a memory in your mind to be remembered. Times when you are commuting that are so easily forgotten can be brought up again by merely playing the soundtrack of that journey.

People take photos to remember the times when they are standing still. In my opinion, people listen to music to remember the times when they where moving.

[ad#postdescription]