Why are we obsessed with numbers?

Hello again. I’ve been thinking about a ‘panacea’ for human beings – whether it actually exists or not. I do not know why, but I have a very strong belief in this adage: Ignorance is bliss. Maybe I’m terribly wrong, but according to me all other living beings are extremely happy in their lives; they are blissfully unaware of their lives being in constant danger (usually from us). So, thinking on the same lines, I realized that the primary thing that separates us very-often-miserable humans from the happy-and-contented animals might be our ‘Superior Intellect’.

So, in my quest for the elusive cure-all, I had stumbled upon the exact opposite of that: the root cause of all the miseries for us humans. Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to present the culprit: “Numbers”. Yes, the seemingly innocuous counting units that we have learnt and mastered. Counting, according to me, is that which separates us humans from other animals (I am also aware that research shows that certain primates do have a sense of counting but I believe that is acquired rather that innate).

Good or bad, we are obsessed with numbers; we want to measure everything we see and discover. Also, numbers are the basic units of comparison which, in turn, is the first step in ascertaining the inferiority/superiority of an object. Undeniably, we crave for ‘better’ numbers in all the material things in this world, like better bank balances, better grades in schools, better clock-speeds in processors, better values of HDL Cholesterol and so on. This has ensured one thing: No one can have the ‘best’ because there is always a better number than you have. Materialistically speaking, this means that no one can be absolutely happy.

I have also realized that the things that give us true happiness are the things that cannot be counted: Love, pleasure and even happiness itself. This means that these things cannot be compared and hence everyone can equally be absolutely happy without the need for comparing who is more/less happy. That is why I think animals are innately happy; they do not compare among themselves who is better and who is not, and in fact, they cannot because all are equally happy. Thus, ignorance is bliss.

Take care,

Ravi Teja R.

Why did Man invent God?

Thanks for coming back. If you didn’t know earlier, let me tell you in advance that I am an atheist and assure you that I shall remain so until further notice. This time around, I’m thinking about why we men (and women) invented ‘god’, which is something that is as intangible as ‘love’ or ‘fear’, but very less perceivable when compared to these. How could the majority of people (assuming that atheists are a minority) have such a very singular notion? Maybe god really invented (or created) man and not vice-versa; after all 80% (a wild guess) of the people can’t be wrong! As I stressed before in my blog, there are no definitive ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers to questions; most of them are ‘maybe’.

We human beings are in an eternal quest to understand everything; we want everything to make sense. In that pursuance, we naturally encounter many things that do not make sense. So, how do we proceed? I learnt that Mathematicians give such things arbitrary names such as ‘x’ or ‘y’ until their actual ‘value’ or ‘meaning’ is found out. We, being very analytic creatures, applied the same principle for our quest too.

As a result, whenever we encountered something inexplicable by any one of us, we placed it a set of unknowns: the ‘god’ set. It was a natural escape route for us to give an answer to all those questions we didn’t have a logical answer for; just attribute it god – no questions asked. So, in early days of man, the ‘god’ set, comprised a lot of things. As time progressed, we found out reasons for many things like ‘Gee… Lightning is caused by oppositely charged particles; god has nothing to do with it, after all’. Naturally, we decreased the size of the ‘god’ set.

This leads us to many questions: Will a time come when all stuff will make sense? Will god be no longer necessary then? My answer is ‘no’. My brother (who, by co-incidence, is, in quest of god) read somewhere a quote: ‘As knowledge increases, ignorance unfolds’. So, when we learn something new, we realize that there are many others still to be learnt and understood, which would be attributed to god. Hence, the ‘god’ set continually increases and decreases but never can become void.

Thus, in a quest for answers, we needed something that could give a ‘don’t-ask-any-more-questions’ kind of an answer for unanswerable questions. That is why we invented god. Why do I ask such questions and try to answer them? : god knows why.

Bye-bye,

Ravi Teja R.