i already forget how i used to feel about you

it seems that an awful number of people have been feeling very lonely in recent times, when they are alone and more so when they are surrounded by people. what an ironic dilemma where you don't know what you want and what you can do to fill your life. have you ever been surrounded by friends and feel more left out than ever? have you ever lied that you have something to do just so you have an excuse not to turn up for another appointment? have you ever filled your life with so many activities that you hardly have time to breathe and yet feel a abysmal sense of desperation when you don't have these activities?



i wish we could retreat into the wonderful past, escape into the innocence of childhood where days flew by and you couldn't wait for tomorrow to come because the future always seemed to bear something more exciting, more promising and more hopeful. You always looked to the future where you would be 'grown up' and you could live out the dreams you always had. but now that we have grown up, what do we live for? What do you live for when you have already achieved your goal?



Imagine living your entire life working towards the single goal of say, being an actor. so after much struggle you do become an actor. then you tell yourself you want to break into hollywood. after a few years you do. then you tell yourself you want to get an oscar. after a lot of hard work you find yourself strutting down the red carpet with the famed gold statuette. then what? what next?



right now we work our way sem by sem through law school just to get that degree. we tell ourselves 'just a bit more, just a bit more and then it will be over. just a few more weeks and exams will be over and done with, just a while longer and the holidays will be here'. but life isn't a sprint but a marathon. it's only to get tougher and tougher after we graduate, its upslope all the way from here with hardly any breaks. so we slog our lives out for the day of retirement hoping it will be all that we have lived for except to realise our lives are nearly over and that perhaps what held us together all this while was our work.



the problem with us is that we live life with such insane intensity. when we are busy we are really busy. when we are free we are really free. there is no balance or moderation in life. when we do finally have time for ourselves, we forget what it is like to live without work, to just go out and hang out. we make ourselves so busy that we have no time and no energy to do anything else. there is no space to build relationships with people and still have space for ourselves.



i think so many of us want to be alone at times because we are so sick and tired of having to work with people and compromise all the time. we get bogged down by trying to solve the problems other people have and the problems that other people give us, that the very presence of people around us stifle us. we are so tired of keeping up with what people expect us to be, so tired of having to pretend that we feel we have lost ourselves. in "memoirs of a geisha" there was a phrase "she paints her face to hide her face". what an apt description of the modern condition.



welcome to the world of the confused modern man.