Publisher's Note

Publisher’s Note
by CK May is the month of flowers not just in the Philippines but also here in Calgary. A lot of my neighbors have done their spring cleaning and unfortunately I cannot cope up with them. I remember that during this time of the year my husband, Hank gets busier day by day. He takes care [...]
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The Illusion of Superlatives

By Erwin Maramat

If life, in the light of day, spared us the theatrics and without pretense came out clean, nothing will be as beautiful. Life was meant to be simple, but capitalism always begs to differ. We are made to believe that life is about furnishing its purity with complications. Why should the end be a wake-up call?

Every day, we join the aimless marathon in hopes that one day we will earn our freedom, but when we do, if we ever do, it will come at an age when we are shriveled and weathered. There will be nothing to look forward to, instead we will be compelled to look back and retrace our steps and find out that we never took the time to pause and really think of what really mattered in our lives. Sometimes, we spend most of our lives for that one perfect moment, only to find that out we could have been living it, but we opted not to see it because we chose to create an illusion of what happiness would be, and its futile pursuit we lead us straight to the doorstep of regrets, if only.

Rather than fill our lives with meaning, we often corrupt it with clutter and complications. It is socio-economic inferiority that leads us to our down fall. In pursuit of material possessions, many of us often wallow in debt. We love keeping up with the Joneses, but the Joneses have just declared bankruptcy along with MC Hammer who is an embodiment of the word.

We often live, wear, and eat the expectations that others have for us because of the insatiable need to belong. To belong to a society that will only open its arms, if we have the means. To belong is an incurable addiction. People have the mistaken impression that what they buy and wear will add value to who they are. These are smoke and mirrors meant to deceive a targeted audience. We build these expectations around us, but what we fail to see is that this is merely an illusion, and once it fades and we lose that illusion, people see us as nothing more than mere charlatans. In the end everyone is disappointed.

How much do we need to get satisfaction out of life? To a great degree, we tend to drive ourselves far beyond our design. We are slaves of our covetous impulses, and servants of what others expect us to be. More often than not, we dress up not for comfort but to solicit the acceptance of others who weigh our merits by how we look.

We blindly believe that material possessions bring us happiness, but there is nothing more obvious than the truth; all that we own either depreciates or perishes, and along with it is our happiness. It is saddening to know that many of us prefer to work ourselves to the bone just so we could provoke the envy of others. What is wrong if your watch if is not a Rolex, will it not give you time? What is wrong if you live in a modest home, does it not keep you warm during cold nights? Why do you need a sports car, does your car not offer mobility? Why do you need to be the object of envy?

Mark Zuckerberg himself wears the same gray shirt because he doesn’t want to waste his time in the belief that time is more important than fashion. Ask anyone who is about to take the last bow. Ask them if what they own means anything.

If you scale down to subatomic levels you will find everything is largely empty, but because we are humans we cling to the tangible, yet the most enduring possessions are abstract: Love, time, happiness and life itself to name a few.

Time, an abstract concept that bounds us, in fact, is static. However, the vitality that mobilizes us is boundless, yet we chose to delegate our energy to often bemoan the inequity of life, we choose to see our frailty as reflected by the things we lack rather than the wonders we can accomplish. “To be or not be?” Hamlet did ask, they are the very same eerie questions that beset our paths, and now either we choose to be or not to be.

Erwinism: “One spends time to acquire possessions, but we can neither get a refund nor an exchange for lost time.”

The Illusion of Superlatives

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