Call to Arms

By Sadhika on

‘Where you're standing, dig, dig out:

Down below's the Well:

Let them that walk in darkness shout:

"Down below—there's Hell!"’

            - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom (The Gay Science)


Our mere existence is a miracle. We are a collection of the most enduring traits in our ancestors, evolved through natural selection over millions of years, who had unimaginably formidable odds stacked against them in terms of cataclysmic natural events, harsh climate conditions, hostile predators and pathogens, hostile competition over scarce resources, social and political upheavals, economic downturns, wars, famines, tyrants, epidemics, poverty, and yet in the face of those odds, we are here! What could be a more motivating truth than that? 


And what could be more tragic than our collective dismissal of the idea, failure to take the responsibility of our actions and inactions, treatment of ourselves as a meaningless blip in the history of mankind, pursuit of purely hedonistic pleasures that cast to the winds the ashes of our existence?


How much easier can we have it that we need only take responsibility for our own well-being, growth and survival and by doing so, we enrich our gene pool in a myriad of ways such that we might be the reason that one more generation of human beings get to thrive on this planet?



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1. The Joyful Wisdom - Friedrich Nietzsche

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