The Truth Is

And the truth is, I’m tired. Exhausted. Bored. Burdened.

It’s something that feels more permanent now, as if this weight will stretch all the way to the end. That’s what makes it hard. It’s not that it's difficult today, but that tomorrow doesn’t seem different either. There’s no escape. Just a quiet, lingering sense that this is how it’s going to be.

I keep losing myself. I have done it so often that it no longer feels unfamiliar to me. But what has changed is the passion, the passion I once had. It is gone. It no longer runs through my veins, no longer burns in my head or blood. What remains is something colder. frozen blood. Still.

Sometimes I wish I could just sleep... for a year, two, ten, a hundred, It doesn’t really matter. There’s a kind of heaviness, a weariness in my mind, as if I haven't slept for years. The path I have walked so far doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere. And when I look ahead, no "two roads diverging in a wood" that one could take. Nothing. Just the quiet, grey dust of nowhere.

There’s a kind of madness in the world— a hunger to trade the present for a promise. They call it a better future. A golden future, filled with peace, prosperity, and meaning. But more often than not, it's just an illusion, 

wrapped in scriptures, and slogans, in ideologies and doctrines.

Religion. Politics. Left. Right. Center.

Hindu. Muslim. Christian. Jain. Sikh.

All of them, in one way or another, ask you to give up today for the dream of some distant, unreachable tomorrow. And in doing so, they rob you of your sanity, your freedom.

The most a man can do, the best, perhaps—is to hold on to his sanity, not to surrender it for so-called greater good.

Because once you surrender it to someone else’s idea of salvation, it’s hard to ever get it back, nearly impossible.

No civilisation has ever truly flourished by taking away a man’s freedom—by forcing upon him rules and values that were never born from his own experience. Sure, experience can create criminals, too. But even then, there’s a strange authenticity in their choices, a kind of affection for their crime. You can’t find that in someone lost in an ideologically created mob, someone who simply follows what he’s been told. He may commit the same act, but not with the same fire. Not with the same intensity.

That is something I'm always afraid of. That if we continue accepting this madness—this pressure to conform, to obey—we’ll lose not only our freedom but the passion that makes life worth living. The raw beauty of our lived experiences. The truths that have come to us through pain, through blood, through silence. They’ll disappear. And when they do, what will remain of us?

Again, the best thing a man can do… is not to lose his sanity. And I suppose I’m not so different.

It’s taken me time, but I’m slowly beginning to see that life is not meant to be extraordinary.

We chase these highs, these fantasies of greatness, but they will never arrive, they don’t exist I think.

Life, for the most part, is repetitive.

Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday.

Again.

And again.

The days blur into each other, and soon enough, you’re not even sure what you were waiting for in the first place.

You might call it suffering. But I think it’s something quieter than that. A realisation that the extraordinary will never come, that maybe it never even existed. And in that silence, the only thing left is to live: pain, joy, boredom, all of it,

To live now.

Not after the revolution, not after the enlightenment.

Now.

Wallace once said that those who commit suicide often shoot themselves in the head, because that’s where the voice lives. The voice that never stops spinning stories. That convinces you you’re the hero of some grand journey, the chosen one, the absolute center of everything. It seduces you with promises: 'Once I achieve this, I’ll be happy.' 'Once s/he loves me, everything will fall into place.' 'Once I’m seen, understood, validated—then it will all make sense.' And so you chase.

Relentlessly. Obsessively.

You build a life around this voice, around its promises. carefully. quietly. 

Until one day, as Camus said, “the stage collapses”. The script disappears. You look around and realise there is no climax, no resolution, no applause. Just silence. 

The narrative was never real. The meaning, the purpose, the 'someday'—it was a beautiful lie.

The man realises the truth of it all. The meaninglessness. The silence.

And in that moment, you have two choices— to kill yourself, or go on.

But in the end, it’s passion that carries us.

It’s what keeps a person alive. Not attachment, but commitment, commitment without attachment.

Attachment always comes with the fear of loss. But commitment... commitment to something you love, without expectation, without attachment, that’s what lasts.

Lata Mangeshkar. Tendulkar. Einstein. Gandhi.

They weren’t attached. They were devoted.

To music. To cricket. To physics. To peace.

There was no distance between them and what they loved. The art and the artist had fused into one.

And once that passion dies, the man dies with it.

After that, it doesn’t really matter if you bury him today or tomorrow.

He is already gone.

Realisation isn’t the hard part.

Acceptance is.

 ~ Suraj Sharma


Note: Some of the ideas discussed in this post are inspired by the Course on Existential Philosophy taught by Professor Abir Bazaz at Ashoka University. The use of “man” and “him” throughout this piece is intended in a broader, existential sense: merely a matter of convention. It refers to humanity as a whole, not to exclude any gender or identity.