Being alone

I find that I confuse myself a lot more than I am confused with other people. With others, there are a lot of things to be confused about, especially when you consider that humans are inherently irrational, and thinking about this situation  I find myself no different. 

My finals are in a week, and my score will dictate the universities I will be able to apply to. I've been studying for the past week, hardly leaving the house for anything and feeling guilty that I do. I've only been in contact with the closest of my friends, and even then I feel that many of them lost in their studies, neglecting everything else in the process even simple conversation just to stay sane. In hindsight, the last day of school may have been the last time that I talked to a few of my year mates. At that time I would have felt it to be sad, but I've now come to a time of acceptance and that life goes on. As an international student where students and friends never stay in the country for more than two years, this is an important mindset to have, and you can't be depressed with every friend that comes and goes. Staying in touch becomes a chore, and your friends at present will always be there to help you forget. After a while, it is easy to just lose touch. At the end of the day, the only one that will be with you for the rest of your days is yourself. 

Yet being alone makes me feel depressed. All those times that I have tried to be extroverted finally backfired when I realise that there's no one to be extroverted to anymore. Public image no longer matters and, being an MUN-ner for so long, public image is what keeps me going every morning. I'm one of the few that acknowledge that life is more than education, and I feel that studying is no match for reflection. Education tells you about the world around you; reflection tells you about the world within yourself. At the end of our lives, the only one that matters is the knowledge that we derive from our reflection when we move on. I find studying to be a waste of time; it is a poor representation of knowledge and its function only serves to put money into pockets rather than to allow one to contemplate more deeply on life's meaning, and the fact that I adhere to it disgusts me so. 

I suppose another reason to my disgust towards education is because it no longer serves as a method to which I can study my passion. At the end of the day, people study the things that make you money, and I can't study what I want. In some cases I feel that I have only wasted my life, before I even had life to waste. With this capitalist thinking, where your worth is determined by a piece of paper, how is it not possible to feel a little depressed?

I guess currently I'm at the stage of my life where I find myself a little bit more contemplative about what I want to do in my life and what I want to achieve from it. In this life I want material satisfaction. In the next I want spiritual satisfaction, and you need to achieve these two at the end of this lifetime. I suppose I'm just finding a way to balance out the two, where I have no priority of one over the other at any point in my life. I've always thought of myself as having a more mature mind than most, perhaps this is a mid-mid life crisis :)

Cheers,

Matthew Tan