/biz/ - Business & Finance

I shall begin by asking you a hypothetical question: suppose that you were born and are now growing up in some miserable little village lost in some trackless prairies miles away from civilization. You have never seen anyone but a handful of dull, stagnant, brutalized people who spend their lives in the meaningless drudgery of the same routine of labor year after year, with no interest, no purpose, no ambition beyond the range of their immediate needs.

You are growing up with an incoherent, inarticulate sense of longing for something better, something beyond the meanness, the pettiness, the sordidness of the men around you. Whenever you are bewildered, disappointed, or hurt by people, whenever you encounter injustice and irrationality, you struggle to hang on to the formless hope that you will not surrender, that your life will have meaning, importance, and beauty, that you will reach something greater somehow, somewhere in some distant future. But you are not yet able to identify what that something is, you know it only in the form of a desperate emotion and your torture comes from those moments when you wonder whether your undefined ideal can ever be achieved in reality; whether the men around you are right, whether a lethargic resignation to pain and ugliness is all that's possible to men on earth.