I watched a Korean movie last night on Rotten Tomatoes called "Burning" (버닝) about a man who struggles with identity, family troubles, lack of economic resources, and being generally displaced within the Korean society. This main protagonist meets a girl who he grew up with but has no recollection of, who he falls in love with gradually. Pretty standard setup, right? Except it gets really dark and weird in a Haruki Murakami way (as MJ would say, in a BAD way), a rich Gatsby-like man shows up to start a relationship with a girl, and then it becomes sort of a mystery/stalker thriller towards the end. The movie was full of symbolism and literary tools that went way over my head after working a 12-hour shift at home on the July 4th holiday with fireworks booming all around our apartment (I've started to do a 180-degree shift on fireworks, btw), I'm fine with professionally conducted fireworks displays with music like at a baseball stadium or organized by a city, but private fireworks going off randomly and illegally just disturbs the peace. I'm just glad I don't own a dog that would go crazy once every year on July 4th). One profound passage, however, stood out when the female protagonist (I've been told I shouldn't use the word "female" towards people nowadays in the sensitivity-of-words movement, even though "Karen" seems to be thrown around quite liberally) describes going to Africa and understanding Little Hunger and a Great Hunger, with Little Hunger just being normal hunger satiated by consumption of food, but the Great Hunger being a yearning for the meaning of life, to make sense of it all and why we are all here.
I've always heard about this Great Hunger and it sounds very neat and a noble ideal to aspire to, but I'm not sure I would waste my time trying to find it. Sounds a lot like hoity-toity artistic pieces saying they are representing something but me just seeing a white line on a black background, with 2 circles in the corner or something. I feel like I have already discovered the meaning of life, satiated that hunger, is to be generally happy while surviving as best as one can, then if I have extra resources like wealth or time I'll try to give some to other people. That's pretty much the extent of what I can in terms of addressing the meaning of life. I think many of us would love to go through a thrilling intellectual exercise about the meaning of life and strive to achieve our ideals, but those don't pay the bills and don't necessarily make us happy, and there's no endpoint or goal in sight. It's a bit like people who set out to change the world: they come up with noble ideas and goals and ambitions and set out to achieve them, and their heart is in the right place, but then when actually executing them they find that their ideals and ambitions might be compromised, or that they conflict with other morals and ideals that seem equally righteous and it becomes a zero sum game of you can have one but not the other, so you end up going against another ideal. Or their ideals are corrupted by other people who use them as a force to achieve their goals, a bit like the Black Lives Matter movement that has turned one very noble ideal (enforce that black peoples' lives matter and should not be valued less than lives of others by the police and other groups) into a movement that condemns everyone who tries to say anything against them and denounces all critics as being racist.
More than just being political, though, I just think human beings are limited in what we can understand about the meaning of life. It's kind of like one of the messages n Burning (a movie that I skipped through despite its 95% Rotten Tomatoes score because I kind of figured its value was in its hoity-toity-ness) where we're born, we live, and die, but it's as if we never existed. There's very little we can do during that time other than just survive (most of us don't have financial resources and time to do much of anything) and before we realize it we've lived most of our lives without making much of an impact. But that goes for everyone; even great political leaders and army generals and iconic writers and artists; their impact is on display in museums and history books, but do they really make that much of an impact in the great scheme of things? Unfortunately, we're closer to animals or every other living creature in that respect: we're simply given life for a short period of time, we live it the best we can, and maybe it's actually a simulation and we go on to some form of life outside of the simulation afterwards. We're not gods or some almighty beings who can shift life somehow to satiate or Great Hunger. We just remain forever hungry, some more than others.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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