I’ve been thinking about death a lot recently. I’m not suicidal, and I’m not looking forward to death, but it’s been on my mind lately. With news every day about people dying, with incidents I’ve seen, and with everything going on around me, death keeps coming up.
Then I saw a video of Mohammad Eghbal (or Iqbal), known as the oldest bookseller in Mashhad, Iran, being interviewed. One sentence caught my ear. He said, “we are travelers, not settlers.”
How about that? We forget that we’re only passing through this world. We’re not here to stay, we’re here to pass through.
So why, in this short time we have here, do we tend to steal, lie, corrupt, and only look out for ourselves? Why live like that? Instead of helping each other and making things better, we chase after as much as we can get, just so we can die and leave it all behind.
I know it’s human biology. I know about survival instincts, and I know we all want a better life for ourselves and the people we love. But shouldn’t we still try to be better?
Ruining people’s lives to hold onto power a little longer, putting people through misery for a little more money, another yacht, another hotel, another supercar we’ll never even drive. It’s not just the ones who cling to power at any cost, ruling over people who never had a say in it. It happens on a smaller scale too, in ways we don’t always notice.
It just feels wrong. I’m not advocating for communism either, which I see as just another version of the same corrupt thinking. But I don’t like what we’re doing right now, and it’s not really about the financial or political systems we’ve built. It’s about how we, as people, think and treat each other.
Because we don’t exist in isolation. Every choice we make lands on someone else, and every choice someone else makes lands on us. We’re all traveling the same road at the same time, and how we treat each other along the way is kind of the whole point.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to gain more, live more comfortably, or have better access to resources so life is easier. But I don’t understand how we can be so cruel as to hoard and restrict those same resources from other people just for our own benefit.
It’s human, but it sure isn’t humane.