The world is crying out for a reason to live, and we take more of it away every day.
Art is beautiful. Science is beautiful. Work is beautiful.
Life is beautiful.
You can live through the entirety of your life without once knowing true passion and what it feels like to care for something, and that thought scares me.
To feel this deeply, this intensely, is a privilege. The death of passion, the rise of "nonchalance", the vilification of attachment - within that lies the death of the human spirit.
What happens when art no longer moves your soul because it has frozen over the throes of passion with the chill and rigidity of conformity and apathy? What happens when music can no longer bring tears to your eyes and your failures no longer bring you to your knees and you are no longer allowed to celebrate your successes and feel deeply, rabidly, viscerally, animalistically about something? What happens when the human race loses what has made it so human over the entire course of its evolution and history?
Greatness, of both experience and substance, is a rare steel forged in the rarer flame of burning passion. To live in a world where passion is at best treated as an optional add on to "profit-making" work and at worst treated as a whimsy of those already rich and settled is to live in a world without joy.
Passion is not a class war. They have commoditized art and with it the joy of human experience, but you do not have to follow. Passion can be found in the most mundane things, from the crunch of the gravel beneath your feat to the way the earth seems to breathe when you stop and listen. And I do agree that is a lot easier to feel this passion in a situation where you do not have to worry about a million other things, but passion can find its place even in the heart of adversity and suffering.
A poor man who knows not where he lives tomorrow can be passionate about those that he loves intensely, with all his heart, today. Of course, it is not enough to simply leave him be with that passion a substitute for human compassion and kindness, for we do have a duty to uplift those not as fortunate as us, but there is no situation in which passion cannot suffuse every iota of your experience.
Passion has found its grave in orthodoxy and structure. Because for those privileged enough to have an education, they are forced through 16 years of forced measurement where passion is a word looked a with doe-eyes and a heavy heart, a tale told of in movies and books but definitely not attainable by the student, and definitely not by the person the student becomes by the time they are an adult, for all they know is how to compromise and play the game the right way.
Humanity has somehow made a system that stifles exactly what created it.
The future was never built by corpos in white and black suits who clock in and clock out to get pieces of paper with faces printed on them. The future was never built by the proselytisers who condemn and rage and point fingers at all those that are different, which in today's day and age has become those with true passion, and condemn them as different from the norm, and therefore a threat. The future was never built by drab, grey, lifeless concrete buildings built from a template and made for mass production.
The future was built by those that lived every moment so full of desire, of obsession, of burning drive that to not build would have driven them mad. The future was built by those that found beauty in design, in science, in all that is good, in all that is bad, and in all that is ugly in this world. The future was built by disarrayed garages full of paint cans and shorted circuit boards and blank canvases.
Do not be ashamed to live, my friend. Do not be ashamed to scream from the rooftops your love for this life, and never let anyone ever shame you for believing and crying and raging and screaming at your failures because of how much you care.
Do not let your passion go silently into the night.