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---------------------------------------------------------------- This essay is based on the reason for living with examples from The Oddyssey. Feel free to plagiarize and what not. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Our endless struggle and desire to overcome is our ultimate reason for living, as we are propelled by it, and play out our lives as if it were a game. We're in it from the start and are forced to play along until the last moment, struggling for something unknown, but needed to survive. In essence, this is life and it's ultimately a mystery. From the day we're born, until the day we die, we're in the game. We can quit anytime we want, but the only way out is by means of death. Yet, man is curious and by nature he will want to continue to see what happens, unless, he murdered or dragged down to the emotional state to which he becomes suicidal and kills himself. This journey that everyone makes is like a game, and this game has difficulty settings. Some people tend to have hard lives while others seem to have it easier. Some people give up, and some people go on with the journey. Nonetheless, everyone has difficulty at one point or another in his or her life. Those with really difficult lives would be similar to playing a game on the "hard" setting. This isn't something one gets to choose either. Parents have a large impact on how one's life will be. It also, greatly, depends on the choices one makes as a person. Also, even if one has, what seems to be, the hardest life, that person would just be that much more of a hero then someone who has a really easy life. That person would feel so much better about himself or herself when he or she does not give up in the end and claim that prize. But even if one's playing it "easy" or "hard", no life isn't just plain easy, everything has its ups and downs. Even if some people don't even know we're playing this game, we are always working towards something that may or may not be unknown. Usually, this unknown is happiness, as being happy is one of the most prized emotions one can have and the one that is best to feel. But, it doesn't go to say that we can't only be happy because there needs to be the unhappy in there too. If we don't have the unhappy, we can never fully appreciate, or know the happy. That also goes for how we need the struggle to notice meaning. If everything just came to us, and everyone was happy, everyone would get bored and die, just like that. No meaning, no purpose. If, for say, Odysseus, of the Odyssey, got home from Troy without all the quests, then he wouldn't appreciate his family or home as much as if he would have gone on the journey. The rules to this game are a mystery as well, and all one has is the ideals and thoughts that other people create, which would not work for everyone. Some of us though, don't know how to get to the happy. We often find ourselves to be lost, not knowing what to do. Sometimes we don't know what will make us happy. Sometimes we get numb. There's always a way though, we just have to find it. Life teases us by giving us little bits of happiness and then just rips it away by placing forth another obstacle. Life seems cruel. We don't know what will ultimately make us happy until it happens. There's no doubt that it will ever even happen. We get afraid; wondering if this is just an endless cycle of teasing and harassing, then gave over. The end. We think that it's not worth it and we're all fools. These ideals just make the whole journey's ending unknown though. But then we realize this doesn't make us happy and we abandon these thoughts and continue to try to become happy once again, in that same endless cycle. Our struggles, which we all face, are similar to those, which Odysseus faced in the Odyssey. The obstacles we experience today differ greatly from the ones Odysseus battled. We don't go out and fight a Cyclops, although we may fight with emotional problems, such as feeling sad or angry because a loved one is ignoring one when that person has something important. There are also those struggles that are wastes of time. Odysseus wasted his time with gorgeous goddesses, while we may waste our time with other attractive people, who may be completely irrelevant to this journey that we must make to gain our happiness. Those people may delay us, as Odysseus was delayed in the Odyssey. We may also be delayed by use of drugs or alcohol. Another problem is that people can just stop the journey and stay with a sidetrack, such as if Odysseus would have stayed with one of the goddesses. But sometimes, this will not ultimately work out. In Odysseus' case, he still had his family and home to get back to and fix. If he didn't do that, he'd have to live with the guilt and that hole in one's soul, knowing something is not finished. He wouldn't have been happy and being the person he is, he wouldn't have settled for it. That is a quality every human being tends to have. The result of denying the prize, and staying with a sidetrack can lead to just constant depression knowing one could do better, much better. Either way, everyone has a different something that would make him or her happy. For Odysseus, it was getting back to his old life. For someone else, it may be to have a successful family. To another, find God. Lots of people don't even know what that might be yet, but subconsciously they are going for it and craving it. With all our struggles, all our pain, the sadness, the hurt, and every other bad moment, we wait for the day to which we can finally look back on our life work and smile. We work and we struggle for that day of glory and pride. We want meaning, we want importance, and if it isn't there naturally, we'll invent it, be seduced by it, believe it, and die peacefully. In the end, we can still win, even when all is lost.