When I look around and see people hurridly going about their daily lives, there is only one thought that comes to my mind - "Life was not meant to be lived like this. Like a chore."

Most people today, it seems, are not living but only surviving. They wake up early in the morning, gulp down their breakfast and leave for work. They go through a ton of stress throughout the day at work and come back home all exhausted. They go to bed, only to repeat it all the next day.

Of course, this is a bit of a generalisation but you get the point. I feel like life has become robotic in a sense. We are programmed to function a particular way and we do it over and over again.

Even though we pride ourselves from building a grand civilisation and becoming the dominant species on the planet, it has certainly come at a cost. The cost of our freedom, happiness, the ability to enjoy the little things in life and just.... living.

Why?

In the past few years, I have had time to reflect upon the kind of lives my grandparents used to live and compare it to the lives we live today. Every single time, I couldn't help but feel that we might have gone backwards instead of going forward.

Sure, we have become much more technologically advanced, which I personally love. We have made advances in the medical field and are now capable of saving more lives and prolonging human life. Likewise, there are many important areas where we have progressed.

But it's almost as if we paid the price with our sanity. Everything that has happened in the past five decades or so has resulted in a life that feels nothing short of a chore.

One is forced to ask...why! Why did we make life so difficult? Why have we created an overcomplicated system where we have to be increasingly greedy in order to ensure our survival? Why couldn't we have figured out a better way to live, ensuring well-being on all fronts? We sure have the resources and we sure have the talent!

We may never get an answer to this question. And so, it will always be a prickling thorn in our hearts while we serve as a cog in the bigger machine of our civilisation.