So, my blog got hacked into recently. Well, it’s actually been a little over a month.
It was the Eid holidays and I was visiting my family in a different city, and I hadn’t been checking in on my blog as often as I probably should have.
So anyway, on the 11th of June, I checked my email to see a new email address had been added as a property owner to my website a week ago, and I immediately knew that something was wrong. I typed in the URL to my website and found that I was getting an error.
My husband, who also happens to be a software engineer and my go-to IT support, was not at home at the time, and I started freaking out. He came home, checked everything out and informed me that somebody had indeed hacked into my WordPress and deleted all my files.
With my husband’s help, I was luckily able to restore my theme and salvage the 43 posts I had written, but everything else was gone. The customizations, the plugins I had installed, and around 250 pictures were lost.
I cannot describe to you how I felt that night. It felt as if I had invited someone over to my house for a cup of tea and they had taken a giant dump in my teacup that I served them with love and good intentions. And I felt really stupid.
There was only one singular thought that kept looping in my head in a giant inflatable speech bubble: ‘Why would somebody do that?’
I don’t sell anything on my website. There’s no credit card info to steal. I’m nowhere close to being a ‘successful blogger’ that someone would want to sabotage. I write about tea, possibly the least controversial topic on earth. So, then why?
What could possibly motivate someone to destroy something I had created with so much love, heart, and soul over the last two years? I felt I wouldn’t feel so bad about it if I could just understand this person’s motivations.
Yet somehow in trying to understand my hacker’s intentions, I also cound no longer understand my own. I haven’t been able to restore a single picture in my website because like any typical nihilist having their quarter life crisis, I found myself asking: Why am I even doing what I’m doing?
And it doesn’t help that it feels like the world is burning. You might be thinking, what does that have to do with my blog?
But isn’t it all related? Because it brings me back to the same question: why do people do what they do? Do human beings just have a natural proclivity for inflicting suffering on others?
When I look at everything that is happening in the world, all the values and beliefs I hold dear and sacred, everything that my parents and teachers taught me about love, kindness, empathy, compassion, justice, the importance of living life with dignity, helping those in need, all of these structures that my brian has built over the past 3 decades to make sense of the world — it all comes crumbling down.
It feels so trivial and irrelevant to be posting pictures of tea and talking about mindfulness and inner peace when it’s not what I feel most of the time. I feel overwhelmed with guilt for being so privileged that I get to scroll past somebody’s suffering while they are forced to live through it, for being given the choice to watch videos of safe, happy babies instead of starving ones.
So, why am I doing what I’m doing? What do I know about anything? What can I possibly teach anyone when I can’t make any sense of the world?
But surely, the answer can’t be to drown in despair. Surely me feeling guilty for being privileged is just another way to feel sorry for myself, another way to feed my own ego. And certainly I’m not helping anybody by doing that.
So, then what? What is the answer? Is it donating money? Is it praying? Is it signing petitions and joining protests that will become a news story for 30 seconds before being forgotten? Is it writing poetry? Is it liking other people’s angry posts? Is it watching endless hours of Youtube trying to understand human history and psychology?
The truth is that I just don’t know. I don’ know what I can do to create any kind of impactful change in the lives of people who most need it.
But I know that I am also not being fair. Maybe humans have a natural inclination towards inflicting pain and suffering. But we also have an extraordinary capacity for love, kindness, compassion and creativity.
And for every person out there who gets some kind of kick out of increasing the net total pain in the world, I want to believe there is somebody else who is working tirelessly to decrease it.
Maybe that is just the duality of existence. You can grieve for the suffering of others while still feeling grateful for your own privilege. You can mourn death and simultaneously celebrate life. You can rage at humanity’s dark, cruel nature while still being awed by all its wonderful goodness.
Maybe the best we can do is to try to live as an example of our own values, to try to counter the hate in the world by injecting as much positivity, kindness, and warmth into the things that lie within our circle of influence.
At times like this, I have to remind myself why I started this blog. I was at a time in my life when I suffered from a similar purposelessness. I’d just left a PhD program in Molecular Biology in Ohio State, because I could not find a way to connect my work to my purpose.
I took a long time off, read a few books (mainly Everything Is Fucked and Man’s Search For Meaning), and thought a LOT about what would make my life meaningful.
I decided that the two things that were most important to me were 1) to help people and 2) to do something intellectually and creatively challenging.
Through my blog, I could achieve both of those things and more. I could create financial independence for myself, while simultaneously retaining ownership of my time. I could help people I loved and people in need. I could explore my creativity.
And most importantly, through my writing, I could influence people to live more mindfully and to be present with themselves and their loved ones. And maybe I wrote this post because I needed to remind myself of that.
So I can’t stop wars or end human suffering. When I was younger, I had ambitions to change the world, to cure cancer, and to solve humanity’s greatest problems.
But now through my writing, if I can help at least one person feel a little lighter, breathe a little deeper, even just momentarily, then maybe, just maybe, it’s not all for nothing.
