An atheist’s guide to god

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re a literate human being who has the patience and curiosity that made you stumble across this article. And if you are more than ~3 years of age, chances are that at some point in life, you’ve contemplated the meaning of life. I did too. Albeit my contemplations started wayyyy after my 3rd birthday. Took me 16 years after that as a matter of fact! But something started happening in my mind during the sophomore year of undergrad. Until this point, my life had been more or less on autopilot. Sure I read books and had a deep curiosity for science and technology in general, but never had I taken life so seriously. Noone told me to.

Being born in a lower-middle-class home with an abusive but dead father who left a tonne of debt and a 5 year old child on my mother’s shoulders, doing some STEM degree and getting a decent job was a good enough deal for everyone but me. “Is this all there is to life?”, I contemplated. As a child I would tell my mom, “I’m going to make bank someday”. Colloquilly of-course. My normie 7 year old brain hardly knew any slang. Looking around me I saw people’s ambition being to join the “Big-4” companies. I made an honest effort and talked to a consultant from McKinsey who was, relatively speaking, making bank compared to me or my mother. But their words never touched upon what excited them about their work. It was all about, “Oh I get to travel to these fancy countries, take vacations with my family, yada yada”. Which for anyone sounds like a dream job. Even to my mom for that matter. But I felt something was missing.

Growing up, I observed people of all kinds. People from abject poverty with the widest of smiles to insane affluence with the deepest of frowns. Kind people, shrewd people, religious people, abusive people, romantic people, violent people, insecure people, people with street smarts, people whose entire life was a big bubble, horny people, prudes, political idealists, politically agnostics, people with a scarcity-stagnant mindset, people with an abundance-growth mindset, and finally, extremely intelligent people who were “taken advantage of” by other people. Or as victim blaming goes, “Let themselves be taken advantage of”.

What kind of a person do I want to be? Can we even faithfully categorize us in any of these slots, or are we a combination of a few? With the hopes of trying to discover who I am, I set out on a – so far – 8 year long journey of reading about people’e experiences. “Books, …” as Victoria Schwab said, “are a way to live a thousand lives – or to find strength in a very long one”.