What Makes Us Human

There’s a line from the first Matrix that has been on my mind lately. During his time training and learning about the matrix, Neo goes through an exercise that helps test his sense of focus. He’s walking through a crowd, when a pretty lady in a red dress passes him. Neo is a dude, so obviously he turns back around, ignoring Morpheus who is giving some speech about the bad guys. When he notices that Neo is no longer listening to him, Morpheus asks

“Are you still listening, or are you looking at the woman in the red dress?” 

Morpheus tells Neo to look again, but instead of the pretty lady, he’s suddenly staring down the barrel of an agent’s gun. Morpheus pauses the game and gives him some lesson about agents can be anywhere. Later on, Neo finds out that mouse, one of the other members of Morpheus’ crew, was the one who designed the pretty lady that distracted him. With a sly grin on his face, he suggestively asks Neo if he would like a more…intimate encounter with her. Everybody groans as he asks, but then he delivers the line that I have been pondering:

“Don’t listen to these people, Neo. For to deny our impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human.” 

I’ve been tossing this idea around, and I can’t help but feel like there’s some truth to it. I often find myself bowing down to all the things I ought to do. I make decisions based on what’s good for me, or what has the highest probability of bringing me to a place of success. Rarely do I stop to think about what I would like to do. What seems like fun in the moment. Beyond that, I rarely even ask myself what I would like to do with my time, my money. It’s simply “what should I do with what I have?” I rarely ask myself these questions and sometimes, I can’t help but wonder if my life is lacking because of it. 

After some thinking, I decided to really test this idea out. I started making the “wrong” decisions, pushing my luck to get a little bit of what I really wanted. I started ignoring the need to get 8 hours of sleep and did other things with my time. I started stretching my budget to be able to eat out. Then I reworked it entirely to be able to self-publish my book. And you know what happened? It felt real good. 

I feel like a part of me was set free. Like I was no longer waiting for the ideal conditions for life to start. I always figured I had to put all my efforts into paying off my debts before I could actually start living. Turns out, I was wrong about that one. Don’t get me wrong–doing responsible things like paying off debt is great! But if you develop an obsession with what you should do, instead of what you truly want to do, it’ll suck the life out of you. 

We see this idea go deeper in the character of Cypher. Halfway through the movie, he decides that he’s going to betray Morpheus and his team. Why? Because he isn’t truly living. “All I do is whatever he (Morpheus) tells me to,” he later complains. Ooh, wait just a minute: isn’t the whole point of escaping the matrix to be free? Don’t people want to get out so that they can live better lives? In a weird kind of way, Morpheus becomes the same kind of tyrant to Cypher that the machines became to the rest of the world. What’s up with that? To make sense of this conundrum, we have to answer the question: what does it mean to be free? It seems like part of the equation is a call to individualism. We want to be able to choose our lives for ourselves, without anyone else getting in our way. Fair enough, I guess. But is it really that simple? Is the issue just a matter of wanting something and letting yourself have it? 

Yes and no. There’s a line that we start to approach between wanting and needing. If I told you that I was hungry, so I got up and made myself a sandwich, you wouldn’t think much of it. After all, sandwiches keep me from dying, so it’s pretty natural that I would want to eat one. However, if I told you that I wanted to be a rockstar, what would you say? 

A lot of people wouldn’t be too opposed, but there would definitely be one or two that would push back on the idea. After all, it is a risky play, and a lot of people don’t make it like they think they would. The pros and cons would be weighed, and both sides would have some reasonable things to say. I could argue that I could do a lot of good, and one could argue that a lot of bad could come to me instead. Then someone could remind me that I didn’t need to be a rockstar. I could survive doing something safer. The question we have to ask ourselves is whether or not my dream to be a rockstar is a need or a want. 

We could say it’s a want because technically, we can survive without it. We can find other ways to make money to buy food and water and such. We could probably go on to do other things that we might want, like choosing what color tie to wear every day. That’s basically the same thing, right? On the surface, it looks like we can do just fine without chasing that crazy dream. 

But is a part of us not dying if we refuse to chase the life we truly want to live? Is there not an inner-man that we are starving to death if we refuse to acknowledge his hunger? Are we just being spoiled, or is there something deeper beneath the surface to be discovered? Personally, I have always been a huge fan of dreams. They make the world go round, and ultimately make this otherwise dull and dreary life worth living. Nothing gets you out of bed in the morning like the hunger to chase something that you want to see come to life. 

Free will. That’s what’s at stake here. It feels like it’s in our blood to demand it. To declare that it is our right to have it. And when it is taken from us, we become screamingly aware that something is wrong in our lives. The question, then, becomes: is it moral to act upon this free will? 

The temptation is to run and grab Matthew 16:24, which says that we should deny ourselves and pick up our cross daily. On the surface, it sounds like a call to surrender our free will and to do whatever God says. That doesn’t sound like the whole story to me. I say that because the very next verse talks about how we should lose our lives in order to save them. It goes on to ask what gaining the whole world is worth if you lose your soul. 

Your soul. Couldn’t that be the real counter to our initial claim: to argue that chasing these dreams, these “impulses which make us human,” is an attempt to gain the world, which will inevitably cost us our souls? Something in my gut says no. At least, not if we do it right. 

Honestly, I’m convinced that these impulses are part of what it means to gain our soul. To desire, to create–it’s what imbues meaning into this life. It’s in what we want and how we get it that things become good or bad. No one would question a man’s dream to settle down and start a family, but if he were to bribe someone to become his spouse, or treat them terribly during their marriage, we might have a few questions about the situation. Very few dreams are actually that bad, in and of themselves. Sure, there are a few, but they’re actually not as common as you’d think. 

The topic of God and dreams is one that has tickled my noodle for a long time. It’s only natural to be a little nervous when your chest surges with the fires of a desire. Any man worth his salt would experience that rush and ask himself, “is this something I should really be chasing?” I’m yet to find a verse that I truly like to back this up, but here’s my stance based on what I have gathered. 

First of all, we have to acknowledge the fire that is burning. You do no service to anyone, yourself included, if you try to ignore it. It’ll just fester, and eventually blow up anyway. I think of Jesus praying before He went to the cross. He admitted that he didn’t want to go. I’m sure He pounded His fists in a fit of rage as He let it all out of His system (though, the verse doesn’t tell us that.) That’s the only way to deal with it. We have to admit where we’re at, whether it’s good or bad.

That leads us to the second point, though, which is that our desires don’t necessarily have one singular purpose. Jesus still went to the cross after begging to not have to. Sometimes, those desires aren’t what was supposed to happen. But to shut them down entirely is to stop truly living. I believe that God is bigger than me, so if I step up with my boiling rage, He’s big enough to shut it down when He needs to. He can do with it what He will. And it’s important for my own growth to do so, because if I never want anything at all, I’ll never want the right thing either. And that sounds a bit off, don’t you think?

I have heard stories of people who have had God help them reach their dreams, and stories of people who have had God reach in and give them new ones. I can’t confidently say that there’s one right answer to this question. The thing I do know is that it’s too depressing, dare I even say–inhuman, to live without that hunger. My approach has always been to get hungry, get angry at the way my life is and isn’t. I take it to God and duke it out a little bit. I dig my heels in til I feel like the issue is truly resolved, then I run with things from there. I don’t know if that’s right or wrong, but it seems God is big enough to handle me, so I guess it’s a working strategy for now. 

The only other question I often ask myself is whether or not I could avoid a bunch of pain if I was a little less stubborn.The answer to that is no. You don’t dodge the pain, you just get to pick the form it comes in. Do you take the dull ache of ignoring what makes you truly alive, or do you touch the burning flame of passion and try to grow from it? I like the sound of the second one, but honestly–I bounce between the two a lot. It’s a tough choice, but I think the right answer is to be truly alive while I’m on this earth. 

So get mad! Get angry! Dare to dream of the life you’d really like to have! Dare to get hungry! Take it all to the source of goodness and life itself, and watch something beautiful come to life in ways you may not have been expecting. 

Like I said, the matrix is full of deep ideas like these. It’s why it’s seen as a masterpiece. Granted, I’m also pretty good at pulling deep ideas out of anywhere, so that’s a factor as well. Either way, this has been fun to write and I hope you got as much out of reading it as I have writing it. 

Until Next Time

May Peace be your Guide.