Genes will get you born  --  but then what?! --
life gives you life, then says the rest is up to you
(least that is how it seems from ordinary views).
You can build up your muscles, build up your wealth;
fine tune your beauty, scramble for fame  --
you can even memorize a lot of stuff and be known as smart,
or just be a good citizen and merge with the masses.
Discounting restrictions due to inherent physical peculiarities,
life appears not to care what you do with yours;
the only drive common to all men is to stay alive  --  beyond that,
everything seems up for grabs  --
anything a human can think of to do looks open to pursuit.
 

Most men’s lives do not stray far from the urge to survive
(at most, to efforts that make their lives more comfortable);
a minority are motivated to stand out from the crowd sufficiently to provide their, something-to-do after they are born, and of these, a minority succeed --
but if being a parent, or a member of an identifiable community does not do it for you,  you still have to do something,
then even if you fail (as in the quest for fame),
the struggle and day dreams germane thereto will themselves adequately fill up
the spare time of your life.

What else could a man ask for:
you’re hungry --  you eat;
you’re horny --   you get laid;
you’re tired  --  you take a nap,
then when you wake up after all of that,
you can strum on your guitar and dream of being a star,
shoot some hoops as you pretend an NBA scout is secretly watching,
or riff on your computer’s keyboard while scenes of you being awarded literary prizes dance in your head --  all great fun –
non life-essential activities apparently limited to humans
(though they being mute, we have no way of knowing how much animals & plants enjoy their lives),
and only those content to live their days lost amidst the collective herd, operationally indistinguishable from the next person will express faux passionate fault with those who seek public attention as their response to the question:

The total physiology of every normal person knows that no intangible pleasure can match that of eating when hungry, fucking when aroused, and resting when weary,
but the thoughts generated by men’s brains play, by nature,
a game of pretending otherwise:
a celebrity's mind can find the excited shouts of collective approval he receives
from his audience at the moment he first appears on stage, to be --  at that moment  –  even better than food or sex, and with no hesitation throughout history
have those from kings and generals to philosophers and ballerinas so publicly said --
so (in the rare per chance you have not had a similar experience personally) you have a continuing record of men great and small readily admitting that other people’s approval of the activity by which they have tried to fill their life after being physically born
have in certain instances, given them more apparent pleasure than even the
fulfilling of essential survival needs.
Make of it what you will  --  but nothing you may conclude thereabout
has any objective authority or significance --  this is simply how it is.
 
 

The certain man (at least by his teen year) realizes there is something embedded in him that seeks to break out and be what he does with his life,
now that his genes have gotten him born,
and easily, as represented by the thoughts appearing in his brain related thereto,
does this difficult to define interest appear in contexts entwined with fame and acclaim (if not with outright power and wealth) and not knotty at all is it for a man and this
originally unique urge to become inseparably affixed thereto,
which renders this otherwise quite special way to spend one’s life  --

Beyond the, beyond-your-control drive to survive,
everything ordinary men do to fill up the free time in their lives involves other people;
men must have an audience, be it of one or a million,
for their routine intangible activities;
men do not paint, compose, commune with god, or run the 440 for themselves --
things men do which are motivated by mind must have an audience  --
--  that is the whole point of doing them,
the one exception to this is the thing in his brain that prompts the certain man;
he always commences his activity in a contrary fashion,
trying to talk to other people about his vaguely describable interest, even humbly showing off for the audience he seeks by admitting what an esoteric area his be,
but if he does not there get stuck, he eventually accepts the fact
that his brain’s answer to the after-birth question: “Now what?”
is one of a sort too exotic for others to grasp;
there can be no audience for what the certain man does with his life --  if there is  --
he is not yet doing it right (or not as intensely as he could);
he must come to grips with the pure fact that no one is interested in what he is doing,
and no one will ever appreciate it  --  and that’s that.

Indeed, once this is fully understood, a hobble is removed from his mental hoof;
realizing that what he is doing, and what he may now privately know about life
impresses no one and never will  --  is liberating,
(since thinking otherwise is but a link in a chain fixed to an inner prison wall).

What the certain man does to fill up his life once his genes have born him is useless, unexplainable and forever unknown to the rest of the world,
and the sooner he recognizes and accepts this,
the sooner will the Nobel Committee take him under consideration.
 
 

P.S. Readers do realize that the purpose of the Daily News is to talk about things that go on in your mind that
        even your mind won’t talk about, and to note things about the brain that it itself tries to ignore.