The Death Of Passion

By Arthit Kumar Dutta

Passion is dying. Slowly, quietly, because passion is dangerous, and we have turned the people of the world into cowards. It writhes in pain, cries in agony, left alone in a cellar to die on its own while the world forgets about it, while the world resorts to moderation, to safety. The veins of people run dry, the passion that once ran through their blood has been lost to history. We have caged passion, and that cage is called safety. We have subdued the fire in our hearts unknowingly yet willingly. Passion dies in a lone corner, bleeding to death, only but a flicker of light illuminates the air, but it too is close to extinguishing into nothing but a wisp of smoke, a memory to what it was, a testimony to what significance it bore. Are we killing passion because we are too afraid of it? Or are we killing passion because it takes away from us our sense of safety and security?

Passion is something misunderstood by many. It is an obsession, a drive filled to the brim with energy and adrenaline, irrational as it may be, a force that could make us die for something. It is love engulfed in flames, it is the burning desire to be one with the thing. It is the overwhelming surge of want, the need, to show enduring willingness to suffer for it. It is not safe happiness, it is the love that could build empires, reconnect people, and also the fire that could burn down cities, topple governments, and ruin lives. Passion is the raw culmination of emotions that moves us - dangerous, yes, but also the driving force behind art and persuasion.We have forced passion to change the meaning than what it originally was. We have forced passion to mutate and metamorphosise. We have diluted the meaning behind passion, turning it into just what we like a lot, and not what we are willing to die for. We have turned the idea of passion into hobbies, we have monetised something which is supposed to run solely from our hearts.We have clipped its wings, once roaring it now coughs out sparks, once worshipped it now dies alone, abandoned, temples in ruins and rubble.

Art is passion. Passion is art. Art would not exist without passion, and the world has started to lose its own spark because we have limited art and so passion too. We have limited art to monetisation, we have changed the concept of art from passion to forced repetition. Artists are forced to spit out art like machines simply to appease the needs of the general public. Artists now do not create because of the intense urge to materialise their passion, they create just for the sake of it, and this is how art is losing its life - passion, and when art loses passion, it starts to decay.The world has sunken art into classical forms. Art is not just a medium, it is the lens, a practice, a manifestation of passion in any form of human endeavor. Art is not meant to be contained in a limiting definition. Art is everywhere we look, and it seeps into every crack and crevice it can find. Society limits it to creative outputs, however, art is much more than that. Art is both the brilliance of renaissance art, and romanticism of astronomy. It is both the elegance of Victorian literature, and the adrenaline of a sport.

Every act of creation, every human pursuit touched by obsession, is art, and when art loses passion, it loses itself. Art limps, forced into frames and rules, but its heartbeat is still visible if someone tries to look closer.

The foundations of human connections lay in art. Art connects people together, like a language of its own, to convey emotions and expressions and ideas better than any other language in the world, and when this art starts to become hollow, society starts to break apart.Thus, it is important to note from here that once passion dies, society is bound to fall. Passion makes us human, so when we lose the Passion in ourselves, are we fit to call ourselves human? Obsession is being replaced by optimisation; people drown in mediocrity. Today’s lives are full of blandness, life seems to have lost meaning. People grow paranoid with the fear of risk, yet we forget that it is passion that gives depth to our lives, identity to our character. People have changed, they no longer chase, experiment, or suffer for something meaningful. People have grown accustomed to the comfort of a little shell in which they seek shelter, they do not take risks, they play it safe, consume, monetise, imitate.When I look around I feel like passion is already close to death. Art is being replaced bit by bit by computed auto generated content being spit out by an artificially intelligent bot. Back in the day, at least as far as I know through the stories I've heard, people worked for what they love. They worked day and night long for something that didn't feel like work, it felt like home. like something you could reach out to after a heart breaking event, something that gets you up in the morning and something that leaves you excited for the next day, at night. I'd go as far to say we are losing all forms of emotion, and not just passion. We are losing the colour that we once saw. When I leave our home in the evening, I think about how on schedule I am, or about if I look decent enough, or maybe about how enjoyable the night would be. Oh, but I don't remember the last time I could feel my emotions, and hear my own thoughts. the crisp sound of the door locking, walking out of the alley; the streets bright from the sunset, clouds of orange and reddish hue scattered, a light cool temperature, the slight rustle of leaves, the clip-clop of sandals. I could feel everything to the very depths of my heart. Life is almost automated now. Going to and coming back from school takes an hour, but the entire process just happens so fast and so smoothly it feels like I barely spent ten minutes on the commute. Time has been rushing past, as if it too is in a hurry. One moment it's the first day of the month and you think about how much there is to do, and the next moment you see the month is already over. This automated life devoid of emotion is to some extent frightening, and to a large extent just sad.

This is dangerous. Emotion is what makes us human, emotion is what separates us from the dead. If we lose emotion, then what would a dead man not be just the same?Expanding on the idea that with the death of passion, society is bound to fall.What is society without passion? What are we without passion? What are we without emotion? Civilisations have been born, and civilisations have collapsed, because of passion. This fire was the driving force behind the renaissance, toppled monarchies, and pushed humans to the moon. If we strip a civilization of its passion we are left with people who exist, but forgot how to live. Passion fuels evolution, and when something is devoid of passion it starts to decay; not a sudden collapse, but a slow, gradual, suffocation. When people stop feeling, art turns into product, politics turns into management, education turns into business, work turns into survival. A world that is trying to chase safety and moderation and in turn is pushing down passion is only trying to strangle itself, and it will only be some time for it to succeed. Bit by bit, everything with meaning slowly becomes transactional, and that is how society is rotting. The corpse of a passionless society is mechanical, dull, beige. streets where once stories were told, are silent, not because there is no one there, but because no one dares to shout. Art galleries are filled with symmetry and attempts of perfection, but are devoid of life. Music is perfect in pitch and every beat falls in place, but does not evoke a flame in us. Sport tactics are efficient in the best way possible, but there is no longer any creativity, the reason to anticipate anything goes null, the youth grow up around algorithms, instead of chasing dreams. People move, but do not live.

Life without passion is inherently meaningless. When life loses passion it loses itself. When the flame in a person goes out, he does not continue to live, although he might be alive. Passion is what brings life into something, it's what turns a bunch of colours into a masterpiece, it's what turns noise into music, it's what turns eating to survive into cuisines, words into poetry, and existence into life. The meaning of life is passion, because without passion life is meaningless. It is when a person loses the fire inside them, that driving force inside them, when their lives lose meaning. when a person loses the one thing they lived for, what use is life anyway? meaning is the sense of why we are living, and that why cannot come from the word itself, it comes from within us. The only thing strong enough to give life meaning, is passion, therefore passion gives life meaning; without it life is only survival. Meaning cannot be manufactured by logic and handed out to us by society,  it must be felt, and this is not possible without passion. to live is to burn, and when this fire dies out, even society might stand, but humanity will fall. The only salvation is to let ourselves ignite once again, to feel, to strive, to yearn. The only salvation is to feel, to dream dangerously, and only then will the fire start to burn bright again, and there will be hope in the midst of all the chaos.

And maybe when society is close to its collapse, there will be a flicker of light; in the same cellar where passion was dying. There you might just be able to hear a faint beating of a heart.

By Arthit Kumar Dutta