Although the thread has now run absolutely sideways from its initial track it is to my mind an interesting existential discussion.
Wikipedia defines existentialism's major holding is that philosophically things originate from the human individual. Freedom to act as an individual is important, but individual authenticity is the more accurate goal of this line of thought.
To my mind the question that
@l_e_g_e_n_d poses comes down to the question of discernment more than anything else. How do we choose, how do we discern in our lives the right path? That of itself is a challenge with which we must always wrestle.
We as people can find abundance of "challenges" all around us in many things along the path of our lives, the question becomes does an individual have sufficient discernment to determine which of the myriad challenges that exist are worth tackling to best suit that particular individual.
For example: Should a person remain employed at a particular company doing a particular job and seek advancement there, or is that individual best served to leave the company and strike out in their chosen field as an entrepreneur? That choice comes down to discernment and the two paths lead to different outcomes.
Should a person marry? Should they not? What is best? The answer varies.
I agree with the premise
@l_e_g_e_n_d proposes for it is evident everywhere in all things:
Nothing is static; everything is dynamic. This is a fact and is inescapable.
The universe, the weather, the life cycles of living things, the construction, maintenance and decay of structures, or mountains, everything is dynamic. Energy is required for all dynamic change, and ultimately energy merely changes forms and is exchanged but is never created nor destroyed. This is a physical law. This is the zero sum game. Modern physics may be discovering an ultimate source for the energy, and the universe seems to be continuing to expand at an ever increasing rate...these are things we cannot know in our personal or communal (aggregate) existence on Earth because due to relativity, things feel and appear quite stable to us in our existence here. And in some things we as humans are too limited in our perspective to recognize these laws that influence us. Gravity existed forever before Newton described it. Relativity existed forever before Einstein described it. Other things have existed forever which we cannot yet understand or describe.
Transitory things like wealth can be created in an unlimited sense by an individual, but remember wealth is something created by humans as an exchange medium and is thus meaningless from the perspective of the universe.
Mars couldn't care less how much money anyone has for example. Mars couldn't care less about the rule of law or any other manmade societal constraint either. But Mars absolutely follows physical laws of the universe. Physics and the universe are not in the least governed by imaginary things made up by man for his own purposes.
But on Earth, in manmade societies things like wealth and the rule of law and other societal constraints are seen as important because society has expectations and the majority of people subscribe to those expectations to one degree or another. We subscribe to the illusions. We quite like them. We are attached to them and attach meaning to them. We create constructs and bind ourselves collectively to them. The rule of law, manners, societal roles, religious belief systems, financial dealings, etc. etc. etc. All manmade illusory constraints that we enforce and perpetuate (and not without good reason, IMO.)
A living thing grows, maintains itself until it becomes too inefficient to harness energy sufficient to sustain life, and then dies. Some living things like babies are entirely reliant on the grace of others for survival. Growth is challenging, it is painful and necessary. Death too is challenging and can be equally painful. One is either expanding or contracting at all times in a physical sense, and this is consistent with the laws of the universe and requires energy.
It is easy because of our inability to comprehend all the dynamics that surround us, to assume things are static. But to attempt to remain static in ones life, runs counter to nature and to our nature as human beings. We, like everything that exists are dynamic. We are physically dynamic and we are built to be intellectually dynamic and emotionally dynamic as well.
But we must embrace our transitory and temporal existence in order to understand why "embracing challenges" are indeed what we are built to do. To my mind the degree to which an individual can create changes within his/her life or to effect change in human society is directly correlated to the degree to which an individual is constrained or not constrained mentally by the illusory limits we human beings tend to place in our own way in an attempt to remain comfortable. Comfort too is illusory. History tells us this over and over. But people are still limited to the illusions of their perceptions and inability to see past the microcosm of their own individual existence at a specific moment in time.
Remember what George Bernard Shaw said:
"Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man"
The unreasonable man is unconstrained and is embracing challenges most people are unable to wrap their mind around.
