Siddhartha Siddhartha Analysis

Defining My Purpose
In a world where society has a predetermined regimen for success, oftentimes it is truly difficult to separate your entity from the one society has constructed for you. For example, in Silicon Valley, my community would want me to be a model minority who aspires for perfection, the latest iPhone, and a career in software engineering. While elsewhere, I may be told to follow my dreams . In my case, both these ideologies came into play in my conquest to achieve my aspirations. At first, I admittedly only sought after conventional success, which I assumed was inextricably linked to happiness. While this could have been called materialism, I believe it was a byproduct of my community’s infatuation with the American Dream, and
A primary example an unfruitful cleansing of worldly pleasures, is that of Siddhartha in Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. In relinquishing his role as a Brahmin’s son, Siddhartha decides to join the ascetics, a group of nomads who practice abstention in various forms. As he starves himself, however, he only seems to gain a temporary escape from his worldly problems and he finds that the lifestyle of an ascetic is one of unsustainable “self-growth”. Hesse writes, “He traveled along the path of self-denial through pain, through voluntary suffering and conquering of pain, through hunger, thirst and fatigue...But although the paths took him away from Self, in the end they always led back to it” (Hesse 35). Despite Siddhartha’s rejection of worldly pleasure, he neither truly escapes the pangs of desire, nor does he find inner peace and happiness. Consequently, I believe this indicates either endpoint on the spectrum of desire can not grant someone happiness. Siddhartha too finds the ascetic lifestyle to be dissatisfying so he begins contemplating several other lifestyles to find his best suit. Siddhartha tries becoming a merchant, a lover, and a devout Brahmin, but it is not until he meets his son that he finds a true balance. Soon he finds that, “ he loved [his son], and he preferred the suffering and worries of love over happiness and joy without the boy...
Oftentimes, one believes their circumstances are predetermined, but the ability to find a balance is in fact a choice. Unfortunately many of mankind’s most profound truths happen to come forth during the worst of times, and this was certainly the case for several prisoners of concentration camps. The same was true for Victor Frankl who recognized the power of of the human mind, and knowing that we will always have a choice. He recounts, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way” (Frankl 43). Frankl alongside several camp inmates lost everything tangible that they had ever owned, yet the one thing that remained with them internally was their perspective with which they would approach life. While some were able to channel their burning desires to escape the turmoil of internment into their passion for their work, others simply used the same reason to wish for death. The perspective, and the choice was what made all the difference. Similarly, I came to the realization that I had a choice on whether I wanted to live a vain life of materialism, or one devoid of material desires altogether. Looking to the documentary Happy I had seen the repercussions of the former and Siddhartha had shown me that of the latter, however, it was then that I realized I had yet