Composed Compositions

Something A Robot Could Could Never Do

We've known robots since we were kids. Most boys had at least one for every birthday they had. The older they are, the more their robots can do; maybe when they were celebrating their second birthday, they got a robot that walks aimlessly with all the music it emits. Then on their fifth, maybe a robot that walks but this time, stops to bust a move! On the seventh, a little boy gets his own robot taht walks, talks, and dances.

I grew up at the age of technology so maybe I can say that I grew with robots? As I grew up, so did technology. Now some robots can be found in some workplaces to help humans do more work and be more productive. In some TV shows, they even work in restaurants wherein you order from, and the cooking is done right in their bodies. They make the job easier and faster. Plus, they don't need to get paid! So a lot of companies are seeking for their own robot employees.

As one robot can lift something two men can't, both can get tired. A robot either needs to recharge batteries or needs to get plugged in. While humans need to sleep and eat to recover from the hard labor. But unlike robots, we aren't programmed to so specific tasks: robots were built to perform specific tasks, to function in specific ways — a robot cleaner cannot be commanded to print your paperworks. As humans designed and created robots, robots' abilities and knowledge are limited to what their Pepito's gave them, just like Pinocchio was not a real boy because he's made of wood.

Of all the things a robot can, I pity them for not having a choice and making decisions. Although I, for instance, don't make the best decisions in life, I'd rather make the wrong ones than not have one at all. Imagine: you're an airplane and you don't have a say on where to go because the pilot has one in mind. Unlike us, they also don't get to choose the field they wnat to work in. Robots won't even experience the struggle of choosing between having pasta or your Friday night hangout. Even a simple "yes or no" wasn't given to them: they don't get to choose when to stop doing what they are told to. Then imagine this: you have a robot for a best friend, and you would get help for almost anything work-related, right? However, your best friend wouldn't be able to help you figure out which would be the best dress for your first date! Too bad, isn't it?

Although a robot can live longer since it doesn't get sick the way humans so, I don't want to be one even if you tell me that my brain could be replaced and I can serve a different purpose now, and later, another. I'd still not take it even if I'm offered a reboot after a terrible experience. Because not having the liberty to choose is like being able to live for more than a hundred years with all the wrong people. So despite having the fear of not knowing what happens at life after death, I'd rather choose to die someday, than not have a choice at all.

As the song goes, ”I did my best. But I guess my best wasn’t good enough”, remember how as kids, we were taught to always give our best shot? Because what more could we give? Yet no one has ever told us about what we should do when our everything is not enough. What if unlike Dorothy, the Yellow Brick Road doesn’t lead us to our success and happiness, and we’ve been following it the whole time? I doubt our ruby shoes would be worth wearing!

I learned it first-hand that no matter how loud you speak, if people don’t want to listen, nobody will hear you. And no matter how hard you work, if people don’t want your help, your efforts will just go to waste. It will feel like the universe is being unfair to you when you did nothing but give.

A friend once told me that for now, we might be scared of uncertainties; we feel lost, and we think that our lives have no direction. Maybe you don’t know if the decisions we have made in the past will actually turn out to be the right ones, but time will come and we’ll understand why things go the way they do.

What do we do when we don’t know what to do? We ask, right? But when we ask, we don’t always get the answers immediately. We have to search for them. But when we ask, we go to people who have more experience than us. But we should remember: never in this world will there ever be two men having to walk the exact same road. One person commits mistake in an entirely different way than the other. Some things we must learn ourselves. Experience is the best teacher, anyway.

Our failures are just mere words in the stories we are writing. Although these words do not define us, they contribute and make impacts to the plot of our lives. Therefore, we must use these mistakes, not to rewrite, but to make every upcoming chapters more exciting and better.

As I were writing this essay, I heard about NOKIA being acquired by Microsoft. Then I’ve read that the Nokia CEO ended his speech saying, ”we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost.” So I figured, maybe not only from mistakes do our lives get bumpy. We are never alone in our journey. There will be people will walk past us on their way to their own futures. And maybe every chapter is a stop, wherein these stops will have buses to go to the next one, and if we don’t walk fast, or sometimes run, chances are we miss the ride or run out of seats. Yes, we try not to make mistakes, we don’t do anything wrong, but that doesn’t make us any better when we don’t make efforts nor take risks. As I’ve always said when this kind of things come up, “just because it has always been, doesn’t mean it should.”

    Ever since my android phone stopped working last April and got replaced with the basic one with a keypad, I got inactive with my online journal. Because unlike before, I could write everything I feel at the moment even without the internet, and once my phone gets connected with the WiFi, it will automatically upload the entry. But last month, my Papa lent me an old android phone and I was able to get back on track.

Despite me having the chance to post an entry, to a follower, my account would still look like it was on hiatus. Most entries weren’t personal. There’s just so much going on with my life that I could not think of a way to put everything into words.

Then two weeks ago, I saw this series from the Slice of Life section of Webtoons, a website of South Korean webcomics or manhwa, entitled “All That We Hope to Be”. And that’s when my thoughts turn into a story. Its eighth episode is about the poor sisters; a mouse and a cat. The mouse asked her sister why they are poor. The cat reasons that it is because she wants to be an artist but she’s not really good at being one. So the mouse suggests she try something else but since the cat says that she’ll be depressed if she did, the mouse said, “Then it’s better to be poor.”

Most of us do things not because we want to but because the universe told us to. This is what I’ve been doing for the past couple of months. I made a mistake, and I’ve been facing the consequences it caused. It’s true that we should accept the outcomes of what we did…but not all the time.There will be other ways to face the music.

In Physics, “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” This is true in real life as well. In trying to fix the mistake I made, I stood for what I thought was the right thing. But turns out, this right thing is as wrong as the mistake. Most people tell me that I should stand keep on fighting to make everything right. But I ask these: does accepting the reality count as giving up? What if truth is, I’ve been fighting for the wrong things all along? Shouldn’t I stop now? Wouldn’t this mistake bear more mistakes?

Yesterday, a friend joke-asked me: “Where should I go: to the left where nothing is right, or to the right where nothing is left?” I seriously replied while quoting Robert Frost: “To the right…take the road less traveled by.”  Because sometimes, looking right, doesn’t mean it is right. Just like the sisters on the webcomics, if the cat went for something she doesn’t want but will provide their needs, wouldn’t she be trying to justsurvive life, instead of living life.

Before, my motto in life is “Better late than never”; in everything I do, that is what I used to believe in, but this year, I realized that “too late” also exists. I told my friend to “live a life without regrets,” and that’s what everyone should know. Now, I go for “I won’t let anybody tell me ‘no’”. People see differently, but what matters most is what I feel.

Perfection has always been a struggle for us to reach, hasn’t it? In everything we do, we want to achieve perfection, but do we get it? I highly doubt that. But still, as we try to achieve our goals in life, we envision of a perfect life once we attained that. Sometimes, the truth about “nobody’s perfect” wears us down though.

As a book lover, I find books as my escape from reality. I want to travel the world, but reality won’t let me; there are my studies, finances, and other things that kept me from reaching the dream. As for now that I’m still on the road to that dream, I ride on novels to travel. I get to go to different countries, and different kinds of worlds.

A lot of authors write fictional stories that may, or can never be true. Some wrote chick-lit, which can be the usual experience of a teenager, like Meg Cabot. Some wrote bitter-sweet stories like Nicholas Sparks, whose stories are very inspiring. Above all authors I know, I chose Veronica Roth (@theartofnotwriting) as the prominent person I’d like to talk about.

Unlike the authors above mentioned, she wrote about an entirely different kind of world. A world still unattainable. She made up her own world. In an interview, she was asked about how and why she came up with the dystopian society she wrote in the Divergent series. She said that her original plan was to write about a place she found interesting, and as she began to build the world, she realized that it was her utopia. But then somewhere along the way, she realized that her utopia is a terrible place. Her perfect world is actually messed up, but truth is no one really understands what perfect is. She said: “both of us are wrong about perfect. We have no idea what it would look like, and our approximations of it are incomplete.” She also said that “if I don’t know what perfect means, it’s not something I can reach on my own. Which means that I can stop trying to be perfect and just try to love the people around me and the things I’m doing.”

I’m not saying we should stop trying to reach our goals now that we know we can’t be perfect. Maybe my point here is that in trying to build the world we want, there’d be obstacles and trials that will try to stop us, and try to change us ourselves. This we shouldn’t let happen.