The trap is this: the expectation that life can be free of suffering, free of worry, free of fear, and free of anxiety. That somehow, somewhere, someone will give you something, tell you something, or teach you something that will just take all those troublesome emotions away, just like in that classic and very sad movie ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’.

Unfortunately, anyone who sells you such a promise is very simply misleading you. It doesn’t matter if the person saying it is a priest, a guru, a philosopher, or even (god forbid!) a therapist – it’s an expectation that will always lead to even further suffering and disappointment.

The goal is not to have the clearest path, but to actually walk it to the end. And there are certainly ways to get there, regardless of how many obstacles you find in the world. This also over-turns what is perhaps the biggest illusion blocking our way: that we can somehow clear the path once and for all and free ourselves from suffering.

Regardless of the gifts and sorrows that fortune and nature gave you, it is impossible to escape responsibility, no matter who you are.

Life is unfair, and as Chuck Pahlaniuk points out in his glorious book 'Fight Club', "On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero". If there was ever such a thing as a rule of life, that's probably it.

In an almost God-like manner, our brains like to create structure out of almost nothing. If you scribble down two dots with a line below them, you suddenly see a face. This is how keen our perception is to formulate a world around us that makes sense and seems orderly.

On a more abstract level, this is the case with even more complex things. If you have ever watched an odd surreal movie or read an equally strange book, or stood in front of an abstract painting, you probably found yourself wondering 'what on earth did I just experience?', and then began looking deeper. Before you know it, you have an theory that explains the entire movie! And yet if you ask another person, they will have a completely different point of view.

'Et In Arcadia Ego' can roughly be interpreted as 'I also was an Arcadian'. This saying has been circulating since ancient times, and was often inscribed on tombstones. It references Arcadia, a land-locked rural part of Greece, which was considered to be the land of nymphs, natural beauty and simplicity. The intent of the inscription was to remind the reader that although the deceased person may have lived a wonderful and idyllic life, even he had to cope with the inevitability of loss.

Humanity's search for explanations regarding existence and ultimately a form of meaning which would justify it, is as old as written memory. Our ancestors passed down stories of gods, heroes, and every day people who would defy the odds and perhaps even their idea of divine order, for the benefit of mankind.