philosophy

Everything is faster today. I am one of those people that has a hard time with attention span. I am easily distracted. It’s hard to sit still for more than a few minutes. I also have a hard time in disordered situations — too much stimulus drives me crazy. Loud music, things out of order, clutter, chaos of any sort makes it nearly impossible for me to concentrate. All of these little factors have manifested as very real problems in life. For nearly a decade after college, I barely read books at all — I just couldn’t get through a chapter before putting it down, getting distracted by something shiny, and never picking it up again. For the first ten… 

You’ve been duped. They told you that safety is the most important thing in life, and you believed them. So you took the safe choice in everything. You followed the advice of the college career counselor, you invested according to what some washed-up Northwestern Mutual advisor said, you passed on some risky opportunities, you bought the cheapest car, you used software to create your budget, you sent your kids to a mediocre school because it was free, you stayed home for a year because someone told you to. And look at you now. You drive a depreciating, dangerous new minivan. Your slim 401(k) can’t be withdrawn for another thirty years. You work a boring, stable, dead-end job with a mediocre… 

Our civilization, as we have progressed towards an ambiguous perfection, has lost some of the dirt along the way. I don’t mean bad dirt. I mean good dirt. Near total freedom and independence is almost impossible to achieve in an interconnected, bureaucratic, streamlined world. You really start to wonder if the Luddites saw something of an actual prophecy in the steam-powered machines they sabotaged. There used to be a frontier. Wherever you were in the world, you could go a little bit further and find total independence. You might have had to raise your own cattle and shoot your own deer with a flintlock, maybe fend off a few wild bears, but you would have been pretty damn free. The… 

The other day, I met a nice guy. Solid dude. But he had an obsession with rules and fairness. Sort of a self-designated class monitor. The type of guy who, given a mortgage and middle age, would campaign to be in charge of his neighborhood watch organization and spend his weekends putting those signs up all over the place. You know, those signs showing the devious gangster holding a cloak over his face like Dracula. Fairness. Equity. Rules. No loitering after 10pm! He read through the entire rulebook for the board game before we started. Called “Time!” every time it was time. Debated the existence of loopholes. Negated sudden twists of chance. And jubilantly exulted upon a win. He won… 

When faced with problems, as humans we like to knee-jerk a hundred eighty degrees in the opposite direction. Faced with vanity and self-obsession, we like to condemn good looks. Faced with greed and hedonism, we like to condemn financial success. Faced with sloth and incompetence, we like to condemn relaxation. Faced with overwork and exhaustion, we like to condemn work. Of course, this doesn’t really make any sense. It’s never accurate to judge one swing of the pendulum by the extent of the counter-swing. In this maelstrom of polarities and counterpoints, society has developed into relying almost entirely upon ad hominem attacks. We are no longer judging the usefulness of a thing by the thing itself, but by who does…