Life in the post-industrial consciousness seems to be nothing more than a series of unfortunate misunderstandings. Progress of the aggregate is assumed from the progress of a decreasing number of its constituents. And the progress of each of those constituents is a faded litmus of what benefit used to mean.
From Aristotle, to Schweitzer, to John Lennon the image has been present, but so smeared with disbelief that it can't be seen through all the hateful graffiti. Everything that can happen does, until it can't. And as the threads of intersecting possibilities wrap around each other, so form the twine of cascading events we call life. And so it has goes without beginning or end, just ever blooming middle. Time, as physicist Julian Barbour explains, is a metric not a concept. It's a derivative of the state of being of a set of things, and useful to represent the pace at which things change in comparison to each other. Even a child knows that night and day occur more often than summer and winter. This is the frame we've built and we teach each other to live in it.
But in 2005, busy is the mandate. Voice mails communicate with voice mails, and even sometimes breed with email, instant messages, SMS, or Post-its. And as each new avenue heralds mankind with a new way to etch into the memories of their peers - a human instinct manifest since cerebral development allowed - the condition in which the message makers exist places them behind so many layers of blanketing that nothing more then a restrained squirm gets through.
Walk to your nearest gathering of Bay area teenagers for example, and you'll hear something that goes like this: "I might have seen something. It might have been common adjective." "I might have seen something too. It might have been same common adjective."
I've deciphered this theme as it was encoded in a sea of likes and hellas. What is immediately obvious is the lack of any mutually beneficial information exchange, and a decisive end to the backing of ideas, should any crop up. Everything is conditional. Fundamentally we've become the petri dish for a culture that speaks advertising pidgin consisting of obfuscated gibberish that even those speaking it aren't willing to back.
But there's no time for such metaphysical babble. Put out that incense and get a job.
Ah right, capital the great equalizer. The invention of the universe that allows me to acquire and trade expectation, thereby giving me access to the bounty of the world I would otherwise live without. But what aim would I have for such bounty before I think about acquiring it?
Who cares, let's get it and find out. I see lots of smiling people around all the pictures. It must be the elixir they've been keeping from me all these years. Look at those smiles. Look at those breasts. I can feel that way too. How could I know they feel the same way I do. I just have to keep saving and...
An expectation that never materializes into an event was simply a waste of time and energy. And yet promissary notes of the expectation of strangers are what drives the modern world.
If I start with a clean head, it won't take long to realize that delight is the best I can get. Obviously, there are various characters and flavors of this human expression of stability, but fundamentally, when something bangs the gong of survival and we resonate with a genuine addition to our survival strength, we experience delight. Life has a way of rewarding its allies.
And where do I find delight? In activation of the senses, of the mind that interprets them, and of the identity that is custodian of its means. There is a grammar in all of our senses, not just hearing. This grammar allows us to identify harmonies and phrases within that sense. By doing so, we provide our mind with greater depth of understanding for each of our sensory inputs, and therefore a greater overall sense of attachment and depth in our interface to the world. We can taste with greater precision, use our fingertips to detect subtle differences in texture or temperature, but we have to allow them to take their shape, by offering them time to develop. An identity that is our own will foster this.
Wherein I assume that all things unrelated to one thing are unimportant, I inadvertantly take on the job of custodian of that thing. I have attributed my priority one to an identity whose defense takes something different than my own, and may even violate my own. And I accept that my own identity therefore, is subordinate to the identity which I now defend with my every waking moment of attention.
And so I pay $4 for a terrible cup of coffee. The good news is, 100 million units were shipped this week, and that's 14% more than the same week last year. And because I can never be where I want to be, it's good they're everywhere. My tongue is blue with disappointment. My olfactory bulbs, a direct extension of my brain, representing millions of years of life-saving understanding left scorned by a simulacrum of what used to be good.
And yet I'm at the throne of progress. So high up I can't reach anyone or anything I'd care to have. So much thinking. So little thought.
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