Finding meaning is not only helpful to the one who finds it, depending on what he finds. The grass being greener on the other side is because the one who is there takes better care of his grass. My grass seems to be not doing so well. This is likely due to the fact that my neighbor’s dog uses it as a toilet, and it also isn’t mine. The grass that is mine is as unacquainted with maintenance as my few feet of flesh. It is rented. At almost $1000 a month, I get to obey my landlords. (My reaction really is sardonic, unappreciative, wretched) This is primarily what a friend of mine from the UK calls “having a moan”.
The cynicism, sarcasm, sardonic-natured feelings I have come from the absurdity of life lived by a broken person in a broken world. I tend toward thinking in ideals, and that these ideals could be achieved by more than myself desiring to achieve them. From what I understand, I’m grappling with what the existentialists grappled with. With people boo-ing at the thought of non-nationalization, or non-socialism on one side, the other full of conspiracies and seeming complacency, where do I fit in to all this. WHERE ARE MY PEOPLE? I feel alone. Separated. I have a tendency to not act on what it is I think I should, but to discuss such things while not doing a whole lot. I suppose consumerism is the direct result of what I love and despise about capitalism. I am in love with the idea of a free market, however, mass production has corrupted this beautiful thing, as I understand it.
Craftsman. Now a mass produced tool brand. On sale at Lowes. Buy the mass produced tools from the mass produced stores, do the same thing every day at your mass production job, listen to mass produced music, eat mass produced food, drive your mass produced car, wear your mass produced clothing, write in your mass produced journal and computer, go back to your mass produced home, and strive to remain sane in the mass produced culture. We have only the option to buy from a limited range of ready-made things that promise much more fulfillment than they could possibly ever truly give.
The people making these things are not in our country, most of the time. Few here know a damn thing about making things, repairing things, appreciating things. It is all handed to us on a silver platter at a nominal cost. We take for granted the labors of the slaves of our American economy. It is never truly good enough, though that is what it is branded and marketed to us as, thus the lack of gratitude and cynicism. Rare is the man who works not for the dollar, but for the true fruit of labor. The effects of hard work, rather than the pay-grade. “I got an A on the science test” applies to the fast food industry as well. We get good grades for the same reason we don’t know anything. There are some at school that are there to learn, as there are on the job sites, though politics and a distorted view of mankind and his abilities has dominated the masses yet again (as if it was never that way).
Why will people not slow down? From Walden,
“The preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest at the end of the week,—for Sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill spent week, and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one,—with this one another draggletail of a sermon, should shout with a thundering voice,—“Pause! Avast! Why so seeming fast, but deadly slow?”
“Shams and delusions are esteemed for the soundest truths, while reality is fabulous…When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence,—that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit every where, which still is built on purely illusory foundations.”
This, written in the 1840’s is the same as today, only today the momentum has grown in it’s already unimaginable and unmanageable proportions.
Paper Discourse 