(no subject)
I watched a lot of television today and it's left me with a decidedly bleak picture of life. I am continually amazed by the extent to which media fractures and dominates the existance of myself and everyone that I know. It seems that so many have a goal of one day getting a job that they can stand. This is such a fantastic mix; that the success of a society has eliminated the need for the physical hunting, fishing and maintaining warmth water and shelter. Instead, we meet our needs primarily through purchase, but the barter system we use is so far removed from tangible trading... our money is generations away from the time when it had any actual value. Our innovations have resulted in many wonders, but also a prevailing sea of meaningless choices upon which we have come to base our lives.
It is no surprise that such an existance strikes many as shallow.
And television, a series of blips of video poker and syndicated talk shows and sitcoms of all sizes and shades- characters that illicit sympathy for their understandable hatred of their jobs, irrational coworkers, quirky neighbors and whining families. Two messages abound- current life falls short of expectation and with hard work and pluck anyone can make it out of adversity. Yet the false sense of satisfaction achieved by the sarcharine endings and neatly tucked corners undermines whatever impitus or inspiration for change that may have arisen.
I think this may be our aspartame that holds us from our goals-- or, far more often, deludes and distracts us into never looking deeply at ourselves enough to forge these goals. And so many of us are a generation of technophillic drunkards, qualified to do much but truly desirious of little of real value.
Input is a sweet rush, and now, more than ever, the world is literally at our fingertips. We don't have the processing power to make sense of the world unfiltered. So, creating and scanning compressions of compressions... how much is lost in the layers of noise?