In this world, you get seventy or eighty if you're lucky, and if you're unlucky... well, let's just say fate smiles on some while spitting on others. Besides, maybe the long-livers are the unlucky ones. I mean, look around you, and not even too far, you'll see pain and misery and hopelessness, and we’re the ones responsible for our own hardships. Our marathon to find new technology, more happiness, greater shinier things just takes us further from where we should be as a species.
Every problem we face today as a nation, and even as a civilization, has an outstretched arm clinging to a wad of cash. It isn't always a direct connection, but somewhere, somehow, money has had a role. Either money causes a problem, or lack of it creates another one, so we put money into finding a solution, and the circle just spins faster.
Here, in our own country, there are nine MILLION people who have experienced homelessness at some point within the past five years. Those who do have homes can barely pay their mortgage, so they work more. They have less free time, and spend that time vegging in front of the tv as the kids run wild and unsupervised. In worse situations, the tv is replaced with a bottle, and lack of attention turns to abuse.
Even with the folks who have bursting wallets, indoor pools, and personal assistants, there is a heavy price to pay. Money comes with a formidable book of social rules and impossible expectations that so often suck the soul from many a jetsetter.
In the year 2000 alone, there were just under seven MILLION Americans who were millionaires. That number increases, an estimated 2740 new millionaires every day. Today, a million dollars isn't what it used to be, but it still is enough to birth a multitude of dilemmas that lead to a loss in humanity. Money isn't a bad thing, but it is like a gun, people kill with and for it.
What's still more distressing is that money, as invasively woven into the world as it is, isn't the only building block in the foundation of modern society's problems. The next big problem maker is society itself. We have built Frankenstein's monster in our global rush to "make the world a better place."
The lightning brought the monster to life in 1773, when the Industrial Revolution burst forth from the womb of Great Britain. Immediately, industry started to hurt all those who it supposedly helped. In an effort to cut payrolls, these new 'factories' used child labor. A 6 year old boy would work 14 hour days for very little money, and the risk of poisoning from fumes and injury from large complex machines.
The monster sailed to the New World soon after, when Samuel Slater, a British engineering apprentice in search of a reward, fled to the soon-to-be United States. Fled is the word used for this, because all English factory workers were forbidden to leave the country because England wanted to keep their new technology a secret. So, America offered a mighty reward for anyone who could escape the U.K. and bring the factory to the colonies. Enter Slater.
Twenty years after the first factory in England, a Yale graduate invented an engine to separate seeds from cotton. Eli Whitney's 'cotton gin' revitalized the slumping Southern U.S. economy and in so doing, slavery was brought back from the brink of death and given an exponential explosion of production and ruthlessness.
Many more fathers of American industry followed in the 1800s, like Robert Fulton and his steam engine, John Deere's agricultural advancements, and Charles Goodyear's vulcanization of rubber. All of these built the load bearing walls of today's world - for better or worse.
The biggest non-monetary father of hardship today is the car. The automobile is at the center of the swirling hurricane of shit that is modern living. It's birthplace and day are disputed greatly, but the oldest ancestor was a steam powered vehicle invented in 1672 by Ferdinand Verbiest. After him, frenchman Nicolas Cugnot in 1769, de Rochas, in 1862 and finally the German, Carl Benz in 1885, gave their own renditions and improvements on the idea of a self-propelled personal conveyance that was actually first dreamnt of by Leonardo da Vinci in the late 15th century.
When Ford started mass-producing the automobile in 1912, the last nail in humanity's coffin was hammered true and flush. Our entire existence in modern civilization is enslaved by the car. As a teen, you are of no social value unless you have a car, so you give up on free time and study time to work, because work means money to pay for a car.
Then you buy the car, and make friends, maybe a girlfriend, and drive even more. You go to restaurants, movies, record stores, and you spend money - so you need more money. You work more to get the money. You go to college to get a higher paying job so you can afford a better car to impress better girls with. You get married and have kids, so you need a minivan, but don't want to get rid of the sports car or luxury sedan, so you work even more to pay for a better house with a bigger garage for all your cars. The kids get older and the cycle renews itself.
With cars, you can live further away from your place of work. Poor people who don't have cars are relegated to the inner city so they can walk or bus to work. All these poor people make the rich people nervous, so they migrate to the suburbs or country. Suburbs get so populated they become their own cities, and THIS cycle starts again too.
So, all of this that I've mentioned so far is primarily addressing our own nation. All over the world, full of about 195 countries, we see a list, volumes long, of problems and issues that make life anywhere on this spinning rock a tortured and empty existence.
Starvation in resource rich African countries is mind boggling. Perpetual civil wars in the Middle East take place on soil bubbling with oil which feeds our cars, and economy itself. Terrorism, from any number of violent ideological reasons, is rampant all over the face of the earth. And many more bad things...
What is life today? What are we living for? With that seventy or eighty we get, what are we doing with it, and why?
We are animals, cursed with an intelligence that forever reaches beyond its own grasp. But why? Every new reach, in time, yields results that cause further suffering, division, and anguish.
We scramble like ants, to work, to stores, to factories, to hospitals, to schools, and to our own graves. We spend billions of dollars on medical breakthroughs so people can live longer, survive disease and injury, and continue to be dutiful cogs in the speeding wheel of 'progress.' We're not humans anymore, not even animals, we are consumers - we have no purpose but to buy things.
I think all of these jobs, cars, factories, schools, stores; all of it is a pathetic attempt to justify our own existence. Honestly, I don't even know why we need to invent, discover, or advance. It all just makes more problems. One problem arises, we find a solution, which brings with it two more problems, and off we go burying ourselves with the next bigger and better shovel.
I don’t want any part in this anymore. I complain and carry these burdens daily yet, like everyone else, I do nothing about it. One man can’t change anything anymore, not for the good anyways. In fact, I believe it is no longer possible for us to stop the speeding train to hell that we’re all passengers on. No amount of do-gooders can change this world – it is truly hopeless.
I don’t want to die, though, I am an animal like all other people out there, and I have a survival instinct. I want to live – and this society we are in today is not living. I desperately want to quit this nonsense and go back to the wild from whence we came. I want to stop lying to myself, trying to make myself believe that there is something good and honorable about being a responsible contributing member of society. It a lie, it’s all a big illusion we force ourselves to accept so we don’t pay attention to the fact that nothing means anything, nothing has any value, and simply existing for the seventy or eighty is the only good and noble thing.
The struggle for more, that central nature of modern life is not living or existing, it’s lying, it’s deliberate ignorance, it’s why everything in the world is so horrible. We don’t need more. We need food, water, clothing and shelter – that’s it. Beyond that, it’s all pain and suffering.
God, I hate everything and everyone, even myself and what we’ve all become. It all makes me sick.
mellow