For every person on earth, there is a list of what that person thinks is wrong with the world.
This is a historical constant. Throughout history, people have always believed there were things wrong with the world. The problem is that in our current era, these complaints converge.
However, the underlying larger problem they indicate is hard to clearly identify. Even when spotted, it is hard to articulate. And then communicating it is difficult.
There is a growing sense of unease in our world and distrust of our direction. At first it manifests with frustration with politicians, then with the economy, and finally with social institutions.
Unfortunately, none of these change even when many of us bemoan them. They are consistently bad, and consistently self-renewing. It’s as if people say one thing and do another.
Much as every person has a different complaint, some complaints are real; of those, some are accurate. The rest are everyday humdrum inconveniences hyped into a mythology.
The accurate and real complaints form a silhouette around a wrong turn we took some centuries ago. This was the idea that an external choice of a pre-existing option could give power and meaning.
Individuals in our society, feeling weak and pressured, wanted sure bets that would alleviate their problems. Take this pill; buy this product; read this holy book and swear by it.
But these external things could not substitute for the process that gives life meaning, which is an internal one. First, decide whether to do good or ill; second, decide what will be the challenge of your life.
Any fool can live comfortably with wealth, warm slippers and a polished pipe smouldering on the coffee table. Yet what makes that comfort significant is that it was wrought out of nothingness.
The adversity provided by life is what gives us a sense of conquest. We were uncomfortable; we overcame our fears, and struggled toward the goal of comfort; now we enjoy it.
The sense of satisfaction and purpose is the joy, and the comfort itself a signal of that joy.
Many people however want to believe it is the other way around. Impose the comfort, and the person gets the satisfaction of having beaten back discomfort. However the feeling of joy is not there.
Our entire society has built itself around the idea of external satisfaction of internal needs.
As a result, we put the wrong people into power; we make the wrong people wealthy; we make our decisions backward, waiting until a problem exists and then deciding on a band-aid, not figuring out in advance how to avoid those problems.
Our people are hollow and leaning, exhausted and bitter, struggling for objectives in which they do not believe. Yet we assume they need more of the same, and prescribe pills and vacations.
Without internal clarity and moral alignment we cannot even enjoy the vast wealth of our technology and history. We stumble through life, making bad decisions because we are distracted by the irrelevance of the questions behind them.
Our wrong turn was to discount our inner selves, and to focus on our external selves and the struggle to make those equal. That struggle originated in our desire to look important to others, and to have power.
The real power we need is within. The power to command our own souls. To say that this is what we stood for, and this is the challenge we conquered. This is what we created instead.
Up until now this has not been a popular sentiment. People want the pill, the quick fix. But as those quick fixes only intensify the misery, people are reaching out by reaching inward, away from our wrong turn of centuries ago.
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The thing about wrong turns, is that the right road can rarely be reached by continuing down the wrong one. Yet people specialize in doing exactly this.
At some point, the journey back must begin, all the arduous way back to that wrong turn, and then down the road to where we wanted to go.
Hopefully that happens before we completely forget where it was that we wanted to go.
The bonus consolation is that the return journey, down that same wrong road, looks entirely different when seen coming back.
It’s all good stuff, as long as one is actively engaged in it.
Somewhere there’s a destination, but getting to it is the really interesting bit.
What I get, and I agree with, is sort of akin to self-loathing: If I were only ___ I’d be good but since I’m not I must either bemoan it, or hide it.
To say things would have been better by now if we only hadn’t had the Federal Reserve, gone off the gold standard, etc. is to make a hypothetical true. But it can’t be true, as it isn’t real.
In my own life experience, I’ve come to understand my own self loathing nature. I would never have come to a place where I’m satisfied with what I chose. It isn’t in my nature. I will never easily love someone. I’ve rarely had the sense of being in the right place at the right time. I’ve rarely had moments of pure joy and transcendence but when I do, I never forget it. I’ve always been phlegmatic and prone to depression but I’ve let myself go there and learned so much from it. I got to the bottom of the pit and realized there will never be any hand from above that will supply me with the answers I want.
But lately I’ve experienced renewal after finally admitting I can’t be given what I want and indeed I hate it when I say I want something and it is given, because I never like what I get that way. When I said it out loud, “I hate it when I get what I want!” it made me laugh. Still does.
Reaching out from within is what I live for. Hit me with depressing stuff; why not? I know that the quest for the golden apple is more important than having the golden apple in my hand.
Can’t say whether this is the answer for society. Maybe the pain pill and the antidepressant are just the thing that is going to be sought. But what would happen if everyone succumbed to their misery? It would result in death and then rebirth, because what’s real can’t be killed.
It was very difficult for my wife to stop being a ‘modern’ woman, and to allow her husband to be an ‘old-fashioned’ man.
She always wanted what she wanted, in the way she thought she wanted it, even though the results were never satisfying.
Little by little, she stopped trying to control everything, direct everything, demand that I be this, or that, and that our relationship be like anything she had seen in movies, etc.
Little by little, she started to flower, in a way she never had, before.
It came a bit late in life, but it came.
I’ve never seen a happier, sunnier, easier to get along with woman.
The journey, to get from then, to now, was often almost not worth the trouble, but that, probably, is always the case, for anything worth achieving.
In retrospect, any amount of unpleasantness and discomfort is worth the end result, when the end result is so good.
A contented man and a woman complement each other.
They don’t compete.
Trying to live like TV shows and magazines…what a lesson needs to be learned.
People don’t stop to think that what they are considering is propaganda. It’s a product, they buy it, but to them, it’s “free.” They don’t think there’s a trade. This is one of the 200 billion reasons that democracy can never work.
What do you want to replace democracy with?