Sunday 27 March 2011

The painful hypocrisy that is modern life

Occasionally a deep breath really helps. A couple of deep, lung filling gulps of oxygen rich air seem to make everything so clear, and having just done it, and spent the last eight weeks crushed between the granite of unfeasible work commitments and the desperate urge to rediscover my beautiful, creative, art-driven soul, it strikes me that we are a society that exists to create it's own angst and beat ourselves up for not reaching the unfeasible ideal that is forced upon us by our soul-deep subscription to low-brow media driven demographics.

And what is the scariest thing about it? The fact that everyone, even the most intelligent people I know, subscribe unconsciously and without question to the single driving influence that is placed upon all of us by the loud, mindless voices we all listen to.

Being financially successful in this world is not the end all and be all of our existence. It is subscribing to rules and and targets set by people with privilege who have never had to ask themselves the question as to what makes a valid life.

The hypocrisy is this - none of it matters. Whatever you do now or have done, or will do, means absolutely nothing to the fibre of the universe itself. You are a blip. You are a momentary blink of history itself. When you are gone nothing you do today, tomorrow or yesterday has any influence whatsoever on the balance of the universe.

Sounds apathetic? Hell no - the point is this: you need only to answer to your own internal scoring card. Pretend if you will that it means anything to anyone else, but it doesn't. How you judge your success or worth is only down to what you think inside.

Remember this - those who deem themselves successful are only trying to validate themselves against others using a scale that favours themselves. When the lights go out at night, you are the only person you need score yourself against.

2 comments:

  1. Some see it as nihilism. I prefer to think of it as seeing things as they are. Just because you realise there is no reason to anything does not stop you from aspiring. You are right though that our goals are generally externally driven and that if we were able to ignore these we'd probably all be happier. Alas this seems to impossible unless we do achieve some conventional measure of success which allows us the independence to follow our own goals.

    Ah well, it could be worse: many pursue self delusion to avoid facing reality in the mistaken belief that it will make them happier. I suspect that they realise they are deluding themselves though and this in turn stops them from being truly happy. Whereas facing, and accepting, actual reality is in fact a positive not a negative thing. Just because reality is not how you ant it to be is not a good reason to reject it and replace it with delusion.

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  2. I'm not driven by money - if I were, I'd get a proper job that actually made me some LOL

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