I haven’t made many posts lately. This is not because I haven’t thought or written anything; actually I have….its just that there is only so much I will allow myself to say.
After all, this is for fun. The website isn’t designed for people to be able to learn anything about me from it. It isn’t an outpouring of my heart…well, maybe sometimes.
I have a diary. No one should post their real diary online. They risk sounding like a lunatic.
You see, you can’t articulate your deepest fears. They affect you too much to make good sense of them. I always ramble when I talk about things I am too passionate about…and I don’t ramble much on this website.
A lot of the time I write about stuff just to keep my mind off other stuff….so in that sense what I write about actually has nothing to do with what I am thinking.
I wrote this the other day. I wasn’t going to post it because I don’t like to scare people…or myself. If something hits close to home it can be funny. If it hits too close to home it isn’t funny anymore.
I am against conspicuous consumption. I never understood why people spend so much money on stuff they don’t in the least bit need, not even feeling any better after they make the purchase, in fact lamenting that they weren’t able to find a better deal, or flat out regretting the purchase when they see the same useless product on sale the next week for 10 dollars less…which is already after the point at which they have put the product on the back shelf never to use it again.
In fact, I often thought people had lost their fucking minds. Now I realize that they actually have….and I am well on my way to doing the same.
You see, at work you unconciously question why you are there in the first place. I say unconciously because if it were concious you would quickly drive yourself insane with the daily inability to find a satisfactory answer.
In the back of your head is a list of your favorite activities and your most important values….none of which make a lick of difference while you do your job. This creates a constant, mild, irritating itch in your mind….
After a long day of work you are tired and frustrated from the cognitive dissonance that bleeds away your emotional energy.
How then to relax after a day during which people you don’t know who live hundreds of miles away are constantly pressuring you to things you don’t really care about in the first place???
You spend money. Why?? Easy. After toiling away the better hours of your day the only reward for that effort is the money you now have in your pocket. The money had better be useful and gratifying, otherwise what the hell did you just spend your whole day doing??
You see, it has to be useful. Our brains want it to be useful and gratifying. If it weren’t we would come face to face with the fact that we are wasting the largest part of every day. That is an unacceptable cognitive dissonance.
We prefer to lie to ourselves and believe that the next purchase will justify all those hours surrounded by co-workers who are probably really nice people at heart, but because of all the complexity and deadlines heaped upon themselves in a self-invented and self-defeating race to outrun the wreckage of their empty lives…..have become monsters of commerce and mercenaries to the profit motive.
So now I think of ways to spend my money too. After all, I have it….shouldn’t I do something with it?
Sadly, spending simply chains you to the cycle. You work more to support the spending and must spend more to justify the work.
Oh well….at least I understand it now. Knowledge is power right?
Honestly, I realize that there are people to whom this does not apply. I just don’t know enough of them, and when I wade through that Atlanta traffic everyday on the way home and see all those tired, frantic faces yapping on their cell phones and making appointments in their daily planners……it all smacks of a vicious cycle. And then I wonder if perhaps it really is.
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