We have been traveling a bit this summer and although I had hoped for some kind of inner change for the better or from some meaningful human encounters, I had to put that aside and be grateful for the nice trip and weather, for the surroundings and the smooth trip. The rest is just a bowlful of questions.
Is is me or the others feeling blocked and unsettled? Is it a real state of the mind and soul or just an induced state that separates us from the happiness at hand?
Seems like many people have the same concerns, the same yearning for a more accomplished life, for something hard to define, rather defined by its not being there. Yet instead of uniting them, this interior agitation is separating them. It is hard to trust another human being, it is hard to count on something to be there constantly - this permanent quest makes everybody opportunistic in many ways. Some will change for the money, some for a social position, some are still trying painfully to find themselves and will be different from period to period, as they go through different stages, like Picasso with his paintings.
The clearest image I found was in the case of some people who complained of poverty and lack of horizon, seemed to be very economical in their household and yet spoke of having a monthly income that amazed me: it was big. Simple people, not many social expenses, living in the countryside. I cannot understand why the revenue cannot provide a happier life in such cases - what is missing? Maybe I am prejudiced. I assume that for the down to earth - ier people having a functional material security would be enough or I am assuming that if my life would have the material problem solved then I would get rid of many sleepless nights. Yet I have an organic issue that is the most difficult to solve in our times, and that got me an obstinacy against the superficial ways that would not tackle this: I want to do something I love, something that makes me happy and forget about the hours passing by and integrate this in my family life, whilst not being materially challenged.
Why this isn't yet an option remains another question. Years spent in the wrong schools, which taught me nothing about life, wrong thinking patterns, wrong moments... some of the available explanations send me in an endless loop. I also have a fixation with authenticity and it still seems weird to me to hear about some weird jobs where one does not produce, does not shine towards the world, but rather intermediates, speculates on people's wishes or even creates needs of wishes to be solved by him or her. It's like money are meant to go from where they are to other pockets only based on motives of fashion, whim, ego or treating oneself, rather that based on serious, sustainable reasons. It's like, no, I will not buy a wooden box made by hand which hold in it a precious effort of being unique and putting some soul into the work, but I will buy that colored plastic box that is so in this summer... Why on earth do we have to keep thinking like this? And the sister of the plastic box is the propagandistic ecological wooden box with an exorbitant cost, which is also bought not for the utility or for the personality of its maker, but for the ideas which it represents. Ideas which, I am sorry to say, are speculated by many in the ecological field, like any other ideas ever. Like people who do not make themselves the products, but add some color on some mass made Chinese boxes, or exploit some poor underpaid peasants whose village offers them no other workplace besides the little wood shop of Mr. Natural. Then the owner of the business goes on and uses the money in his fashionable life which comprises in many cases also plastic boxes...
It's like people have gotten used to being cheated, lobbied, targeted by publicity and propaganda that they expect this whenever doing something. The small and quiet shop in the corner that does not fight to attract customers, but just has good merchandise is not visited by almost anyone in our days. We are mass thinking even in the alternative or so called alternative actions.
So unhappy people with no horizon and money in the bank are not initiating any measure for the better, they just stay and wait for someone to take their money. For a bad cause of a good cause. But I still say this is a step back for the human nature. Instead of the basic needs, we now have basic needs plus being in with the trend. And those who make the trends are always unclear, and ultimately most of the trends are made having means of profit behind. And footballers and dancers and singers are admired like gods, while those who find it hard to lie and label themselves in an attractive way and play the complicated games of our society are pushed into oblivion. A good soul, a natural rough talent value nothing, instead a shiny exterior, a clever trick and lots of work make everything. Sometimes even without the work, but that element is not to brag about, because it is not good for the public image... The public are the masses who have to believe, to buy and to go on with their tedious duties, so they are presented idols who somehow worked their way to glory or idols who embody all the secret sins in every person: lazy, talking dirty, overeating, hating their enemies and worse.
So again why? Why can we realize things as they are, many of us, yet we are incapable of doing anything else but act some behaviors that are mass imprinted? Isn't it freaky, for example, that in an industrial small city for example, everyone who is the same age, say 60, had a similar life trajectory - got hired by the factory at say 19, then got laid off at 30 something, worked to some other nearby factory etc? We are beings, not cattle.It is impossible that in a lifespan such a city had not produced a musician, a painter, a farmer, a writer, a traveler, a philanthropist... only that what they were meant to be was lost in the mass idea: these people are going to work in this factory, some plain workers, some engineers...
Now the mass behavior is dividing people in a dangerous way. Those who are apparently happy or without a worry in the world consume huge amounts of everything and practically throw their money away, as if one moment of savings would lose them the statue of stress free and rich; those who do not like their lives with every pore of their skin are grumpy and desperate - some of them unfortunately wish to get into the first category, some have joined the underdogs groups available in order to be unhappy in a group. And the media throws to them subject after subject on which they should and would hate each other, to keep them occupied.
Who will change the world for the better then? Not a new generation of fanatics, on any chosen subject... Not the people afraid to disagree with their group who guarantees them some social position and revenues, for fear of incertitudes and falling down the social ladders. Not those who forcibly take for granted that we should be all thinking alike...
Are we just rerunning the 70's? The freedom generation produced in their children an antagonistic reaction and generation of suits wishing order and discipline. not the solution either - that what?
The regulating factor of society have unfortunately sold out: churches kindly approving in their notorious members stealing and behaving in a way that cannot serve as example, communities who are still friendly towards the local politician who ruined their livelihoods, writers and philosophers who had to write appealing to the public or else nobody deals their books. One way or another selling out is also a trend... followed by an elaborate personal cover up in order to be happier with what we have become. And a herd of personal trainers to help us with that (talking about made-up professions who produce what? an artificial conscience silencing?).
Can't anyone remember that a functional society has to have and respect rules meant for the well being of a average imaginary person, a person who can be naive and still survive, who can be without work for a while and still survive, who can refuse to make managerial, financial, ecological and administrative major choices because it is not his profession to do so and still wake up tomorrow and have a safe medium to live in? With a reasonable space for the particulars individuals, upwards or downwards from this middle point, but concentrated on this safe space, this middle space where one could live peacefully.
Why do we have to have emotional and aggressive societies, advantageous for the rich, or only for the poor (although I think this was only an utopia), for those who are incessantly forced to choose in order to justify their existence? Why do I have to chose in a store because toxic foods are also there, near healthy ones? Why am I expected to intervene in the jobs of the too many state and people representatives even though they are paid to take care of a society and I am not?
Why do I always find that I have to be for or against something or else... while in the everyday life one also has to be an economist, a cook, a cleaning person, an IT person, a repairman, a constructor, a parent, an educator and so many other things because we are all specialized in everything and in nothing, all are so expensive and the time is insufficient?
This overestimated hands on intervention of normal people in leading their own societal organism is a false solution, or rather just a diversion. For such a solution we need first to be educated in smaller groups while growing up. Pushing such an attitude now it's like you are pumping up someone to believe that he can be a football scorer and a goalkeeper in the same time. How can this be? It's like a mental illness, only the patient is our society.
Why can't I pick up the pieces of my own life? Who is supposed to see clear what is right and wrong in what I am doing or not doing.
I am afraid the answer lies somewhere in the region of the heart, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is an organ that had shut in itself inside our superficial chests and from which we have, beside its physical functions, only vague memories...
Feel, such a hard thing to do...
