You know those “blah” kinds of days - I think we all get them sooner or later, some more often than others. Days where everything seems to come together to bring you down: the weather is terrible, you didn’t sleep well, and nothing seems to work quite right. And it doesn’t seem to matter what good things happen, what friends you hang out with, what you eat, what you listen to, nothing feels good or right and it feels like nothing can quite light the spark and get you going again. Sometimes it’s fleeting, and all it takes is one really bright, wonderful thing to get you going again. Sometimes it lingers, and when it does, it’s usually for one of many fairly typical reasons - like realizing, honestly, truly, that you’re getting older: and for just that reason, you can‘t seem to reconcile yourself with the world anymore.
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| *sigh* |
I can’t stand those kinds of days.
A big part of preparing posts for this blog/journal is reading and research - other blogs, articles, updates to online publications, watching documentaries, films, going into forums to ask questions and discuss things, and generally exposing myself to a lot of input from around the world regarding spirituality - and human behavior - overall.
Much to my chagrin, despite my efforts I look around and I can’t understand a lot of what I see. Everything moves so fast now, and it doesn’t seem like there’s any chance of slowing down or catching up if you fall behind. Near total access to anything from around the world allows for flash-in-the-pan celebrity status for the most trivial of things, and people I wouldn’t have ever imagined when I was a child being given five minutes on TV take up News reports for days, weeks at a time with pointless shenanigans.
I can’t tell the difference between enjoyment and ‘ironic’ enjoyment of a lot of things anymore in a culture that embraces and celebrates its worst aspects with shows like “Toddlers in Tiaras,” “Jersey Shore,” or “16 + Pregnant.” Even saying you don’t like these shows doesn’t mean much - it’s been shown that just being exposed to these shows are bad for you. The problem is made worse by the fact that, because so many people watch reality television and it's become a big part of social interaction around the water cooler or at school, if you're not watching the shows, you're left out of the loop. Reality television has also taught a good chunk of the American populace (from a very young age) that immoral and unacceptable behavior is worth money and fame: and that it's okay to be humiliated or to humiliate others rather than question why a behavior is wrong and stop it. This attitude has taken deep roots in the newest generation.
I find myself feeling incredibly strange when suddenly I can’t be sure of what’s ‘good’ music by the standards of popular culture anymore. Granted, as a kid, I didn’t care for any of the popular icons of the time - the music of N’Sync, The Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears all sounded hollow and prepackaged to me: I called it 'bubblegum music.' Hannah Montana, the Jonas Brothers, Justin Bieber and Rebecca Black are the same to me - just the popular, shallow music of the times. I can understand the attraction of some youths to such performers (I’ll withhold calling them ‘musicians’). Lady Gaga does nothing new, either - using religion and occult imagery in songs and doing her best to be a shock icon when she performs has already been done to death by countless other before her, Manson and Madonna to name two out of hundreds from the US alone.
Aside from Lady Gaga though, my problem is that I haven’t met ANYONE, at least above the age of 13 years old or so, that claims anything more positive than a strong dislike of any of the things I’ve mentioned. So how in the world do they manage to get so popular? It’s as if they’ve become famous for… well, being famous, the same concept that Paris Hilton reintroduced us to in the early Oughts and I’m sure will be refreshed again and again as the years roll by.
Meanwhile, ignoring popular culture for a moment, I keep coming face to face with problems and issues that I wasn’t usually consciously aware of before - the still widespread powers of racism, sexism, hatred based on religious differences, the suffering of people around the world, and on and on. I sit down to laugh at an episode of “Epic Meal time” but all I can think about is people in North Korea literally dropping dead in the streets from starvation while donated food and supplies which were supposed to be distributed for free get sold on a black market.
Within 10 days, over $50,000 (the original goal) gets raised to erect a statue of RoboCop in Detroit by people giving up money for a laugh - while public services, business and schools in the same city face not having enough teachers, officers or supplies to keep running because of budget shortages.
Commercials sell us nonsense for the sake of nonsense - take the words “Old Spice” or “Dairy Queen” out of those products most recent adds and one would be hard-pressed to figure out what is being sold.
Look up. Look back The world is now insane.
Our current state seems to be one of delirium - of excess, and an empty celebration of ‘life’ when very few seem to know the value of what it means to be alive. It weighs heavy on me because I don’t know what to do, and it gets harder and harder to imagine raising children in such a world - a world where the more intelligent and prosperous you are, the fewer children are born, and countries where the average IQ is lower are more fertile. In the US, where I live, the gap between the lower class and upper class continues to grow as the middle class slowly vanishes.
I just don’t know how to feel anymore. I can’t fathom allowing myself to just fall into the ignorance and hedonism of today, but at the same time it seems futile to struggle against it: people who simultaneously care about these issues but don’t use their moral basis as a way to justify hate against others for the most trivial of reasons seem extremely far and in between. Those that don’t have some sort of hate for something seem to have let go of the world completely and live in an irrational fantasy where the world is already fixing itself, where racial and gender equality is already a matter-of-fact thing and religion doesn’t matter.
I don’t know where all these feelings came from: it wasn’t sudden, but it wasn’t something that just slowly built up, either.
As silly as it may sound, and as you may have inferred from today’s title, I think South Park may have hit the nail on the head with the mid-season finale this year: once you get to a certain point in life, everything seems to turn to shit.
At the end of the day, I can take solace in the idea that I’m not the only one to have ever reached the conclusions I’ve come to - I’m not even a drop in the ocean when it comes to the sheer number of humans to sit back and think “I’m getting old, and the world is going crazy.”
The only thing that really scares me though, is that despite that fact, we still push forward anyway - and in the end, I guess that’s the good thing, too.
It’s an old sentiment that there is no joy without sorrow, no pleasure without pain, no light without dark. If there was no contrast, it wouldn’t matter what kind of paradise we lived in - we wouldn’t realize it was paradise. I hope from the bottom of my heart that we as a species are able to redeem ourselves before we’ve passed the tipping point (if we haven’t already): because I can’t begin to imagine what kind of wondrous world would exist to balance out the horrors of the one that stands now.
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