afterthoughts

Just follow along,,,  I dunno where all this is goin’; just gonna type it out like I would with my thoughts before the phones went into our pockets and notebooks and pens where the record keepers.

We’ve gotten soft.   Not just individually, (especially around the middle as we have aged,) but as a species.(modern western culture especially)   We have it TOO GOOD in more ways than are healthy.

Think about it; here in the Ewe Ess of Aey, even our poverty stricken types have better access to food and other ammenities than the peasants of the middle ages had.

And idle time to contemplate how miserable they are.

As a species, we are hard-wired for strife.   Seriously, we expect the shit to hit the fan yesterday, and when it doesn’t, we subconciously start looking for the next failure/SNAFU/Tiger in the bushes,,,   

In fact, I can tell you this: all of my brightest memories are from some of my darkest days.  The days where I had next to nothing to work with, IF, I had anything to work with, and the only solution was to McGuyver the living shit out of something to make it work.    Stuck  in the desert with a busted five-ton sucking air instead of fuel,,,, BUBBLE GUM and I was back on the road.   Sitting on an improvised shitter with dissentary under black skies in Kuwait, thinking, ‘This is hell” and how I became the serious contrarian thereafter.  (yes, that was the beginning of the end for my Marine days,,,,)

We seek strife, and when none is to be had, we create it.  We see the boogieman in everything, from the economy to whats going on in the family.   I think in no small way, we can even make ourselves physically ill so that we have some issues to deal with.

And we build prisons for ourselves striving for something to ease the pain of existence, because our existance is so “MEH!”,,,

Because we have it so good!!!

I know that my next meal is ‘in the bag’,,,

I know that my next meal is a choice.  Multiple of choices in reality.  I don’t have to chase it down unlesss I want to jump in my truck to get something different, and then, I know that what I choose is a given, not a throw of the dice.   I don’t have to worry about whether or not the mammoth are where I expect them to be and if I am going to be able to make that kill when the time comes.   My choice for a meal is right there, no strain or stress involved.   (unless I make it so,,,)

We got it too good.

We have it so good, people have enough free-time to play at being in the dark ages (Renn Fairs) or at war (Civil War re-enactors) or dig into history (I actually like these) trying to figure out what we lost way back in time.  even going so far as to MAKE the tools that might have been used to create the thing we lost in time. 

I have said “we are the most spoiled generations” a time or three, but seriously, we are the LEAST FREE.   Sure, we get to make all sorts of decisions but at the end of the day, we are so ENSLAVED by the pursuit of the almighty dollar to make our other pursuits doable, that we aren’t really at all free.   And the younger ones are in even worse shape than us oldsters.  I think that’s why I see so many of them just dropping out of the race,,, And you will find many of them on Utoob making videos about the very things I already mentioned.  Chasing history, looking for solutions, and making a buck or two if their ‘channel’ starts getting popular.

And its even sort of cool that we are at a point where we can look back with the microscope of humanity (the individual) to figure out what we left back there, and maybe see if we shouldnt have.   Some of it, like socialism, leave it in the dustbin.  but some things,,,,    Maybe they aren’t all that important, but maybe, just maybe they are the key to figuring out something NOW,,,

There are even those that look further back

We got soft.   Those back in the days, even just a hundred years back, were so much tougher and hardier than US,,,   They had to be: Life wasn’t ‘peachy keen’.

And I don’t recall reading about massive amounts of depression (mental type, not economic,,, I know someone is going to bring up ‘Great Depression’) or suicides.    We didn’t have 35% of the population on mood stabilizers (rough guess from some reading,, dunno the actual figures) with drug addiction among the remainder being ‘EPIDEMIC’.

Mark Manson wrote Everything is F*cked and that book keeps coming back to haunt me.  He even says, right in the fore, that his ideas aren’t original, only his approach.   The idea that we NEED strife to be happy is key in that treatise.    It’s when we have it so good that we feel so damned insecure.   But put us under stress and strain, REAL stress and strain, not this contrived trivial bullshit of political kabuki theater:   WE SHINE. 

If we have it all, then what’s the point?   It’s when we aren’t ‘secure’, that we find our strengths.

“what I want is what I’ve not got,  What I need, is all around me.” DMB-Jimi thang

No small part of me wants to ‘get back’, go to the roots again.   Just unload this cup I have built up since 2008 and start over again.   Not because what I have built is ‘wrong’ perse, but because its getting Too Easy,,,  and too narrow at the same time.    I find I am chasing that dollar more, and not exploring enough.  

I feel like I’m on a ratwheel, going nowhere, but time is not slowing down (the hell, its got its foot on the accellerator and pushing it through the firewall!)

and tomorrow, I jump right back on that ratwheel and start pumping my little legs as hard as I can to keep it moving for five more days.    

I’m thinking that this coming weekend, I am going to head to the woods or lake for awhile, leave the phone on the charger in the truck and ‘step back’ for a change.   Take my old ‘thinking tools’ with me: a notebook and a pen; no TECH stuff.  Its time to declutter again.

Live

LOVE

Learn

Laugh

LOAD