As a society we have become addicted to distractions: we walk around with our earbuds listening to either music or books. We drown our eyes in images of fake people, fake lives, and anything else to distract us from the reality of our everyday ordinary lives and we call it entertainment. We drown out natural sounds for the chatter of talking heads on the radio and television. We have become divorced from our own inner voices, our own inner aspirations, and our own creativity.
We are living in society that being anything other than a functional plastic cog in the societal machine is seen as an aberration by the steady supply of identical plastic cogs.
Our society has perpetrated a peculiar distrust of anything which even smacks of “OTHER” such as poets, musicians, other races and cultures, or anything else that does not represent cultural and social homogeneity.
I spent most of today listening to the wind and weather. It was a cool Cascadian day, The skies were gray and overcast and the wind was blustering moderately. With the exception of a few sprinkles in the morning the day was rather pleasant. Why, because there was nothing artificial, nothing virtual or fake about it.
We have an upsetting and strange distrust for those creatives on the fringes of our culture. We don’t trust people who eat healthy, we don’t trust people who prefer sobriety over substance abuse, we don’t trust the writers, the artists, musicians, or the thinkers. We have a distrust for expertise, for scientists, and doctors. Because we are living in a society that erroneously teaches that our personal opinions are equal or superior to empirical evidence and time tested expertise. Isaac Asimov famously called this “the cult of ignorance.” It is becoming more prevalent in mainstream society and often mistaken for wisdom,piety, and knowledge.
We see it all the time and everywhere. We hear it on podcasts, the network news, from supposed cookie cutter pundits commenting on a variety of talk shows as well as on talk radio. But it hasn’t made anyone’s life better. We have allowed multi-billionaires to pay millionaires to tell working class people not to trust other working-class people.
Has any of their chatter held any positive tangible result except for the profit of their media shareholders? (Check the Media stocks) Has anyone’s life actually improved because of political bickering. Do you have less social anxiety because a podcaster gave you the next shiny object? Has a political pundit’s opinion lowered any of the prices of your groceries, of your fuel, of your housing, or anything else for that matters tangibly?
Perhaps we need to slow down. We need to reevaluate what is actually important, get back to basics, create radical acts of creativity, get outside and start a garden, start doing things again that have tangible results rather than virtual results such as: likes, tick-tocks, YouTube’s of people doing ordinary things That as an adult you should already know. I actually saw a YouTube video by a supposed influencer claiming she had created a new snack and you really had to try it, it was “buttered saltines“. She was under the mistaken impression that no one else knew anything about it. Let’s not dumb ourselves down simply for the sake of trying to fit in. We know the world is running out of creative and original ideas. We see it in Hollywood remakes, we see it in popular fiction, we hear it in music, the World doesn’t need more square and round pegs. What the world desperately needs is creative people, we need curious people, we need people who aren’t afraid of learning and applying that learning to substantial solutions to everyday problems.
Politicians, the media, the supposed influencers, the political pundits, need to be taken far less seriously. We need to stop giving our attention, our money, and our support call the attention getting nonsense.
I remember when we actually admired people who actually did things. I remembered when we admired Carpenters and artists and shipbuilders and sailors. We used to admire people who created tangible things like bakers, tailors, steel workers, engineers, doctors, nurses and anyone else who got their hands dirty for a living. Now we idolize people who create virtual things that have absolutely no substance outside the digital realm.
No one has ever been fed because you have an abundant Farmville, No one has ever found a scientific solution to an everyday problem on a podcast or a network news show. But here we are, deporting people who actually DO things, deporting people doing important research and other things that matter to everyone.
We need to start SUBTRACTING this cultural cancer from our precious lives and well-being.
Build, Create and Do!
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