Originally posted by milefile
I know that my parents were worried this is how I'd end up. I can see why. For a long time there was no reason for them to think otherwise, and of course it never even occurred to me. The future didn't extend past the end of the day and anything that made me think past the weekend was resented and eliminated. Then one day I started wondering where this all would end. I realized I was lonely and without purpose, but didn't know what to do about it. For one year I lived alone wondering what to do next, a virtual shut-in. Then I met my wife and I knew what to do next. Since then my life has been a study in providence. I have a lot to be grateful for.
I feel we all have a lot to be grateful for, just to be living in the general social circumstances we enjoy every day. Which is not to say things are great all around, or that we even really have cause for happiness in a general, de facto sort of way, but rather, it's simply an understanding that things could be off in ways which currently aren't and it's a set of circumstances which we all take for granted. Naturally.
That said, there is still a lot to be desired. Simplicity and self-realization, self-expression and creative and social liberties are all prime among those things which aren't open playgrounds to most people. The sad fact is that the very social circumstances which allow us so much material ease come with an immense emotional asphyxiation.
So we have an unbalance one way, whereas we could have an unbalance the opposite way, if you see what I mean. Either way, we'd take the situation for granted, and either way we might just think the grass would be greener on the either side... but which situation would actually produce - from as objective a viewpoint as possible - a greater sense of contentment in most people? I contend that emotional flow is more important than physical padding, as compelling as the latter may be. I can observe this by looking at myself and the friends I've known for so long. One-time street punks with nothing but each other - sometimes sleeping on the street, usually hungry, desperately in need of physical comforts, yet free in a material sense, which left us unrestrained, emotionally and socially. In the end, we were happy on a subconscious level, though we may have been (I know I was) desperately lonely in a romantic sense. Well, we're all yoke-wearing yuppies now, furniture-owning and in debt, mostly living alone, powerless, desperate, living in a world that makes less sense every day and hating every minute of it. Not to mention desperately lonely in a romantic sense.
The lucky ones get to live what you're living. The average - as I can see it - wind up with a lifetime's worth of opportunity to do nothing but work on their idiosyncracies.
And none of them would have ever thought they'd end up that way, if you ask them.
There might be a point in there somewhere in all that bile. If I figure out what it is, I'll clarify.
