virtualroot.com » 2008

Peaceful living.Posted by simon on January 31st, 2008

The more money I make and the more crap I buy, makes me really really wish I could just sell everything and walk away from this “modern” society. I’d just build a cabin in the woods near a lake and live like David Henry Thoreau for a few years… Hell maybe forever. If you can’t find at least a handful of reasons for why you would love to do the same then I’m sorry, please stop reading now I’ll just be wasting your time.

This desire for isolation and simplification of life is one that stems from a series of things. The first being I feel I seldom get to appreciate the finer points in life. I suppose you could call this smelling the roses. I am entirely to blame for this, I know it and accept it. I lend part of this animosity towards my current life back to my choice to go into Computer Science instead of Micro Biology. I think I would have been / still could be a really great Micro Biologist. I feel while I was at college I was almost too focused on my career and on some level I am still too focused on my career. This has caused me to sacrifice many personal relationships as well as cut me off from being available to many new relationships. Now with that being said if I could do Computer Science over again would I change anything… No the reason for that is this. Getting a degree in Computer Science is a mild accomplishment. I know at least 6 graduates who are working in a call center making maybe 10 dollars an hour. A degree is just a piece of paper that says you paid to deal with at least 4 years of silly bullshit. This prepares you and makes you capable of handling a companies BS. What you get out of a degree is what you put into it. So if I put any less effort into my degree I would be seriously cutting myself short and I wouldn’t have risen as quickly as I have through the ranks of developing poo flinging coders.

The second point is, I’m an Introvert. I like to be alone for long periods of time without worry for anyone or anything else. I like to sit and read and just chill out for as long as possible. Does this mean I don’t relate with people well? Not at all. I spend a considerable amount of time thinking about the decisions I have made in my life and why I made them. This allows me a wonderful understanding of myself which in turn allows me to relate my experiences to others. Now being an Introvert doesn’t mean I’m going to freak out and hide under the bed when I’m in a group of people. In fact I love hearing about other peoples stories and life experiences. Mostly because it’s like reading a book only you get to query the story teller to get whatever details you find entertaining. So most of the time I just listen to people. If someone asks me a question I’ll answer it as best and fully as I can. Does this mean I like to sit around and talk with a bunch of chicken heads? No, I’ve gotta have my standards. Remember, I value my time because I can spend it with myself, therefore someone has got to be as entertaining as myself or better to draw me away from my personal time. What I’m finding more and more is that I’m finding less and less people who I’m willing to exert energy to spend time with. I’m especially much less likely to exert this energy if people are going to be drinking or doing drugs. The reason for this is, I’m not a good drunk or drug user. I don’t freak out, but I do disconnect from reality. Not only that but it is way harder to have quality conversation with a group of drunks.

Third Point, I’ve always had the philosophy that a simple life is a happy life. Is my life happy right now? Sure, there are things that could be improved. If I had three wishes the first would be to make the women I’ll fall madly poetically in love with appear. Second would be for people to be able to exchange full and complex ideas by handshakes or some kind of physical contact and third I’d wish for financial freedom, but I fully believe that my second wish would have ensured this once enough high fives were passed around. Either that or I will have a short time to get acquainted with my newly found loved one before the world is decimated. Besides that I have awesome friends, I get to try out lots of new things and fiscally, I’m pretty set so long as I don’t get myself fired. And even if I do get fired I’m pretty confident I can come up with a new suitable form of income in short order.

I suppose the question you have been asking yourself is “Why can’t you just sell everything?”. I guess it’s the same question I ask myself everyday when debate selling everything and isolating myself. It’s my friends and family that keep me from just taking off. I know for a fact a fill a large hole with my immediate family and I’d like to think my friends would miss me. Though the one thing I know about human kind is that we are a bunch of adaptive assholes. So I think people would get along without me, though I’m going to use them as a reason to not run off on my own. Now who’s to say that I won’t someday. I’m just crazy enough to do it and write about it, though to be honest I’d rather sell everything and create some crazy green commune somewhere chill.

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The Loneliness of TechnologyPosted by simon on January 15th, 2008

It seems odd to me that in today’s day and age people could still be lonely. Yet in the definition of loneliness from wikipedia we find this excerpt

“Ironically, loneliness frequently occurs in heavily populated cities in these cities many people feel utterly alone and cut off, even when surrounded by throngs of other people. They experience a loss of identifiable community in an anonymous crowd. It is unclear whether loneliness is a condition aggravated by high population density itself, or simply part of the human condition brought on by this social milieu. Certainly, loneliness occurs even in societies with much smaller populations, but the sheer number of random people that one comes into contact with daily in a city, even if only briefly, may raise barriers to actually interacting more deeply with them and increase the feeling of being cut off and alone. Quantity of contact does not translate into quality of contact.^[1]”

I bring this up to support my previous article on Genuine Moments. If a person is able to consistently have a series of Genuine Moments it would seem impossible for one to be able to ever feel lonely. Loneliness stems from the lack of contact from others. Normally it is from the withdrawal of a significant other say your mother when you were a baby or as an adult a dear friend or a girl/boyfriend.

So why is it so hard for people to make friends and reach out to others when they are at a lose. There are many people who are reaching out looking for others. All you need to do is look at any dating service, craigslist, myspace or any social networking site. People are practically screaming for attention because they don’t know how to communicate their frustration with life to anyone else. Technology is double edged sword that seems to expand our horizons to beyond our wildest dreams, but at what cost? When we start having to sacrifice our human experience to gain a million dating services, is it worth it? Is always being in contact over email, IM and Text Messaging the cure for loneliness?

I think this constant bombardment of availability and communication is great, when used appropriately. If I take myself for instance. I’m an introvert. I’ve got no problem admitting that, hell I relish it. I think it has afforded me the characteristics to be a wonderful success in my field and allow me to think about life on my own terms. It hasn’t ripped any meaning relationships from me, I consciously let some relationships die because they just don’t add anything to my experience in this life anymore. What is horrible is when these new forms of communication force people to becoming introverts without ever knowing it. People get addicted to video games (And yes you can get addicted to video games but I’ll save that for another time), Tv Shows, all kinds of things that keep them shut in and isolated in ways that our history as a race has never ever experienced. If you think about it for the last 10,000 years our race has been just barely squeaking by. It has only been in the last 100 years our population has been skyrocketing with our massive technological leaps. We can cure the common cold that used to wipe out whole villages yet what new diseases have we created? Are we prepared and capable to handle the massive changes that our taking place day in day out to our world?

Sometimes I begin to think we are right to fear that which we do not understand. What happens when the next plague hits and wipes out 90% of the population and all the people who understand these magical technologies die. Will our society seriously be able to recover from that kind of a blow? Sure some will but think of all the daddy’s girls in the world. They will be lucky to become some hics baby factory for all their worth in any non-technological, do it yourself society.

I know I’m getting a bit off topic so lets bring it home. Technology is a great thing. I live and die by it, but I’m also in that .000001% of the world that understands how it all comes together. I also have a degree in engineering which means I generally think about things very differently. Does it mean I’ll be any more useful in a post-apocalyptic world, maybe. However in this world it does mean I have a view from on high and from what I see… there are storms brewing. It might not start raining in my lifetime but I’m pretty sure it’s going to start getting darker and winder. And what I mean by that is this. Unless each person can instill some core set of ideas that depict what is essential for a happy, healthy life in every person to be born in the next generation rather then the driveling bullshit that enslaves the minds of the next generation. Things won’t be getting any better. We will only become even more dependent on our technology and god only knows what will happen when people forget how to make fire.

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Genuine MomentsPosted by simon on January 13th, 2008

I just picked up the Waking Life again and the thing that struck me the hardest during my re-experiencing of this movie was the talk about Genuine Human Moments or the
“confrontation between souls”. It seems it is all too rare in our society where we interact on a deep level that involves a meaningful interaction. Can you imagine if you actually knew all the people who service you in your life. If you knew and cared for the guy who makes your a Wendy’s Hamburger or the mechanic who changes your oil or the girl who bags your groceries. Our society is based on a highly efficient model that requires people to be not nameless faces but forgettable acquaintances. Our economy and government are based on these kind of relationships. Without them how could we manage to go to War with someone or truly hate a person enough to want to kill them?

Think about the interactions you have with your friends. How often are they something you would consider memorable? How often do you talk about something that makes you stop and have a “Holy Moment”. Meaning you don’t just see your friend but you see your friends character, you see the levels of pain s/he has had in their life and truly touch one another. These are the kind of moments that make life worth living yet we seem to have trained ourselves and our society to push them to the periphery of our human experience and drone on like good little cogs in our sad society.

How would your life change if you stopped one person a day and asked them if they would be interested in sharing a “Confrontation between souls” and explain to them the idea of bringing back meaning to our daily interactions. If we go back lets say 100 years our world was much smaller and people did know all about the people who butchered their meat and sold them their groceries. The more often you see the same person day in day out the higher the change you will have a “Confrontation between souls” and once you have one, odds are you will have another with that person. It’s a barrier that is easily crossed and not easily forgotten.

As our world grows and technology allows us to have more half hearted interactions with others it’s important that we take the time to not isolate ourselves in a crowd. How can you ever grow if you never share yourself or your ideas with another person on an Genuine/Real level.

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