Indifference
As modern people we're accustomed to see life in binary terms: living a positive life is to be happy, living a negative life is to be sad. As soon as one dwells deeper into this dualism, one discovers a flaw: life is not, and has never been, only a journey of happiness and comfort. More likely it's often a struggle, and feeling sad, lonely or depressed is a part of this experience. In other words, being sad is not "negative," it's actually quite healthy, in sane proportions.
Most people today are afraid of being hurt, either physically or emotionally, because they're already unstable enough. This gives birth to what I call the truly negative way of living life: feeling neither happiness nor sadness, going through life as a shallow, indifferent organism without individual response to the world around us. I call this the modern lifestyle of indifference.
This existential indifference manifests itself in all parts of our society. We find it in love, where people seem incapable of truly loving, caring and understanding for another human being, instead jumping from bedroom to bedroom, in search of some form of security that we deep down inside know we won't be able to find under the sheets of a stranger. We find it in friendship, where people manipulate and use each other for their own ends, even though they are the ones who really lose the game, since they ultimately have no one to trust other than themselves. We find it in politics, where the people in power don't give a dime about how their people live boring, meaningless lives at office desks, slaving away 8 hours every day for soulless corporations that only care about short-term profits.
But most of all, we find it in our so called "culture," consisting out of Coca Cola commercials, pop star queens and exhibits created to provoke our morality, but having little or none to communicate with us. This is the most negative way of living life, because it reduces our existence to a shell without emotions and soul. We wander like dead robots from birth to school, from university to work, from family to death, without having experienced anything of lasting meaning. Our value system reflects this state of living: we use slogans about collective freedom and justice to defend our own individual position, even though we live lives that ultimately do not only threaten our own existence, but the life of all organisms on this planet.
As a product of our incapability of truly experiencing greatness and sadness, we uphold anything that tries to further rationalize our lifestyle, as if that was the answer to our problems. We welcome the world of credit cards, fast food and sperm banks, because we're no longer interested in what life has to offer. Life has become a means of paying bills and voting, not contributing to things that might inspire us to overcome our selfishness and reach out to other people, to the magic in life. We're operating mechanically, desperately crying over poverty in Africa and "intolerance" in the Middle East. But underneath, we pity ourselves, because we're the ones that are poor, living soulless lives, protecting our lifestyle out of pure fear of what might discover the truth. And, worst of all, we cannot understand our own reason of being, because we deny ourselves the right to create one. As a result, we'll never die, since we have never truly lived.
by Alex Birch
May 30, 2007
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