A Hefty Price For Google And Toilet Paper

It's not easy for a human being to poke about in the world today and not lose something of his or her self as a result. It's like trying to stick your hand in a combine without drawing back a bloody stump. That's a simile. And I honestly can't say that I have anything better than a vague notion of what a "combine" looks like, or what it does. It has something to do with agriculture, and my simile would have been a lot better if I used a piece of industrial machinery to represent the modern world. I'm drawing a blank, though. Ours is a "post-modern" economy that doesn't manufacture anything remotely useful to anyone. It's considered tres gauche among the world's post-industrial economies to grow a banana or manufacture a television set.

What a world. With a rigid global economy and a consumer culture that offers countless "choices" but no alternatives, we are all set upon a path that we pretty much have to follow if you don't want to sleep in a refrigerator box, or eat muffin stumps at the homeless shelter. Freedom is a lie. You can always try to fly off a skyscaper if you don't like your limited options, so there is that, anyway. Like it or lump it. Most people decide to lump it, but they find solace in knowing that time will eventually do what they lack the courage to do themselves; which is to end it. Mercy!

Basically, what I'm saying is that people did not evolve to function well in the reality that we've created to replace nature. Not that nature isn't an unholy bitch, but I suspect that the ennui and detached isolation that most people feel today was rare, say, 500 years ago. People were too worried about their nose falling off, or trying to turn turds into gold, or picking fleas out of their crevices. In an environment like that, the complaint, "I'm depressed" would not stir people to sympathy. More likely, people would say, "No shit, we're all depressed...have you seen my nose?"

But enlightment and prosperity didn't have to come with the cost of our humanity, whatever that is. Every few months, someone releases a study that basically says that workers could be 847% more "productive" if they didn't waste precious time scratching their asses. They sometimes put a dollar amount on the "wasted" time, as in, "Corporations lost $300 billion last year due to lost productivity caused by employee defecation. A study is currently underway to assess the practicality of colostomy bags for all employees." How can you possibly keep your mind healthy in such a universe? And I refuse to believe that we have to accept such nonsense as the price we have to pay for a progressing civilization. And accepting a globalized, capitalist world with all of it's associated insane and fucked-up personal and institutional relationships comes at the hefty price of our contented sanity.