I have a theory that we are burning ourselves out to help us cope with our culture.
I look at several things in our culture when I say this. I know that the examples that I give here will be gross simplifications. So I ask that people who read this go and seek to expand upon my very simple argument here to draw their own conclusions.
Entertainment is seeking to divert rather than engage people. Instead of dancing- we watch "Dancing with the Stars". Instead of singing we watch "American Idol". Instead of playing sports, we watch sports. Instead of going on adventures in our youth, we play video games that seem to simulate the effect. Our past times now exist to divert our needs and keep us from feeling the need to engage to strongly.
Entertainment further seeks to isolate rather than engage. We vote with a massive and anonymous television audience on shows like "So you think you can Dance" and "Britain's got Talent". We watch televised political debates, rather than question candidates in person. We sit alone in our living room and watch television. We sit alone in our den and play or talk anonymously online. Marketing specialists call this phenomenon 'cocooning' and see it as one of the current big marketing trends.
How does this relate to burning ourselves out as a method of coping with our culture?
Look at our culture.
We go to school longer and more intensively than any period in history. We are expected to assimilate and regurgitate more abstract information that any generation in history. Much of this information is irrelevant to our lives, save to rewrite on a test paper or in an essay.
We absorb more advertising than any generation ever created. We absorb more information regarding current events than any generation. We absorb more information about so many abstract subjects that have no bearing on our lives.
Why?
What does it do?
Who benefits from it?
The majority of us do mind numbing jobs. We do repetitive jobs. We jobs that offer little chance for expression or individuality.
I believe that we would rebel against this, if we were not already overloaded, and burnt out by our environment. I believe that we need this isolating diverting entertainment to allow us to deal with the overloading burnout damage and the numbing effect of mind numbing jobs that not even the burn out can completely manage.
I believe that we are broken and must brake ourselves further in order to get through each day without falling apart.
But we are falling apart. Isolated and without out a substantial inner life, we have nothing to provide support us through rough patches. And the rough patches come hard and heavy. We are overwhelmed by school and advertising. We are numbed by pointless jobs. We lack proper exercise and proper nutrition- unless we take excess time from our already overloaded lives to attend to such matters.
Our daily activities are disconnected from the land, from our past, from anything that we have evolved connected to throughout out evolutionary history. We must navigate a system that removes power from the individual and supplies that power to the bureaucrat who manages us like the human resources we have become- homo sapiens domesticus.
We do we go from here? We turn to religion for answers. We turn to vicarious achievement in sports, or celebrity watching, or televised entertainment to attempt to fill the void.
But the void gets bigger. We are addicts, but nothing will fill the hole in our guts.
But burning us out will keep us with our noses to the collective grindstone, and numbing us will keep us there until we burn out, and the emptiness will keep us seeking quick thrills which generates an another generation to take our place when we finally succumb.
"To know enough is enough, is enough to know"
Lao-Tzu from the "Tao Te Ching"
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