Irrational Focus

Social Media. What? How can a long series of trivially retarded conversations constitute "social"? How can splatting blurbs everywhere about the little and embarrassing things in your life be considered "connecting with people"? How can people pretending to read your drivel so that hopefully you'll read theirs be equated with "media"? Seriously folks, these systems are fun, but they are merely entertainment. Once the next best things comes in, we will drop them like the brain-dead stupidity that they really are. After all, how much do you really need to know about people's status, particularly if you barely know them? This week's hula hoop is next week's landfill. Get ready to move on ....

Why do things, when it is so much easier to say that you've done them? After all, expending effort requires effort, while just talking about effort only requires a creative enough spin. A misappropriation of the truth, by just the smallest fraction. When they are looking back on the start of the 21st Century the biggest thing they'll note is how we claimed -- so often -- so much more than we did. How we claimed -- so loudly -- so much more than we knew. How we just kept claiming everything, like a pathological liar stuck on 'repeat'. I guess most people think that if they say it, then somehow that constitutes action, and if they say it often enough, it will somehow become the truth. We can talk about a virtual world, a digital utopia constructed cleanly inside of a machine, but when we come around to trying to re-create that alternative reality over top of our modern one we know that we have diverged too far from our center. Too far from what makes us ...

Everybody says they want change. Everybody says that they want to fix the problems. But once it comes down to something they've said, or something they need to change, or even something they can do something about, it is suddenly an issue. Suddenly something to be avoided. Something wrong. We proud creatures seem to be gifted at talking about stuff, but acting on it is another matter completely. We will talk. We will say. But we won't move. Intelligence, that odd beast, is not with us often enough. We float mindlessly through life. Wisdom, particularity when defined to be an understanding of when not to get pedantically caught up in nothingness, is a rare commodity. Thinking, then, is not something most people are actively involved in. In fact, they try very hard NOT to think about things. To avoid those things for which they don't like, or don't want or are just too confusing to them in some vague way. We are a society of willingly blind fools. One tha...

I found the following Toronto Star article very depressing: http://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/article/793087--testing-drivers-on-roads-less-travelled but, not just because of the usual story about the incompetence that we are constantly greeted with by our Ontario institutions. Any one whose has spent time in Toronto knows that we are surrounded by a vast array of bumbling bureaucrats. That they somehow manage to take the simplest things and turn them into laughable jokes, with ease. You'd be laughing if you were so busy getting frustrated with it all. Ontario specializes in having our employees turn off their brains. In that way, we get a large number of perfect automatons, able to quickly and efficiently screw up any task, large or small. More optimally, they do it while somehow managing to blame it all on upper management. It's a gift. No doubt our artificially intelligent droids are happily entrenched in their own mindless misery. We're go...

Most people begrudge learning. They fight it, all the way from kindergarten right up to high-school. If they're destined for a higher education, they take the fight with them to their new institutions. Fear, frustration and fatigue: learning to most people is to be tolerated -- barely -- but avoided whenever possible. There are moments with brief openings, possible opportunities, but beyond that is a high wall setup to protect oneself from outside forces. Outside information. Later in life, long after the learning has ceased and the career has stagnated, what passes for debate is more often people just trying to validate what they know. They aren't open, they aren't interested, they aren't flexible. They aren't discussing. Instead they've locked themselves into their small subset of what they believe is the truth, and they'll just keep digging in farther. Most people out of school don't want to learn new stuff. Perhaps, they don'...

Selfish, greedy, cheap,  rude, irritable, indifference, slimy, smarmy, arrogant, jerk, dirt-bag, creep, sneak, hostile, nasty, angry, mean, hateful, jealous, vengeful, cruel, heartless, soulless, merciless, liar, thief, murderer, brutal, killer, destroyer, sadistic, tyrannical, and depraved. Without them, who'd be left?

We spill out, like primordial ooze into the cracks and crevices of our differences. In every direction we spread, but our bulk stays together, driven from one gorge to another in time to an unseen beat. Our brief moments of thought, get locked into position, like dogs caught fighting over some insignificant morsel. We, who can create, long before we can understand, and yet understand so much less than we can know. A species lost between our origins and our destiny, but hardly ready for carrying our ultimate grace. Hopeful and hopeless, bright and dim, foolish and foolhardy, we keep traveling. Never to forget, that even in the darkest corners, we still need to stop, to think and to appreciate our essence.