I was thinking, well not so much thinking as having a gut feeling, that playing the stimulating video game on my iPhone would give me some insight into life somehow. We might not think these days that video games provide any benefits other than entertainment or certain cognitive training, but it actually did something for me. It clued me into an insight into why we are so lost in our present world.
We crave stimulation in our lives. That we know. A craving might represent a lack of something, as in a street urchin wolfing down a charity dinner, but it might also represent an overabundance of something, as in our insatiable appetite for more junk food as Americans. Thus we must discern which one presents us today.When we think of how we were raised in the West, it was always a matter of course that we were presented with option after option in our lives. Commercial after commercial. Quiz after quiz. Career after career. It did not seem that the possibilities had an end, and so we had no ground from which to project ourselves. We were pulled and pulled by the sights and sounds, as though we were in a candy shop. We learned to love the empty calories of the empty promises of modern life.
Empty calories are dangerous. They are dangerous not so much because of their negative effects, but because of their positive effects. They bring us stimulation and mental sedation, a rest from the trials that present themselves to us. We like them because they stop us from feeling real feelings. They bring us a cloudy composure to obscure what we really feel.
We know that the empty calories of modern life are problematic. But is it their mere overabundance that brings us mediocrity? What alternative do we have?
Just asking that question reveals the spiritual barrenness of modern life. What options do we have other than buying the newest product, studying for the upcoming test, or applying for a job that we will probably hate? Is there more to life than that?
We may say that we want love, but our modern world tells us again and again how loved we are. From participation awards to diversity festivals to helicopter parenting, it seems as though we are loved more than ever. But what foundation does that provide? When we are unconditionally loved, that implies that each choice of ours is worth just as much as any other choice. So we hop from one stimulating thing to the next, hoping for guidance, but no guidance comes.
Where do we find true satisfaction? We used to find it in taking up our parents’ legacy and building upon it. But our parents told us we could do whatever we wanted. They didn’t tell us that we had a land to cultivate. They didn’t tell us we had a home to maintain. They didn’t tell us that we had a vocation to continue. Most importantly, they didn’t tell us that we had a long lineage to uphold, nor that that lineage was part of a greater part of a community or ethnic group, or indeed a race.
We thereby have nothing to protect, nothing to uphold, and no sense of direction. The ground upon which we stand can be taken from us, so we do not cultivate anything of nutritional value, of a value that can be measured by the gravity with which it is presented. It was presented to us, instead, with a value implicitly equal to anything else. Thus our inheritance became wastelands while we danced from whimsy to whimsy. Squatters came and turned the wastelands into slums.
And now I will dance back to my video game. Maybe I will get around to cleaning the slums tomorrow.
libercolumbia 