Escaping Enlightenment

You are browsing the archives of 2008 July.

A particular Digg article about a Subway store posting a sign up had a mixed reaction from me. The Subway in question posted a sign up that said “We ask you to stay off your cell phone while ordering or we will have to send you to the back of the line”.

My first reaction was “Fantastic! Its about time businesses started treating people with the same respect they’re given by the people who feel their cell phone conversation is more important than conducting a business transaction”. I then toyed with the idea that perhaps this sign is an example of a sort of arrogance displayed on behalf of the business and that cell phone users should have a right to be rude. It didn’t stick very long.

I’m sitting here at the computer, listening to my daughter on the baby monitor while she sleep in her room. My wife is in our room, and because of the huge smile she had when I got up this morning, I can only imagine she’s in there dreaming of a scantily clad Johnny Depp.

Both of my girls have been out of town for the last two weeks, leaving me here to “bachelor” it up with the cat. The time they were gone, of course, they were missed. I must admit, though, I really enjoyed the time to myself.

Presently, we are flooded with sources of information. Between the nightly news, RSS feeds on the internet, blogs, chatting at the water cooler, we are almost consistently fed information. Somewhere along the lines, we’ve lost the ability to actually think about what we read or hear and tend to take everything at face value. We are so used to being fed information that we actually have “news commentators” who tell us what to think about the news stories we hear (I’m looking at you, Bill) instead of digesting and contemplating it on our own. We judge our presidential candidates not on the issues stand for, but by tears, party loyalties, middle names, and bad jokes. We’re so used to having “instant” knowledge that most of us don’t even read the newspaper anymore.

How many times have you heard someone say “Life sucks, then you die” (or alternately, “Life’s a bitch, then you die”)? I’ve heard it rather frequently, both in a sarcastic and sincere tone.

Does life have to suck?

“What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, ‘This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!’ Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment in which you would answer him: ‘Thou art a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!’”