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I’m not sure when it began but somewhere along the brief history of the past 20 years it seems we all stopped rooting for the good guy. At first glance this warrants a response of “so what” but the repercussions of this choice seem to be affecting us on a deeper level. Long gone are the days of helping strangers because modern thinking says that they can’t be trusted anyways, they might sue you if you do something wrong or hurt you in response. If you see someone stopped on the side of the road struggling to get a tire on their car well that’s just their lot in life now isn’t it?
Somewhere along the way people stopped doing what was right in honor of thinking entirely for themselves and going above and beyond self-preservation. It was no longer satisfying to have 'enough' of something, suddenly people had to have so much of something that there was nothing left for anyone else. Status it seems began to be derived from how much of x object you had compared to others without it. Without warning it was no longer acceptable to be content, being content was a weakness.
A reasonably new car (less than 10 years old) that was reliable was an accomplishment 20 years ago, now it's sub-par. Unless you drive the current model year of a car with a price tag larger than your yearly income, you're just not good enough. Clean and neat clothes used to be all that mattered. If they fit your ass then they fit the bill. Now unless you're wearing $200 jeans you dress like a “scrub”.
At some point in the last 20 years it was no longer good enough for people to be full, they had to be stuffed. I mean that both literally and figuratively. Just look at how obese America is, we eat so much it causes our health to decline and our health care costs to skyrocket.
So where did we start to go wrong?
When I look back to my first few years of life on this planet I see a humble and decent lifestyle being had. People were still kind to their neighbors, kids were still playing with one another past dark on any street in America. I don’t believe anyone was ready for the drastic change that would begin to take place.
I distinctly remember the first time Halloween became an 'unsafe' holiday where kids couldn't be out past dark. As if all of a sudden the world at night time was a dangerous place. I remember frequently visiting parks with play grounds that no longer exist today because they were made of wood and not soft foam padding. It seems awfully funny of a premise, these were clearly far too dangerous to be used and yet my friends and I seemed to emerge from the challenge relatively unharmed other than a skinned knee here and there. I remember walking home from school when I was 10 with my friends because we were old enough. Now some schools won’t let kids outside the doors when they are 13 unless a parent has provided two forms of ID in order to retrieve them. When did this innocence get lost, and how do we find it again?
It could also be true that this is simply one of the qualities that the past holds, the quality of each day passing seeming better than the one ahead. Remember back to your freshman year of high school and think of all the good memories. You'll likely smile about all the good times you had with your friends, but at that time you were 14 and had no idea how precious those memories would become.
I like to think that my main focus in life is to actively improve on myself as a person. My goal is a constant cycle of trimming away the bad qualities and keeping the good ones. I am not always successful in this pursuit but I feel the question should be asked why does it seem hardly anyone else has followed the same path of improvement?
People hold so much value in showboating about how much they spent on their jeans or how much money they make at their job or how much expensive food they ate or how drunk they got. Is this all that life is about now? This endless pursuit of trying to feel better than everyone else, no wonder everything seems so shitty.
Why does everyone feel that they have to try to one-up the next guy? What is this deep seeded urge to show identity through how pseudo superior you are to everyone else? Don't get me wrong, I am all about healthy competition and in NO WAY do I believe we should allow a socialist agenda to take hold so we can all set ourselves on cruise control and no longer be concerned with progress, but they question must be asked - why does competition take place on the most unimportant of fields? Money? Cars? Material things?
Think of how wasteful those things are. Of how little they define you as a being. Sure, they are fun. I love new clothes or a few beers as much as the next guy, but in no way do these items define who I am and that very well may be the problem - people are letting themselves become defined by the most trivial criteria. People are so focused on this constant struggle to be better than everyone else that they no longer sit and think “maybe I should let that person stuck in traffic go” or “maybe my neighbors are decent people maybe I will go say hi to them”. See those acts right there are the “glue” that holds together the collective unit of mankind together. Without that we are just a bunch of assholes walking around thinking we are better than everyone else, that somehow our lives are marginally more important than random stuck in traffic person or person next door that you don’t know.
So maybe that is the point of this blog, searching not for when that glue disappeared but how we can get it back. It is very clear to myself and others that we are certainly lacking something right now and I think that this something is what made my childhood seem so decent. It seems it has a lot to do with where our priorities have shifted to and how those new priorities affect our interactions with one another. When your life is nothing but the pursuit of tangible objects it is very easy to focus on nothing but them. Gotta get that big house, gotta get that $45,000 car, gotta eat nothing but the best meals well beyond the dollar range of the other guy. We seem to think that this is what makes life worth living, that this is the new pursuit of happiness.
Maybe I'm a bit of a survivalist, but the main criteria that I used to value things is simply this: if civilization as we know it ends and there is no outside help, when money doesn't matter and it is me versus nature, does this item help me exist? For the important things in my life the answer is yes. My training, both physical and mental, will become invaluable in a very real sense. Everything else - your big home, your AMEX with the $50,000 limit, your $45,000 car - those will matter fuckall and they will suddenly go back to what they were viewed as before all this nonsense started; just products whose value only exists in a world that we have created.
Something tells me if it ever comes to that point you are going to wish you spent as much time getting to know your neighbor as you did working for that car.
