today we spend much of our money on healthcare, child care, and education
and wide-screen plasma HDTVs, ipods, new cars every two years (here in the states, trucks with truck nutz here in the south), UV sunglasses, food processors, and 24-month aged parmesan reggiano. We're going to have a hard time if we have to learn to live without our luxuries like the majority of the rest of the world. It's hard not to want to be selfish when you can have so many nice things, and we've certainly been that. This eternal growth model couldn't be sustainable.
grant, personally, I am thankful for the modicum of social interaction that I get through this here box, because frankly, I don't get very much outside it (and I don't frequent many places besides here, how sad is that?). Still, I think that there is something disconnected and isolated about the mostly television-based and now somewhat internet-based society we're a part of now. There is a level of abstraction that disassociates people on the internet, which can be good at times but takes people some level apart. Though I'm sure there are many internet sites where interaction is more personal and possibly more emotionally deep than what's ostensibly a more cerebral site like this. Maybe through this crisis the internet will evolve into something even more effective interpersonally to help people through it, but I think real-life is always going to be more effective, when it works.
I don't know, reading back that sounds kind of like nonsense, but I'll post it anyway.
by the way, very good to see you, afj. |