Having been away for a few days — mostly because @cosmictriage and I were vending at an arts and crafts show — Monday meant my return to the usual pileup of things that didn't get done because I was out of the loop for three days.
Excavating the pile of stuff that was waiting for me — much of it in the form of notifications from one website or another about something that's happening that I need to take action on — made me realize to what extent the world is profoundly selfish (or narcissistic) in the sense that it assumes that whatever "they" are expecting us to be interested in clearly must be the only thing we do.
Why on Earth would we give time to anything else?
What I mean by that is a result of noticing the subtle subtext in all these irritating notices that I'm "being penalized" because I didn't check in here or there for 24 hours, 48 hours or whatever... the underlying assumption being that the only thing on my mind surely must to constantly check in with them.
Newsflash! "You're just not that important!"
And yet, that is how a great and growing portion of the world operates. We're supposed to be "tied" to these things and if we don't follow up on — and agreed to be tied to — these things, we end up losing out in some fashion or another.
Sure, maybe nothing horrible actually happens to us but we lose out in the sense that our lives perhaps become less convenient and more expensive — both financially and in terms of time.
The underlying idea that made me really sit back and think about it was the fact that this all looks a lot like a deliberate attempt to get people addicted to stuff. Which I find kind of offensive on a number of different levels. Which is probably naive of me, but there it is!
Perhaps its an area in which I am overly sensitive, having grown up with a mother who was a "functional" alcoholic and a father with a gambling problem. I just don't dig things that "require" me to be plugged in 24/7 in order to be allowed to "play the game."
So sue me...
So what do we make important? An important part of the journey for me has always been the freedom to live authentically, even if that life bears little resemblance to the publicly purveyed definition of "the good life" or what we are supposed to strive for as the ideal of success.
It seems odd — at least to me — that people so often are almost afraid to share what they authentically dream of, lest they be "judged" in the court of public opinion.
Of course, not everyone actually knows what they want. Sometimes they only know the "caricature" of what they want. And discovering the truth below can be a journey of years.
And then we land somewhere... and it's not always where we thought or imagined it would be!
May your journey be a fulfilling one!
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great week!
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Created at 2023-09-12 00:42 PDT
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