Freewrite for Sunday night

It has been a very slow weekend with everyone around here ill, and @smallsteps in a bit of a bad way since Friday. In the last hour she has perked up quite a lot and is now running around the house after sleeping all day, just in time for her bedtime.

I was planning on writing something a little heavier, but I "wasn't in the mood" for that and decided to just freewrite and see what comes out. I normally have more of a plan in mind that I have spent some energy fleshing out mentally before putting finger to key (pen to paper), but I also like just seeing what comes out.

The other day I was talking to a colleague who said "good things come to those who wait" and I joked how it normally means there is nothing left. He then paused a moment and said how that saying contradicts "the early bird catches the worm". A lot of the sayings contradict each other when placed side by side I'd say, but there is an availability bias in the moment when they are applied as they come to mind in situations that evoke them, it is part of the programming.

I have spent a lot of time waiting for things to happen, but I can't say that I feel like I have been presented with a lot of good things. Don't get me wrong, my life isn't a complete shambles (most of the time), but I can't say I have been overly blessed with fortune. It is funny, because some people tend to always fall on their feet - I know one person like this. However, that person is not a very nice human in my opinion.

But, I don't think much of this matters in the grand scheme of life as most of what we do as individuals is only important to us and those who surround us directly. But, I do think that what each of us does is important to all of us when pushed out to scale - small actions lead to big changes - for better or worse.

Some say we shouldn't stress the small things, but I have the sense that these days we spend far too much time on large things that are either out of our control or irrelevant to our daily lives. So much of our time is spent on things that do not add a skill, do not bring a benefit, do not provide any new possibilities - it is just time consuming. How much entertainment do we need before we are satiated, how much useless political spam can we absorb before we realize it is filler designed to do exactly what it does?

We have been programmed to spend our attention on what doesn't provide anything of value to ourselves, but does generate wealth and power for others - a very small slice of us. If we are what we eat and all we consume is what people feed who benefit from us being slow, fat and stupid, what condition are we in?

Just take a look around and it will be pretty obvious that the condition of society is not one of health and wealth, it is failing - even as at a technological advancement level we are moving forward in leaps and bounds. It is interesting how we can advance yet the gaps between us seem to be shifting even further apart.

When it comes to quality of life for my daughter's future, I have to consider the quality of all other people's lives also as it all affects on an individual. Imagine being wealthy but having to live surrounded by squalor and having to constantly need to protect oneself from theft and violence. Is that a good quality of life? I know people in parts of the world who live like this, and they do not like the conditions once hey are out of their houses filled with opulence.

Some love to have more than others, but at the end of the day it is very difficult to enjoy life with friends when there is large disparities in economic possibility. It is hard to maintain a friendship over time when while one can afford a lot, another struggles to get by. It is possible of course, just very hard. Perhaps this is why some of the poorest nations on earth are among the happiest as there is less disparity between people.

There is always going to be differences in pretty much all aspects and factors of life that matter, but a lot of them are engineered in order to create mechanisms of control over the population by a narrow subset of the population. And due to this, there is a kind of social osmosis that will continually keep us in a state of conflict as those with will keep gathering until those without rebel fiercely to balance the tables, and inevitably overshoot the mark.

Well, it is time to put my daughter to sleep for the night and hoe that when she awakes she is feeling better than she did today. There is the short-term position of the parent where I want her to be happy healthy now, and the long-term position where I want her to be happy and healthy always. The long-term view takes consistency and investment into a wide set of areas, most of which we ignore while we spend our time worrying about what is fed us through the media and is out of our control.

Taraz
[ a steem original ]