Reflections on a very old theme

What's wrong with the west?

Well we're empty, and this isn't exactly groundbreaking news.  How are we empty and why are we empty?  Lets look at it from a Hegelian perspective.

Besides the fact that our actual human hunger keeps returning us to our internal objective states, there appears to be something else that is causing a hunger within us.  We're all empty to some degree and you can see now more than ever we're consuming everything in our path, lets take a look at some obvious examples.

Alcohol and drug abuse is nothing new, but we see it still run rampantly through nearly everyone we know to some extent.  How come?  Is it that unconscious psychological feeling that you possess of emptiness whether it be hunger, or something that we have constructed that is fueling you to numb off what you cannot achieve?  Let's face it's getting harder and harder to 'make it' these days, so consumption of everything is helping us temporarily feel better about it.

Drugs and alcohol aren't the only example.  What about things like ipods, television, and the internet; things that have no doubt advanced us, but if you think about it, have also dampened us to the reality going on around us.  What does the ipod do?  Well in a sense it tunes you out, it blocks off human contact; if you think about it, we've constructed many things that do this - feeding out emptiness.

What about our sensational need to buy things.  Shopping gives you a new lease on life doesn't it?  For a brief moment that hunger is fed and you feel whole again, only to feel it subside a few days later, then it's back to the mall to buy some new 400 dollar jeans and plan what dress you're going to where to the bar the coming week when you get smashed with your girl and boyfriends.

In a world where individuality equals what kind of designer purse or exotic sports car you can afford, true unity with each other is lost.  We've gotten so deep into the atomistic view of society, that we have all become detached to some extent.  Why is this?  Natural species progression, the feeling of emptiness we just can't clench with that new porsche or BMW?  Jesus, won't anything make it go away?  In fact, most people don't realize this emptiness because they've been so conditioned to just accept it, and not question the nature and purpose of their own consciousness in the world.

So, are we stuck with it?  How can we get out of it?  How can we feel better about living our own lives and renewing the sense that my/your life matters?

There is no real answer.  Perhaps we should risk life to get feel free again, a battle to the death.  But this doesn't really sound plausible.  I suppose the real answer is to be found within the subject; set a goal and follow it in a straight line.  Realize that in a world with over 6 billion people, what you do matters; we ought to feel good about what we're doing if we're working at something that is beneficial to society - no matter how small.

Constructive thinking, wrestling and accepting the struggle of what is around us, and overcoming it through hard work and thought.  Trying to go backwards doesn't work, we are what we are now, and that's okay.  I suppose the idea is to become more conscious of ourselves and the world around us, and I think a lot of us know this already; but it is actually very difficult to do.

I suppose living the most authentic life possible would be the best choice, if we subscribe to a Nietzschean perspective.  Well that's it; by the way, I'm no authority on this (fucking iphone) but I do think about it, and although we might not be able to get rid of the hunger or emptiness we ought to at least try to satisfy it.  Just live anyone else, I'm caught in this uphill battle to try to make sense of what appears to be an insane objective world.

Some might say religion can help us, I say no to that at any cost.  Spirituality should be introduced to a greater degree in the West, it has so many insightful things to offer; firstly, no God, and how we ought to live a much simpler life as a basic principle.

The surreal

For the last four months I think I've been asleep.  The beginning of everything started with thoughts, fantasies, and ideas about what reality ought to be; and it's funny, because the implications that 'ought' carries are vague at best.

I think in a lot of ways, we don't give a lot of thought to the power that our fantasies have; there is nothing different about our dreams and reality - the forcefulness of our urges are immense.  These urges can shape our lives in dramatic ways, and when do they become reality?  Well, we make that decision.  Our lives become surreal when we delve into our own thoughts so deeply, our reality becomes questionable; we become split in regards to our decision - what should our choice be, chance or something that's more sure?

Why do we start wondering about the 'ought' ?  Why do we even have this option?  We might not even understand why we think we 'ought' to do something, yet at the end of the day it's perpetuated by our own selfishness.  Maybe we get bored, maybe we feel like our lives aren't as interesting as what we think we see around us; however, when we embark upon this journey to find what we think we 'ought' to find, a lot the time we're left with empty hands.  In fact, we're left with sequences of time that we felt were so real while we were experiencing them, that the moment totally escaped our grasp.  Now, when we look back on them, only moments later, we find they feel like dreams - like moments that didn't really happen.  Moreover, no one else witnessed them but us, so how can we be sure they actually did occur?  Maybe people did see what we were doing, and perhaps their insight is far greater than ours, maybe they do understand our 'fantasies' or that we're living in a 'fantasy'.  No  matter how conscious we think we are of the moment, it can still escape our understanding; this has happened to me more than a few times lately, and I'm not ashamed to say that I really did think I thought I knew what was going on.

To master one's own consciousness is a bold task, it's often wrapped so deeply in other things that we lose it; for example, our sexuality often guides the way we think about things.  Like Hume said, our reason is just the slave of our passions; how can we be sure we're actually making the right choice when it's being guided by something that's irrational?  Are our passions rational?  I think not; however, they're evolved alongside our reason so at times it's difficult to tell the two apart.  In our modern day world, the men and women have to decipher exactly what's speaking to them, their reason, or their genitals - both can get us into trouble.

Well, I started one place and ended in another.

Magical Thinking

Let me just say, the psychology classes I've taken in university are limited; I think I've taken about four now, and I don't plan on taking any more.  In fact, the classes bother me most of the time as they usually consist of 'special' students who can ramble off countless studies that I never really pay that much attention to - although I'm sure they're interesting.  However, I have to credit psychology with helping me figure out my own mind at times; in particular my 'magical thinking'.

'Magical Thinking' is when you think your mind or your thoughts can actually influence reality.  For example, say you didn't want to see your ex-boyfriend or girlfriend at a restaurant you usually frequent, well you might picture yourself seeing them there a few moments before you left your house for dinner.  The idea is that since you thought about seeing your ex first, before you left, it would just be too much of a coincidence if you actually did see them there at the restaurant.  Of course it doesn't affect anything at all, your thoughts posited at the world in this way are absolutely meaningless, this actually wastes vast amounts of my time; but I find myself doing this more than frequently.

I remember lying awake as a kid and thinking things out in my head in this fashion; multilayered and complex things about certain events that I didn't want to happen or did want to happen.  I didn't actually believe my thoughts could influence anything, but think about it, isn't there some kind of chance that they could?  Of course obsessing in this kind of mannerism can lead to actually psychological disorders, but perhaps at some level, it allows the mind to think about things on a slightly more complex level - or maybe it's just a way for me to comfort myself?

Nowadays, my 'magical thinking' has been trained in a sense (probably by philosophy), and I'm glad for that.  However, I still wonder if it does have some kind of effect on possibilities or possible worlds that are the outcome of the way we think.  There really is no way to investigate this or test it empirically, it's just a flaw of the mind - a phantom.  Does thinking your plane is going to crash affect the outcome? No; but the last time something good or bad happened to you did you think about it previously?  Probably not.  The person who won the lottery probably didn't expect to win it either - it's just how it works.  So I suppose the idea is to give thought to things, but not too much; either way, I still find my mind at times fracturing into what seems like hundreds of possibilities for every action I make.