Rise Up!

In the beginning man was in nature. There was no separate nature, no line between the world man inhabited and what we, today, call the natural world. Man was one of the animals and competed with other animals. Today, we are separate from the natural world and inhabit environments of our own design and construction. Our separation from the natural world leaves us in a world that is not only artificial in its design, but also in the way we interact with it. Because of this lack of contact with the world, other than through the consumption of purchased goods and experiences, which have become the same in that we purchase everything. We experience more and more of our days through a screen whether on a computer, phone or TV. In our daily lives, we rarely encounter anything real, and when we do encounter something real it stands out like a sparkling diamond. Real things are those things we did not pay for, we cannot return, or request a refund for. We are left to interpret our real experiences. But, for the most part, we spend all of our time working to make sure nothing real ever happens: accidents, suffering, hunger, pain, etc. But in this, we also remove many of possibilities to achieve life. By building a structure of certainty, of supermarkets with perpetually available food, of TV with perpetually available entertainment, however banal, we destroy the spontaneousness that can come from living life as it occurs. It’s time to turn off everything that places a barrier between the real and the purchased, the mediated, scheduled, programmed, calendared, designed, packaged, guided, directed, produced, processed, industrialized, imported, exported, delivered, etc. It’s time to turn off the machine and throw away your credit card, phone, computer, cable, etc. Remove yourself from everything you cannot explain. It’s time to kill the machine. Stop the machine and all those that wish to turn us into simple economic entities that consume, produce, and consume. Rise up and conquer the artificial world and start living in the real!