Time

It is of course the most normal thing to start thinking about the past when you are facing the middle hump of life. When I look back at the previous 48 years I don't see another 48 years stretching into the future; I see 20 years of, if I am lucky. Good years followed by some shitty years when the highlight of each day will be a decent bowel movement and decent night of sleep. My best years, my unconsious years are behind me, and the years of being overly conscious about time, people, health, and money are rising up before. When I was young I seemed to not worry if my bank account dropped below $30 bucks with a week until payday. With $30 in the bank, I would take out $20 to go have a few drinks. Now, with thousands of times that in the bank, I feel fear. If there is one thing you can accomplish when growing old, it's to reject fear, to live.   

Manufactured Lonliness

Life must be more than the accumulation of things sold to us by corporations that both create the objects of desire and the demand for them. How does an individual ensure that their desire, on some level, is only their own and not one manufactured by those that only wish to divert wealth from a need to a want. A human being needs food, shelter, and, on some level, love. In fact, many of the things towards which we direct our desires are an attempt to receive love from another individual or a group of anonymous individuals. We are manipulated into believing that satisfaction can be achieved by exceeding our basic need for food and shelter and working to achieve human love through things. We are diverted away from caring for people to caring for things we believe will help us reach our goal of people. We continuously fondle and caress our consumer products and ignore those around us. What is our objective in life? Is it to spend more time with more and more sophisticated things or to interact with people? When we interact more with people we are not buying into the corporate message. The corporate message is anti-people. The corporate message wants to isolate individuals and have them believe that the thing the desire, love, can be achieved through the possession of, and interaction with, things. This is not a plot, but the expression of a sales technique. An individual that is happy, loved, and successful in that he has those two things does not want to live through the objects or the presentation of oneself as an object. By surrounding ourselves with objects, and living our lives through symbols of success and beauty, we destroy the things that are truly beautiful. By believing the corporate message of what is beautiful, of what is meaningful, we remove ourselves from the world and cease to live. By living through symbols that are not our own creation we move away from life.