So in my fragile state I’m tapping away at this post because I’ve missed blogging in recent months, and because my own stupidity reminds me that I have thoughts I’d like to share about this very subject.
Stupidity. I’m not sure about your world, but mine really is full of breathtaking stupidity.
More and more I see ordinary citizens of the world in which I live being treated like helpless children despite their obvious maturity; or like criminals instead of hapless innocents trapped in a mire of revenue-raising regulations; or heroes when they should be perceived as villains; or wealthy when in fact they are just making ends meet as taxes and the cost of living soar; or intellectuals when they are nothing more than pompous and misguided blowhards. I won’t go on, at 68 time is too short.
In previous posts I’ve identified my ‘PC21’ - my personal conflicts with the twenty-first century - and this list perfectly illustrates some of the conflicts that often cause me to feel disenfranchised, as stupidity gets a tighter and tighter grasp on society, and as it slowly strangles my own ability to live my very modest and unobtrusive lifestyle.
Since I last posted I’ve spent some time in my Thai home; living in a third world country is a welcome reprieve from western society.
But I've also spent some time in corporate Australia and there’s certainly no escape from stupidity there. Less people doing more and more work, multitasking our way to mediocrity while all the time loudly proclaiming corporate values of quality and thought leadership; eliminating competent employees and then immediately replacing them with more educated but less competent and capable people - qualifications are rarely a substitute for experience; demands for increased productivity and quality while acting in ways that reduce worker engagement; shunting people around organisational structures that on paper work perfectly, but in the real world defy implementation; English-mangling jargon that makes the simple incomprehensible; it’s a place where talking in meetings eliminates any possibility to doing; and, in my own area of specialisation, we’re trying to turn selling into a science rather than mastering the art.
This is unquestioningly the age of absurdity. But there’s not much point whining - better to fight back. But what to do? What weapons do I have against this global tsunami of absurdity? Or do I have a shield large enough to protect me?
Well, I’ve already posted the steps that I’ve taken to try and counter my personal conflicts with this century.
And recently I’ve been trying to make sense of this age, and trying to discover whether others have similar frustrations to my own, so I’ve been reading ‘The age of absurdity’; for me it’s riveting and if you find yourself wondering what has happened to life as you once knew it, then this is a book for you.
If you sense that you are in conflict with the twenty-first century I highly recommend you read ‘The age of absurdity’ and react, and resist some of the nonsense that threatens to overwhelm us.
Reading it has certainly helped me see the absurdity - the stupidity - that pervades our society and it’s given me great new insights that help me stiffen my resolve to resist.
How to resist? What to do? It’s tough because the absurdity of this age is omnipresent. But on a practical level here’s my discipline:
- I try to simplify my thinking - and eliminate or reduce the mental muddle that often accompanies anything we do in this age, and
- I try to focus on doing everything with complete attention rather than multitasking myself into mediocrity, and
- I try to eliminate or avoid sources of information, like newspapers, that cause me to confront the absurdity, and
- I try to avoid accumulating.
By applying these disciplines I don’t eliminate absurdity, but I do cause my focus to be on what I am doing, rather than what everyone else is doing; and that works for me.
As is self evident, Buddha accompanies me on this journey of reflection and in an early post I wrote that it was ‘my growing conviction is that there could be no better guide, no better plan, for responding to pc21, than the way for living life as proposed by the Buddha’; his eightfold path is a very accessible tool for living.
Author Michael Foley writes in the ‘The age of absurdity’ opening chapter, that ‘Buddha’s metaphor for the liberated mind was a sword drawn from its scabbard’ - so perhaps Buddha’s image and my self-professed role as an aging warrior are entirely appropriate for trying to liberate myself from this age of absurdity?
And perhaps maturity can be an antidote to absurdity - and stupidity?
http://www.amazon.com/Age-Absurdity-Modern-Makes-Happy/dp/1847396275/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1308383280&sr=1-1
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