Had to pop out to the shops there a little earlier to grab a few of the basics. I live in a pretty affluent area (don’t you know). I stress the phrase ‘live in’ rather than ‘belong to’.
Maybe I was a little tired or pissed off or whatever, but for the first time in a long time I didn’t feel the peace of the area, or the well mowed lawns, or the contented successful folk. I didn’t feel any desire to be the guy in the snazzy car diving passed with the blonde. I wasn’t thinking ‘Jesus, anyone who reads the papers will know that there are a lot of fucked up shit holes in the world and this aint one of em thank god’.
You know what I saw. I saw stuff.
I thought about the real world. I thought about what makes a person who they are. I thought about what we really enjoy and love about each other. I pondered our potential as human beings. And again I looked around and saw a lot of even-more-meaningless stuff.
I wondered whether or not we’d all be better off if we didn’t have to spend half of our time having to chase around after all this stuff so that we could then spend the other half of our time chasing around after all this other stuff and we could just ‘be’.
What does it serve and what does it cost? Never forget those 2 questions when faced with any thought or situation in your life.
It’s not real, in that, it doesn’t tell me anything about who that person really is. It just defines them within a certain system or situation.
I passed it off at first. I didn’t find it a very happy thought. It felt elevated and detached. A little immature and inexperienced maybe. I considered stopping off for a pint. I countered with the usual argument that it ignores the realties of people’s daily lives. That these people had worked hard to attain what they had and at some level all of this stuff meant something to them.
I saw families who maybe had struggled before and now they could afford a new house. I saw an old man proudly pruning his front hedge. I saw young men parading around in front of their mates in their new souped up cars that they had worked so hard on. I saw women dressed up to the nines and heading out with their mates on the town. And then I thought for a split second how lucky we all were that we weren’t lying in a bombed out shack in the middle of Baghdad and then I stopped and thought…
SCREW THAT!!!
That’s too easy. In fact that’s downright chicken shit.
Maybe it ignores the reality of a person’s daily existence, their trials and their tribulations, their struggles and their immediate needs. But it gets to the very heart of the idea of who that person really is deep down.
The strange thing about all of this is that I have absolutely no problem with the basic idea of people and the creation and/or attainment of stuff. I think it’s a healthy human practise. Choosing to create or attain something that you feel defines you or explains you (or indeed satisfies some part of you) is one of the great characteristics of the human race. Jewellery that represents a sacred belief. Clothing that represents status in a community. A fuckin hair style that represents your own individuality. It’s all basically good!
The stuff we choose is really based on the systems that we are a part of and our own definition of ourselves within those systems.
One mans Ferrari is another mans prize bull. One woman’s latest plastic surgery op is another woman’s self made pottery.
I wouldn’t buy a souped up car even if I could afford ten of them, but the guy next door would save for years just to afford one. Maybe we’re the same age, we went to the same school, maybe we watch the same TV shows, but he has chosen this stuff to define him and to satisfy him. He probably thinks I am as retarded and misguided as I think he is.
And now to the first point.
No matter how individual we feel we are by expressing ourselves and satisfying ourselves with our particular bag of stuff, most of the choices we make come from the conditioning we have received throughout our lives.
That of course begs the epic question – ‘what systems are we being conditioned to be a part of?’
What if the systems themselves are not ‘healthy’? What if they serve something else other than our individuality or our interconnectedness? What if they are necessarily shaping us into something we are not in our heart? What if we are just using these things as crutches? And if any or all of these are the case, what are they taking away from our basic sense of self; our basic individual and communal humanity?
These aren’t some paranoid angst ridden teenage rants. These are genuine real world concerns and they affect all of us everyday.
The way you address the questions is with another.
What would we be if you took all of this stuff away? How would we cope? How would we define ourselves? How would we relate to each other? What would we reveal about ourselves?
We would be naked, stripped of all our trinkets and our garments, our warm natural bodies exposed to the elements. You can see how a lot of people would be uncomfortable with that, with nothing to hide behind. No one is advocating global naturism, but this is your true form, the reality of who we are on a physical level. Your body is the real you more than the clothes you wear.
And that brings us to the second point.
There is always the danger, depending on culture, society or whatever, that all this stuff can mask your true humanity.
That’s what I saw walking down to the shops earlier on. Not a load of zombie puppets on strings suspiciously eyeing each other up. But a lot of good people taking on, dedicating themselves to and hiding behind stuff they didn’t create, but which their society, economy and culture have placed in front of them to be used as objects to define themselves.
Were they all sad, depressed and mourning their natural state? Were they f&*k! Most of them were happy out on the face of it. And that’s an even more worrying point.
Because I saw a potential community boxed off, divided, categorised and separated. I saw people conditioned by social, cultural, economic and political systems that I have never really found to be attractive. And I don’t believe they in particular should have the moral authority to define us or tell us who we are.
Removing all of this stuff, the good and the bad, and still being able to recognise and define yourself – that is your true humanity.
So you in the car and you on the bike. You with the cop suit on and you with the bag of pills in your pocket. You with the pen and you with the knife. Who are you? No really, who are you?
What do we get when people start asking themselves this question? We get a lot less people in their own little worlds chasing around after a lot of unnecessary stuff. We get a lot of community and a lot of humanity.
So you… ye you with the computer screen stuck to your face.
WHO ARE YOU?
Filed under: Thoughts | Tagged: commericalism, community, conditioning, Culture, individuality, materialism, society
