The Madness of the Modern

According to Blur 'Modern Life is Rubbish'; and they definitely have a point. Partly it's the dissociation between ourselves and our environment. We live in concrete and steel bunkers, work in concrete and steel towers and one is connected to another by the sterile blacktop. Food comes pre-packaged in plastic (and the contents often taste as bland as the wrappings) and these food items often bear almost no direct relationship to the natural state of the produce. Perhaps this (along with various scares whipped-up by the media) is why we're distrustful of much modern food.

Then again, as more people crowd together into towns and cities our iteractions become more complex and more stratified. The relatively simple pyramid of the family and the tribe becomes an inter-connection of relationship pyramids each with its pecking order. It gets even worse in the world of work where we're in hierarchies of managers and seem to have little or no control over our own lives. Which is why those who do not do well in hierarchies fall between the cracks of modern society.

And therein lies the main problem: modern society has many, many, craks. All those people feeling disconnected from life and society. Perhaps this is why we turn to other avenues, explore the past and art and poetry as relievers of stress. All art is born of and most creativity is engendered by conflict — be that conflict either internal or external. It is this tension that leads to the greatness of the creative persion, the enjoyment of the audience but ultimately results in self-destruction. For we cannot live in an eternal tug-of-war between the internal and external selves.

We are all just prisoners

Two posts in one day... I know it's a bit much but maybe I'm just hyper creative today. Thoug the real reason is that I'm just a little hyper... Enjoying one of those little, wonderful, manic phases in the midst of depression. Of course, I'll pay for it tomorrow, but for the moment I'm just going to enjoy the experience. For now, just about anything's possible.

For now I'll give you some musings on modern life. Have you noticed how modern life basically sucks? Conformity to society's 'norms' has you working your tail off for 9+ hours a day so that you can enjoy 20+ days a year of rather expensive vacation time.

Basically it's a con. Wage slavery designed to subjugate the masses. It's the bondage that keeps modern economics (and global growth) going. The truth is that our hunter–gatherer ancestors only had to work on average two hours a day to keep themselves and their families fed and clothed. OK, so they were susceptible to drought and the vagueries of nature (but so are we, we just haven't faced a major natural challenge to our society in the past century or so).

The modern world is little more than a con. We're all so busy working for someone else and trying to live our lives in the interstices of time that are left to us that we don't consider what our lives would be like if we didn't have to do this. And even if we do consider downsizing we're often far too locked-in to the vagueries of modern life (call that an euphemism for debt) that we can't afford to do that.

All this ignores the fact that money itself is a sham. A con trick bought into by the western world because if people didn't believe in it they'd be penniless. Ultimately it becomes a self-sustaining myth. A bunch of nonsense where we work for the edification of someone else and the ruination of our own lives.

Mad Musings

So what is a blogger, and what is this blogging thing all about? In many ways the blog is an extension of traditions of the seventeenth century diarist. Certainly, Samuel Pepys, were he alive today, would have been a blogger. But blogs are more than personal diaries. They are also commentaries on the modern world and bloggers tend to be more computer literare than your average internet peruser.

This means that bloggers (and I include myself in this analysis) tend to be a self-selected group of 'technorati' and in this respect we are the true inheritors of the tradition Samuel Pepys (who was after all a member of both the intelligensia and the technorati of his day). He was also a gourmand &2014; which is an appealing aspect of his nature as far as I'm concerned.

There is another similarity with the diarist's behavoiour as well. In that the diarist has a very personal relationship between the brain, the pen and the page. You may not think that the blogger considers the world this way, after all it's a mass medium, capable of potentially reaching millions. Yet, if you think about it blogging can be an intensely personal experience. After all what you're facing is a screen on which the words your type appear instantaneously. This can be an intensely personal experience between yourself, the keybord and the screen. None of the potential readers out there truly matter; especially if you can type at a reasonable rate and know HTML then the words on the screen can flow almost as smoothly as they would from a pen.

As a wordsmith of sorts (if you don't believe me, then check my poetry site this can be a liberating experience. Especially as I was once a magazine editor and it's been ingrained into me that words should be correctly applied and typeset appropriately. As such it's fairly amazing that I can even write anything this 'freeform' without obsessing about every word and editing and then re-editing the copy.

But that is the nature of this new medium or ours, where the diarist, the editor and the newshound meet and coalesce in this experience known as a 'blog'.

The Diary of a Madman

As an occasionally creative person and sometime polymath I'm occasionally prone to the occasional bout of depression. It's one of those diseases that one doesn't really talk about, or comes with the stigma of somehow being 'weak'.

Admittedly the disease has it's drawbacks in terms of interactions with other people (or the complete lack of them) and the loss of any and all emotional response. The wanting to sit quietly in a darkened corner is a bit of a downer as well. Despite this, there is the occasional pay-off that comes with a sometimes preturnatural clarity of thought. Admittedly these flashes of self and external awareness are electrifying when they occur and they both illuminate and colour one's world-view.

Perhaps it's these moments of clarity that make depression worthwile; though they also make seeking, undergoing and receiving treatment a difficult thing (more on this in later posts).

Truthfully though depression is pretty booring. Whilst in this state one is pretty booring. It's a state of nullness of not wanting (or being able) to do anything. You're also booring from other people's perspective; mostly as you're a pain in the ass as you don't want to interact with anyone.

Only whilst coming out of depression (or in the associated jump to mainia) is anything interesting depicted. And it's only in this state that anything creative (such as the poem given here) can be generated.