Before the world went crazy?
The world does definitely seem like a crazy place. Or maybe I've just grown to be an old fart now, and so the commonplace and the status quo of the current moment looks increasingly crazy. The jury is out, on that one.
Even considering the question of how things were before the world went crazy... begs the question of figuring out when the world actually became crazy, and whether or not the world was ever not crazy.
Could be that the world has always been crazy.
So I find myself sifting through the memory banks, trying to remember the first time I looked out at my surroundings and thought to myself ”wow, the world's gone crazy!”
I can't say as how I have any specific memories of such times, but one of the common threads behind those thoughts have often been that people in some place have gone to war. War is definitely crazy!
Maybe It's a Gradual Thing...
I expect that the world going crazy is not a sudden thing; rather it's a realization you wake up to after something has already been trending for a long time and you suddenly realize this is nuts!
One of the first times I looked at the world and decided what I was part of made no sense had to do with work, back in the early to mid 1990s. At that time, I was working in the IT industry as a technical writer and usability analyst… And I woke up one day and realized that it was completely crazy that people were persuading themselves that it was a good thing to relentlessly work 70 hours a week just so you could buy a few more trinkets and a fancier a car.
Of course humans have always been working for long hours. In the Middle Ages people toiled endlessly in the fields to just scrape by.
As such, the craziness wasn't so much the actual amount of work that was being undertaken as the increasingly artificial reasons for subjecting yourself to it. I think this was in about 1992 and one day I found myself standing in a rather upscale jewelry store, contemplating spending $400 on a gold and silver pen.
I ended up putting the pen back and quietly walking out of the store as I processed the juxtaposition with my college days just 10 years earlier, at which time $400 would have covered my share of rent and food for a month, or close enough.
It was also a key moment in my life in the sense that it was then I seriously started out on my ”search for myself,” which lasted for almost a decade of mostly rejecting what was around me, and what I had been brought up to think was "what one does, in life."
But What IS an "Un-Crazy" World?
I'd like to think it's one in which we don't have to run as fast, just to make sure we don't end up destitute... and perhaps one in which we place a higher value on people than on things.
A number of years back, I recognized that my utter distaste for conflict and war is the way it completely ignores the value of life in a quest to secure things; be that land, wealth, resources or something else.
Sure, we can say "yeah, but that's how it has ALWAYS been," but what sort of excuse is that? The fact that something has always been doesn't mean it's RIGHT.
I's also like to think that an Un-Crazy world is one in which people spend less time living with fear, of one kind or another; fear of violence, fear of hunger; fear of poverty; fear of illness. Perhaps, as a result of it being a world in which greater importance is placed on human well-being than government coffers and power.
Sure, it's a pipe dream... but still, if we don't at least picture it, it has no chance of ever happening.
Happy Mother's Day!
How about YOU? Do you think the world has gone crazy? Or has the world ALWAYS been crazy? Regardless, what would an UN-crazy world even look like? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
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Created at 20220508 14:48 PDT
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The world maybe going crazy, we need to find our own moments of sanity.
We humans are all a bit crazy, pop culture has always been a farce masquerading as serious business, and the political class has always been hell-bent on plunder regardless of how they sell their schemes to their victims. The internet has just helped broadcast this reality more of late. We no longer have gatekeepers in the press. On the one hand, this has allowed more open discourse and independent investigative journalism. On the other hand, it means every crackpot can shout at all of us.
The place has definitely started to go nuts sicne 2008 so you're not wrong there.