03-27-2009, 04:16 PM
Slamz' personal log, stardate, uh, whatever.
My Philosophy Of The Moment is that a life not spent dreaming is a life wasted.
Essentially I take the exact opposite view of conventional wisdom, which states that life is wasted unless you go out and Accomplish Something -- a bigger house, a faster car, a better job, more education, more money, having a garden, getting the weeds out of your garden, etc. Potentially a never-ending cycle of work which leaves little time for "frivolous" dreaming.
Bah.
Surely, I think, if mankind has any gift at all, it's our ability to dream up better worlds. Maybe it's a simple dream, like a world where an ox pulls this damn heavy plow rather than you. Maybe some of these dreams lead to inventions and advancements, but that's not really the point of them either. That's just pandering to the conventional wisdom mindset which might conceed that "fine, some dreams are good as long as they result in increased productivity".
Bah again, I say.
Good dreams, like most good things, are built upon a foundation laid by someone else. You don't pick up some random herbs, a chicken breast and create a masterpiece dish on your first try, but you can do pretty well if you start with a recipe that someone else created, and then modify it. Dreams are the same way. Creating them from scratch can be tricky but when you're building on a TV show, a game or a book, you have a foundation to work with, which you can improve in your head. Maybe you go on to write your own game, script or book, maybe not and I'm not sure that's important. The important thing is you took this magnificent gift we have, the gift of dreaming, and you got some good use out of it before you died.
In the long view, either you're an atheist and you die and turn to dust and then who gives a fuck about your accomplished chores, or you die and go to some afterlife where a list of accomplished chores probably will look like a waste of a perfectly good life and a perfectly good capacity for dreaming. Are there dreams in the afterlife?
I don't know that I'm advocating laziness, exactly, but rather, that we put way too much weight on "being productive". Is that what we were born for? To be productive? To work our hours away in some office and then go home and remodel the kitchen so that the house will sell for more?
I say to enjoy the things which are fun. If woodworking is fun then enjoy woodworking, but without regard for the practicality or productiveness of it. If watching TV or playing video games is fun then enjoy those things without regard for the practicality or productiveness of those things, either.
Also don't confuse this with "apathy" or "complacency". It's one thing to stop to smell the flowers because, thanks to the work of our ancestors, we now have the free time available to us to choose to do these things. It's something else to stop to smell the flowers while a tyrant takes over the world or while the work of your ancestors is being destroyed.
Maybe next year things will change. Maybe tomorrow the earth gets hit by a meteor and we all die. But today we're here, it's 5pm, I have no further obligations today and I'm going to go home, play some video games, possibly meet up with my girlfriend, perhaps there will even be sex, and then more video games, maybe some time to read this new Terry Pratchett book and that will be a great day. I don't know anything about tomorrow but today we have time for laziness and dreams and I think we should take full advantage.
My Philosophy Of The Moment is that a life not spent dreaming is a life wasted.
Essentially I take the exact opposite view of conventional wisdom, which states that life is wasted unless you go out and Accomplish Something -- a bigger house, a faster car, a better job, more education, more money, having a garden, getting the weeds out of your garden, etc. Potentially a never-ending cycle of work which leaves little time for "frivolous" dreaming.
Bah.
Surely, I think, if mankind has any gift at all, it's our ability to dream up better worlds. Maybe it's a simple dream, like a world where an ox pulls this damn heavy plow rather than you. Maybe some of these dreams lead to inventions and advancements, but that's not really the point of them either. That's just pandering to the conventional wisdom mindset which might conceed that "fine, some dreams are good as long as they result in increased productivity".
Bah again, I say.
Good dreams, like most good things, are built upon a foundation laid by someone else. You don't pick up some random herbs, a chicken breast and create a masterpiece dish on your first try, but you can do pretty well if you start with a recipe that someone else created, and then modify it. Dreams are the same way. Creating them from scratch can be tricky but when you're building on a TV show, a game or a book, you have a foundation to work with, which you can improve in your head. Maybe you go on to write your own game, script or book, maybe not and I'm not sure that's important. The important thing is you took this magnificent gift we have, the gift of dreaming, and you got some good use out of it before you died.
In the long view, either you're an atheist and you die and turn to dust and then who gives a fuck about your accomplished chores, or you die and go to some afterlife where a list of accomplished chores probably will look like a waste of a perfectly good life and a perfectly good capacity for dreaming. Are there dreams in the afterlife?
I don't know that I'm advocating laziness, exactly, but rather, that we put way too much weight on "being productive". Is that what we were born for? To be productive? To work our hours away in some office and then go home and remodel the kitchen so that the house will sell for more?
I say to enjoy the things which are fun. If woodworking is fun then enjoy woodworking, but without regard for the practicality or productiveness of it. If watching TV or playing video games is fun then enjoy those things without regard for the practicality or productiveness of those things, either.
Also don't confuse this with "apathy" or "complacency". It's one thing to stop to smell the flowers because, thanks to the work of our ancestors, we now have the free time available to us to choose to do these things. It's something else to stop to smell the flowers while a tyrant takes over the world or while the work of your ancestors is being destroyed.
Maybe next year things will change. Maybe tomorrow the earth gets hit by a meteor and we all die. But today we're here, it's 5pm, I have no further obligations today and I'm going to go home, play some video games, possibly meet up with my girlfriend, perhaps there will even be sex, and then more video games, maybe some time to read this new Terry Pratchett book and that will be a great day. I don't know anything about tomorrow but today we have time for laziness and dreams and I think we should take full advantage.