The Age of Bad Decisions

A couple of months ago, I decided to go back to university to complete a Masters degree in Media and Communication. I had been back in Australia for a month, was on the verge of being dumped from afar and had no job, car or money to speak of. Wrenching myself out of bed, I made a few calls and photocopied a few documents. A few weeks later I was accepted. Then I told some of my friends about my news and they just replied with blank stares and asked, "why?"

I figured that further study was something eyed with favor among most people. But then I remembered where I was living - when I was living - and was reminded that I dwell in the Age of Bad Decisions.

Generation Y was one of the economically blessed generations in modern history. I remember when getting a job was merely a formality - if you didn't like it, you could always change. Taking that sojourn abroad was as easily said and done. Study? Well, if it didn't yield you your dream career at the end of it, there was something deficient in your character.

Working hard was optional and strategic thinking even more so. Fuck it, buy that big screen TV on credit. Spend the extra money at the pub. Another pair of designer jeans never hurt anyone.

But what it fundamentally contradicted for so many people was that their love for economic risk didn't match their confidence in all other areas. The material abundance wasn't an indicator for abundance in more abstract yet just as valuable things; such as love, brotherhood and knowledge.

Even a decision in and of itself to return to study, to expand my skills and really concentrate my know-how seemed like a ludicrous one in the face of the Bad Decision Maker. It has no obvious monetary benefit; it does not glisten; it does not come with 3G; it does not make popcorn in less than three minutes. We drown in oceans of abstracts but we cling to the material for comfort. We stay in "loving" relationships even though our partners may treat us badly and cause us despair. Our arrangements are less than ideal because we allow them to be. We utter words like "don't" and "can't" and think this is the end; that nothing more is possible.

For some, their tunnels of reality have shrunken down in this Age to only allow a pinhole of light to rush through. Some have merely forgotten that we as humans can do so much more than earn and spend. We can think, we can do and we can live, too.

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http://twitter.com/crushtor

A Note on Abstraction and Closure

Since we, as humans, perfectly imperfect as we have come to evolve, abstract all sensory perceptions from the outside world, we also abstract our relationships with these perceptions as they are constantly formed and re-formed. If, like Ellis hypothesizes by way of Korzybski, insofar thoughts create feelings and our behaviors, we must learn to accept that we cannot explain the totality of the outside world and thus, accept the nature of the universe as one of uncertainty and probability, not fact and absolutes.

Many friends and relatives with myself included have gone through almost soul-shattering, life-altering break ups, deaths and other tragedies. Many seek "closure." They believe that healing words - the sounds that come out of our mouths - will cure what ails them as if they were a magic incantation.

My advice to those seeking closure is this:

1. Stand in front of a door. Push it open.
2. Pull the door towards you.
3. Realizing that the door has closed and the reality of your present situation has not changed, be content that you are a functioning human being with the ability to know better than to search for answers that have no sensible question.

I to elucidate further on constructing one's own reality, I was talking with my father the other day about time. He said to me that "whoever discovered that there was sixty minutes in an hour was a genius." I replied that he was a master manipulator. My father looked at me quizzically. "Well," I said, "If the dude can make people believe that time is specifically delivered in parcels of sixty minutes and divisions thereof, he should probably have been King of the World."

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http://twitter.com/crushtor

Never Surrender

"An honest politician is a national calamity." - Robert Anton Wilson

Writing a piece on the Australian Government's proposed Internet Clean Feed for Onya Magazine, I quickly realized some things about governance in the 21st century. Governance is an annoyance at its best, a hindrance to personal and in some cases, small-collective satisfaction at its worst. There's a role for collective action in our civil society and in the cases where Governments overlegislate and create more problems for more people ala the Clean Feed, its time for many leaders both political, economic and civil to sit down and ponder the end of a "space-binding" method of governance replaced by "time-binding" governance, instituted and regulated by information technology mechanisms.

The mindset that space and the matter that resides in it should be the basis for its government has reached a halting limit. The Clean Feed is a blaring example. The old Magniot Line mentality has prevailed even now, in the 21st Century though one can still send a malicious payload wirelessly. Now we must explore other frontiers to govern ourselves both with a public service and without. Will we? Perhaps in a technologically backward-ass country such as my own, only time will tell, and for us time may come too late.

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http://twitter.com/crushtor