We Americans believe we are uniquely qualified to talk about freedom.
There is no evidence supporting that belief.
The majority of our colleagues in humanity start free, and capable of pretty much anything.
It’s a state we only briefly enjoy. Very early in our lives mom and dad… or more commonly the nanny these days, will sit us in front of a screen and set about getting us a proper “head start” on the game.
Because everyone knows if little Susie hasn’t seen every episode of Little Einsteins she’ll never get into the best pre-school. Meaning she can kiss her first choice college goodbye. Which means she’ll likely never be able to afford a curved panel tv. Everyone knows good looking men prefer to watch their sports on curved panels. Susie will end up with an ugly husband… and ugly kids… and. She’ll end up in a small house. Driving an old car and be a – well, you know – a loser.
We don’t like losers.
I once coached a 12 year old who told me her greatest – her NUMBER 1 fear – was she wouldn’t get into her first choice famous college… MIT.
SHE WAS 12!
When I was 12 the only thing I thought about was naked girls and tennis. To be honest, it’s still pretty much all I think about. Which probably goes a long way towards explaining why I live in a camper in a third world country.
Oh well, no one’s perfect.
The capital “T” truth of modern American life is the economy comes first. You now it’s true. We’ve all been convinced we’d be lost without it. And so we’ve all been programmed from a very early age to serve it.
And since an economy must grow to be considered healthy; and since that growth now relies almost entirely on consumption. Well, the economy simply can’t afford have us running around all wild and free… thinking that happiness can’t be bought.
Did you know the average American home size has tripled over the last fifty years? And still, personal storage centers are one of America’s fastest growing industries.
Anyway, by the time we’re all eighteen — old enough to kill inferiors and infidels… but not legally drink beer — we’re fully indoctrinated. Incapable of free thought.
Oh… it may feel like we are free in thought… but since it’s impossible to distinguish where we end and the system begins, how can we really know?
And therein lies the deceptive beauty of the narrative. We’re like small scale Manchurian candidates, all thinking we’re acting on our unique thoughts, all unwittingly programmed with trigger words like buy, sale, savings, and one day only. The fallout from the execution of our mission accumulating so slowly most will be long gone by the time the full scale of the consequences are known.
You think I’m over stating the point?
Take a step back and look at your world. Our lives all orbit around the same core ideas. Our kids all study the same subjects. All being validated, or invalidated as the case may be, by the same tests. Our neighborhoods all share the same color schemes. Our colleagues all drinking Starbucks, eating in the same chain restaurants, monitoring the world’s pulse on Facebook, and waiting for hours… maybe even days in line for the latest Apple product… everyone knowing that in just a few days there won’t be a need to wait, and that in about a year they’ll do it all over again.
It’s not exactly the diversity you’d expect from 300 million free thinkers is it?
The average American life consists of 26,000 days… or 624,000 hours if you prefer to make it sound longer.
Believe it or not you will spend more time looking longingly into an electronic device than anything else you do on this planet. Yes, it’s true, a whopping forty-one percent of your life, 10,600 of your days, will be consumed by your electronic devices.
As for work… well, you’ll dedicate 7,500 of your finite days, almost a third of your finite life, to the pursuit of an infinite asset… money. Trading the finite for the infinite is a bad exchange by any accounting method.
And the time you spend on the fun and truly important stuff, you know, the things that bring you happiness and better health, the things that make life resemble the poems written about it… time with friends and family and lovers, exploring, cooking, eating, and having sex. The time you spend on them collectively won’t add up to a quarter of the time you spend working and looking into the Retina display of your one true love.
All of which is pretty depressing in and of itself. But as far as I’m concerned the saddest stat of all… the stat that certainly goes a LONG way to explaining the current frustration that seems to dominate much of daily life is this: the average American spends only 2,500 hours… a paltry 0.45% of their 624,000 hours in coital bliss.
What the fuck? Or should I more accurately say what the lack of fuck?
Is it a wonder so many gobble anti-depressants like they come from a pez dispenser?
This so obviously isn’t the life we had in mind when we were young… and free minded… and anything was possible.
We’re not so free after all.
Or… I suppose you could alternatively argue we are free, and we’ve used that freedom, that others have so generously died for, to place ourselves in lifelong debt, eat ourselves into sickness, and anesthetize ourselves with our iPads as we did so.
In which case I’d say we don’t do well with freedom.
Either way paints a pretty grim picture.
So here’s an idea… I propose that until we learn to do something a tad more meaningful with our freedom, no more people should die for it.