There is a very real danger of our drifting into an attitude of contempt for humanity… God himself did not despise humanity, but became man for men’s sake. ~Bonhoeffer

I couldn’t find the precise quote I wanted, but this will have to do.  I think there is a temptation to define how we “should be” without context of how we “are”, and then pronounce our present condition to be a total pile of crap.  If we contextualize our ideals, we end up with something less pure (more human), and this scares people.  If we start with dirty, nasty humans we end up with small variations on dirty, nasty humans (an admittedly less-than-lofty goal).  Yet all religious conversations as to the ultimate lives we can live end up as clean-room demonstrations of an irrelevant goal.  And its irrelevancy is not simply a result of its impossibility, but because it ignores everything we have at our disposal to define who we are and where we’re going, namely: the world around us and in us.

Meaning and purpose and purity and relevance and beauty are all activities in accumulation.  The urge to bulldoze the foundation and start the perfect house from scratch avoids the most obvious problem: a perfect house without a foundation is not perfect at all.  We want to say “well if only I had this hour free, my life would be better”.  So we drop out of our life whatever is boring us and build something new, only to find that people who don’t work are poor in more ways than one.  “If only my life were more pain free, I’d be a better person” and we eliminate the chances for growth and learning in the lives of our children.  The activity of refactoring our lives rarely takes the form of a careful removal of the portions involved, a complete reanalysis, and a newly picked replacement.  We live like we shop (some of us, I’m looking at you).  We don’t consider the ramifications of the negative action before we thrust ourselves into the pursuit of its foil.

And sadly, we call it being human.  We’re more human for our haphazard decision-making than our calculated engineering of life.  The exercise to determine the best way to approach the problem demolishes itself at its roots by suggesting that this type of answer is the answer we should avoid.  And of the hundreds of angles I’ve approached it, none is unique in this very respect.  The problem of life itself is shrouded in logical oxymorons, and our best observation yet is that of awe and submission.

People often remark that it’s very easy to feel alone in today’s society.  Impersonal, mechanistic. Despite his/her human form the fast food operator is lifeless, cold, and distant in the day-to-day mania.

Some attribute our lonely culture to mannerisms, saying that politeness has fallen by the wayside in our capitalistic striving for efficiency.  Some say it’s technology and the easier solution of text and instant messages to the laborious phone conversations of the past.  Others still say that what we’ve created is a function of smaller, more broken families, fragmented communities, and distant neighbors.  I’m restating the obvious, because everyone is aware of the phenomenon, but everyone has a unique cause and a similarly special solution.

Proximity is not the solution.  Urban centers recently passed the 50% mark, meaning half the world lives within extremely close to hundreds of other people.  The appeal of the city is to be close to “everything”, and inevitably that means you’re close to “everyone”.  And while there may be less than minor social interactions on the subways and in grocery stores, there is plenty of people in the business realm that you are required to engage with, whether you want to or not.

Religion is not the solution.  It seems like religious folks were the first to see this coming and dove in to fix the problem, selling themselves as the warm home for the forgotten citizen.  And they were overrun.  Religion has become commodity, and the venues of worship are looking like those of concerts and public speaking areas.  Worse yet, faiths everywhere have reframed themselves, dropping the scales that used to balance the introspective and the outreach to follow the herd to the next big “event”.

Shrinks are not the solution.  Psychologists have their place, but the rise of the psychologist in modern society has correlated negatively with the impersonality of society.  Scientologists think we’re over medicated.  I’ll let you make your own decision.

In a recent survey, Americans on average are less likely than ever to communicate regularly with a close confidant.  Noting this is a survey, and the word “confidant” was up to the interpretation of the survey-taker, significant generalizations can be gleaned, mostly in the “people are less likely to have deep, meaningful relationships with folks” department.

The overwhelming majority of professionals that I’ve met with this summer have all spoken very highly of our company presidents’ “Networking for Life” seminar.  In it, he talks about keeping in touch with the people you know now (and knew) well into the future for bean trading.  Most everyone has mentioned it at least once, usually with an additional “I wish I’d have know that when I was your age”.  The sad part is the obligatory question and response.  Why?

When people around us become steps to a higher place, be it in our career, our social circle, or some hot chick, they cease to support us.  Distance acrues.  There is something intensely satisfying about being “known”, and very few goals are worth the compromise.  Work is not a sufficient place for being “known”.  People know your quirks, they can predict your blow ups and what you’re good at, but mostly you’re a flat character and an accessory to a plot that doesn’t need you.  Better to have the luxury of a dull office than to be lulled into facelessness.

There are legions of things trying to define us.  It’s the ultimate victory: a human soul.  And it’s infinitely profitable.  Just yesterday my cube-mate associated himself with the “6 million other iPhone owners”.  The things we own, the groups we are a part of, the activities we do, they all want a piece of us and we’re not usually the one to send someone home hungry.  Yet it’s our friends who make us, rather than relabel us.  Let’s not lose that.

I think it’s all a conspiracy.  When you’re young, you look forward to your birthday.  Most of the time it’s the presents, but sometimes it’s a new opportunity (like driving or riding a roller coaster).  Then, as you age, you quickly learn to dread it as another sign that you’re getting older.  Somewhere along the line it loses its allure.

Kids are generally not well funded.  Childhood is a great idea, but it would never work in the real world because of the lack of cash-flow.  Parental subsidies make it possible, and part of it must be this idea that if somehow I can make my kids excited about getting older then I won’t be quite so sad about my own anniversary and increase in age.  What once was a celebration of what will come in the future becomes a day of remorse for all that has passed.

Part of this probably stems from a view of old people as ineffective: Staunch defenders of the status quo, pension/tenure mongers, people who perpetually hold on to the view that our greatest day was yesterday.  And this perspective holds because of its self-fulfilling nature.  People growing into an expected comatose state will see the past as better than the present (never mind the future), will see the passage of time as an attempt of the universe to take away what was good, and will generally be less happy than those who see bright opportunities ahead.  I hear there is a steep valley in the happiness to age graph.  Really old people experience the “best time of their lives”, but the people getting there are hobgoblins.

We need a reorganization of culture.  It’s a circular frustration to fight tooth and nail against older generations to realize the future necessary to achieve anything meaningful because the other end of the timeline feels like your fight is to take everything good away.  Without a unified perspective that the best is coming, we relegate ourselves to infighting and ineffectiveness.  The greatest leaders the world has ever known put their followers into a spell of possibility, rather than burden them with the loss of what was.  We must never forget the past, but every effort must be made not to choose it over the future.

Find any musician worth his salt and you’re destined to run into a few thousand fans following his every word.  They’ll set up websites to discuss releases that haven’t actually happened, gather merch to pronounce themselves a part of this “movement”, and sing the praises of every member of the band (by legal name).  Nobody pays them, and nobody encourages this activity (though it becomes a sort of self-perpetuating phenomenon once it reaches critical mass). It’s a human reaction to something great. By announcing its presence to the world, we join ourselves to it, and share the glory with it.

There are countless other examples.  An exciting one for males: “I liked her before she was hot.”  Somehow, the recognition of beauty, grace, or some endearing quality of a female makes us feel good.  I’ve been in several situations where one of my friends decided to let some girl know how pretty she was mid conversation.  And it was awkward as anything.  Why now?  Way to kill the convo.  Are you hoping to hook up with her?  But I know the answer (possibly, but for this illustration, no), because I’ve been that friend.  Or I sit there with a compliment on the tip of my tongue, holding it back to keep from becoming “that guy”.  There’s something about stating the obvious out loud, with no other intention than to say “I saw this in you, and it was good.”

Sports teams have their own fan-bases as they battle it out on the big screen.  From a very alien perspective, the entire process is so idiotic.  Who cares who can bring the ball across the field without getting decked?  But that’s not it at all.  When we emotionally attach ourselves and associate ourselves as “fans” of a team, we share in the thrill of their victories (and losses).  We become a part of something that so many people (maybe even worldwide) are familiar with.  We become bigger than ourselves.

I think a lot of these things translate really well into the realm of religion.  Yet the process of getting from a to b results in horrendously mangled forms of expression.  I personally feel a tendency when I go to Churches these days to evoke some sort of emotional response to the worship service.  I try to feel the music, to be affected by the words that come out of my mouth.  This is my duty: to climb to a cloud.  But I’m perpetually unsatisfied.  Sure, I can get a “God high” and leave the place feeling great.  But feelings fade.

The fundamentalist in me says “gah, it’s not about emotion.”  So I go back and sing the words out of duty even in absence of any emotion, like a tired marathon runner, thinking silently that God is listening and nodding.  Yes, I am good.  You are correct, Stefan, I did that.  Excellent work, I did that too.  Eww, you squeaked.  Good recovery, close your eyes.

Both of these things aren’t “incorrect”, despite the way I’ve portrayed them.  Worship is “for God” as much as air is “for us”.  And emotions are an integral part of what makes us human.  Without them we’re routines, and people routinely have difficulty seeing glory to God through process and procedure.  But a more wholistic ideal has to exist, and I think it looks a lot like a Dallas Cowboys fan, or a sober person at an Incubus concert, or that teenage boy letting a girl know how beautiful she is to him.  Maybe we “commune” with God through worship by becoming emotionally involved in his successes and failures.  We recognize his greatness and find satisfaction is showing that outwards.  We state the obvious to him, even though he knows it.  And through this process we become one with him as though worship were a supernatural vehicle for transporting us into his etheral arms.

Maybe, if that’s true, then we do actually need worship to be close to God.  Not because we need that emotional drug, but because we need to reposition ourselves psychologically…emotionally…spiritually closer to God.  And we can’t by just trying hard.

I love you all.

Is it better to be open minded and closed-mouthed or open-mouthed and closed minded?

What exactly does it even mean to be open minded?  Early indications (taking into account I’m eighteen) seem to suggest that the human faculty for objective reasoning is misinformed at best (and totally impaired at worst).  We can make relatively accurate judgments that are “basic” however you might define the word, but as abstractions are piled on we either completely misunderstand each other or are looking at different pictures because no one can agree on much anything beyond the length of a meter and that taxes suck and life’s unfair.  But if we take as given the absence of a large segment of “objective truth” in this universe (or our ability to see it clearly, pragmatically they are synonymous), I think we’re left with a problem that I have yet to be able to solve and that I will get to in a moment.

The longer I live, the more I notice that a lot of problems originate in our minds, take short flights through conversations, discussions, and books, and finally lay themselves back to rest right where they started.  Being a confident person requires little more than to believe you can do something, which should be easy if we had absolute control over our belief process (and obviously we don’t).  The sick end of this problem lies in self-perpetuating mental problems, like not having friends. To be loved, be lovable, and depressive lonely people rarely have friends. Snap out of it and bammo, if it was only so easy!

So back to my original point. If we assume that this objective truth is merely some sort of illusion, citing all our friends who disagree on everything, then it follows that a person should set up a system of beliefs that optimizes their livelihood here. So why is that so hard?

Belief, it seems, is half agency and half circumstance. You can’t believe something you haven’t heard, or is misrepresented or unsupported, and similarly if you don’t WANT to believe something you never will. But I WANT to believe a lot of things that I simply cannot force myself to. Like that I’m some sort of charismatic socialist revolutionary fighting for the rights and freedoms of my fellow man. That’d be awesome.

Yet the feasibility of an idea lies in our distance from it.  If only we could progress by believing incremental falsehoods, rather than full-fledged lies.  Disbelieve in yourself, but believe in the future.

I love you all.