Trapped Lives
It seems to me that we manage to live trapped lives. Our stress on working commits us to work that is both wasted and self-destructing, tears at our health. We make—manufacture— ourselves a thousand things that have no use except to be bought. a thousand other things that, like bugs, eat out our vital insides. And a thousand other that are simply vain. It is very stressful work, and misapplied. Meanwhile we live miserably. We bombard ourselves with entertainment for our minds, which largely are unsatiated and bored, but don't know it.
We grunt to create artificial entertainment for ourselves, whose minds have grown life-forsakenly weary as well as bored—lackadaisically old, half to dead. So we need our word games to toy with, just as old people need their crossword puzzles. It is just this bored, forceless life that produces a blind belief in heaven and God and afterlife. We need something, because earth and our own bodies which sprang of earth aren't good enough, bore us.
We manufacture our stresses and anxieties to remedy boredom. We need our frustrating cars and infuriating traffic jams in order to stimulate something in us, even if it drives us to drink. We need our newspapers and world politics as ever-changing games to play with, mentally invigorating. We don't mind if a few lose their lives in the playing: so long as it makes balm for the remainder.
Always we are making things, being little individual gods, with a little self-worship thrown about: nothing extensive. We like our modesty.
And its rather fun to be busy all the time with new constructions; if not new things then new laws and rules; or new mental experiences to “experience”. It's rather fun, a fun life. At least its not boring. And not embarrassing, which might be worse. Embarrassed, made fun of, ridiculed by the minds of other people: that's simply devastating.
