Dealing With Reality Past the Productive Years— Part 1 of 2 (to be posted within 2 days)
It takes humans long formative years before any, even modest, understanding of life realities can be vaguely understood. Compared to other species, we clearly are the smartest, albeit that barely puts a dent in our understanding reality to any appreciable extent. I reckon it is reasonable enough, as the smartest species on our planet, to assume we must be here to run the show. Some of us never lose this youthful cockiness. While I think my formative years’ bewilderment of all things good and bad was worse than most others, the persistent feeling remained that life must be, to some extent, an experience that necessitates pondering things ad nausea. So many assumptions, about so many things, kept falling by the wayside, to be replaced by new perceptions based on new evidence. Time after time, after I had the pins all set up for a strike, my actions produced a gutter ball. So back it was to the drawing board, and while I got better clarity on so many things, this clarity didn’t always enable me, by myself, to effectuate a needed outcome on so many matters. It seems we all seek contentment, but human diversity prevents any clearly marked expressways to contentment. It seems too many people, frustrated by all the complexities and diversity, choose rigidity as their main defense strategy. Belief becomes the holy grail upon which these people (not me of course) base much of their understanding. Belief is something we can wrap our arms around, a sort of bubble wrap, for our feelings and actions. It seems some of the things we take the most pride in, are our strongest beliefs. Try taking a ‘lucky teddy bear’ away from a child and the child will erupt like a volcano. When things we value are taken away from us there is no way currently to accurately measure the existence or extent of any permanent damage to our soul—whatever our soul might really be.
As a child, I spent an inordinate amount of faith in my inherited religion. It puzzled me why so many other people did not believe the Baptist wing of Christians (Northern Baptist of course) were not God’s chosen people. When Billy Graham worked the crowd into an ethical fervor, why didn’t everybody just go forward, be saved, and live life happily ever after? Hundreds of thousands of years after human existence on our planet, the picture is still as clouded as ever as to whose inherited religion is the true religion sponsored by God. After living all this time I don’t think I have any clearer image of what God is really like. Ok, wherever there is a gift, there must be a gift giver. After that I am basically either speechless or mumbling fairy tale like dribble. Whatever God really is, God had to have come first to create everything, or at least create the laws which enable new things to be created. But how can something come from nothing? This is not the first time my mind has come face to face with something I clearly have no mental competency with which to comprehend. For example, I don’t know why you are you and I am I, and what would be the point to ponder this at all since there is not the remotest chance either of us will ever understand it. So, rationally, much of what we ponder ends up being “It is what it is.” Maybe if I could chat with God, like some claim they can, He/She/It would be constantly telling me “Because I say so, that’s why”. Since I am the dumb one and God is the smart one, that would probably suffice as an answer.
Ready or not, the formative years end, and the productive years begin. I, for one was not really ready. I got fired from my first job, and an attempted firing at my second, before I managed to get hold of the situation and understand my modus of operation had to change. We all change, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worst—but change is inevitable. Other people change too, and this just complicates all our lives even further. Relationships get strained and sometimes break, sometimes hang together by the thinnest of threads, and sometimes relationships end bitterly. Sometimes the end of a relationship can’t be avoided—via death or incompatibility, or external situations which end it for us. Be this as it may, our own relationships are only part of the picture. What are we to do individually about all the less fortunate with whom we actually know, or at least realize exist? Whatever life really is, it is certainly no zippy-do-da-day permanent sort of existence. Not for anyone. Like it or not, there are so many people just going no wheres fast. We often feel that if these less fortunate would just have the good sense to live their lives differently things would be better for them, so it’s all on them—not our problem. The age we grew up in was a world in which it was the best of all possible worlds for some, but for far more it was a not so great of possible worlds.
Our perception of the world depends to a large extent on our own environmental situation. From a practical standpoint this means diversity, by it’s very nature, generates widely disparate opinions and conclusions about so many aspects of life, and how we feel about people we know well, and about people we only vaguely know exist. If we are affluent, how many times are we really ever on the streets of our urban, rural, or suburban ghettos? During our lifetime the size, personal safety, and depravity of our ghettos have grown. How many times a year are we ever in the midst of these ghettos? Probably zero in most cases. When I was young we had Hunter Street and Crotonville, black and white, wrong side of the tracks, communities. It really wasn’t unsafe to walk through these communities, but then we never felt any desire to do so and felt it probably would be unsafe. I had a strange neighbor who still lived at home as an adult with his parents and often would walk miles to town and the train station, take the train to the city, then return and around midnight, would walk from the train station right through a ghetto neighborhood and to my knowledge nothing bad ever happened to him—except his strangeness, which he had from day one.
Teaching university students can be an everyday enlightenment about the life situations of so many students from so many walks of life. But this is not a universal experience for many University Professors. They barely know what student individual grades are, let alone any other aspects of student lives. They teach, often very well, the concepts of the subject matter and that is the all of it. This, after all, is what they are paid to do. Other professors for varied reasons, end up knee deep in discussions with students about situations in their lives. One would have to be exceptionally dense not to realize how many unfair hurdles are often in a student’s way to professional success—hurdles that someone like myself never faced—and to be honest, had I faced, I doubt I would have ever gotten to college, let alone graduated.
Diversity dictates that we gravitate to our own peculiar areas of interest. Progress in evolution depends on diversity. This diversity can make it quite difficult for us to line up strict labels of right and wrong when it comes to human behavior. If right or wrong behavior is to be the measure of who gets to go to Heaven or Hell, then certainly God would make it a level playing field, do away with all this genetic and environmental diversity. Since diversity in genetics and environment, along with chance, drive the process—-who earns going to Heaven gets a little dicey. So instinctively we kind of figure out who we are and what we like or want and then pursue whatever the pathway seems best. Lot of retracing our steps and going a different pathway involved. However, it does not seem to be that simple. Sure, if we like to paint, we may become an artist. Or maybe we like the adrenaline thrill of potentially dangerous activities so we may climb cliffs or bungee jump etc. But suppose we kind of enjoy harming other people in some way or another? Is this ok? It is not—for the reasons to follow in a bit. The goal of everyone is contentment. But we need understand that addictive or compulsive behaviors of any sort can not, by definition, generate contentment. If you feel compelled to wash your hands or sweep the floor 100 times a day this does not make you contented at all, but if you don’t do it, you feel uncomfortable. It’s a trap.
Let’s take Donald Trump here because everyone at this point is familiar with his lifestyle. He enjoys wealth, power over others, notoriety, and making sure the other person or group always gets the short end of the stick in any relationship by him with them. He was born into a wealthy family, inherited millions, and quickly realized that with millions to start with, and the ‘art of the deal’ (stiffing others) he could amass more wealth. Every behavior which helped him amass his varied wants became compulsive and addictive. Enough was never enough—and even now, with endless wealth, power, notoriety, a trophy wife, and devoted followers—enough is never enough. When enough is never enough, contentment is non existent. A contented person is does not rant and attack somebody or some group, almost everybody and anyone, 24 hours a day. And worst of all, he simply cannot help it. He proudly claims he has amassed all this because he is a genius, but then a genius would never amass the degree of discontentment he has achieved.
This musing is not about Trump other than his example of how we can follow our wants down the wrong road too fast and end up knee deep in discontentment. He who has little and is satisfied is richer by far (in terms of contentment) than he who has much and wants more. Enough is enough is one of the most important aspects of life to master. Everything that glitters is not gold.
If the formative years are the years we learn how to exist in life given our own peculiarities, then the productive years are when we seek achievements. It is like in most sports where you practice and practice but then at some point the games begin in earnest. Competition is good in that it helps us maximally develop our talents. Obviously our talents (genetic) and personal environment differ. Everyone is not equal at all. The distribution of talent and varied environments make life unfair. Whatever is going on in reality, we as individuals are not the center of importance. Religions attempt to change that and suggest we can be individually important if we inherit or marry into a particular religion and follow the human scriptures written as the roadmap to either success here and now or, at the very least, some sort of Heaven after our death. We are all bad, God is all good, and if we don’t meet God’s need for us to properly worship Him/Her/It we will go to some sort of Hell. Fortunately, God loves us, and if we shape up sometime before death, God will forgive us for all our sins (save us) and we go to some sort of Heaven. It is not clear what happens to those who our actions or politics or religion or inactions have their lives destroyed, and because we helped kill them or made their lives miserable, they never get ‘saved’ as a consequence. In the extreme case, if we killed several people out of anger, or in war, or ran them over in a car with reckless driving etc. and they were not ‘saved’ at the time of our action towards them, they can never go to Heaven, and we, on our deathbed even, can be ‘saved’ and go to Heaven. Huh? Something is very screwed up here.
Religion certainly does give a lot of people hope and the strength to endure a lot of situations in life.That’s why religion is called the ‘poor man’s opium’ and the poorer a community is, the more intense and animated their religious services. One community is thanking God for their success and the other community is begging for some help from God to have success. The religious services of the affluent are usually much more subdued, formatted, and ritualistic. But just like heroin, religion can dull the pain of our current situation. While that may be necessary in hopeless situations, dulling the pain (making you care less about the realities of your situation) also tends to make it less likely that a person will make the changes necessary to better the situation. If we are all God’s children then why is life so unfortunate to some and very fortunate for others? The ugly kids hate proms and the attractive kids love proms. Why would God, Who we believe loves all his creations, do this to the ugly? The answer seems to be this: the evolutionary process works. It has generated progress now for billions of years. God, however we conceive Him/Her/It to be, created the laws which govern this successful process. And just like the person who invented the rules for Poker is not responsible for who wins or loses at Poker, God—who created the laws for the evolutionary process, is not responsible for who is better genetically and environmentally to succeed at this game of life. There is no evidence at all that God ever intervenes and protects any particular person from the laws which govern the evolutionary process. That is to say, there is no evidence that the ‘fix’ is in for anyone or any group by God for them. Somebody who claims God talks to them is anecdotal, same as somebody who has a grandmother who claims this or that cured or helped alleviate some medical condition. Without more scientific evidence both are pure anecdotal and must be believed on faith alone.
At this point God would seem to be a real bastard. If I am born in the worst ghetto with a crackhead mother for a parent with the worst schools, the worst teachers, the worst medical care, and live in a most dangerous neighborhood, it is all because God allows chance and diversity to exist. This is far different from “God decreed this be so”. This makes us feel like ‘stop the world, I want to get off’. And why doesn’t God personally give each of us a Bible written by HIM so we can follow HIS laws and get to Heaven? The answer seems to be this: humans have an innate genetically driven ethical trait called the “Golden Rule”. Everyone everywhere recognizes this as an ethical principle. This trait, a genetic gift from God via the evolutionary process, makes it possible for the greatest number of people to achieve the greatest degree of contentment. Thus, we have the ability individually and collectively to maximize contentment for the greatest number of people. The problem is we seldom follow this ethical principle that we all understand is an ethical principle—it is in our genes, although like other human traits, it will vary a lot from one person to another.
So, at this point we might say, “Well this doesn’t work very well, so leaving it all up to us to help each other is a bad system.” I guess it would be if evolution is now over. But by what logic could we claim this? At one time most people imagined slavery would always exist. But, for the most part, it no longer does. Of course getting rid of slavery left many other human deficiencies alive and well. We cannot even begin to envision what the future will be like, unless we are fundamentalists about a particular religion then we just know we are going to Heaven. Really? Strange then that, at least some of them, don’t jump in front of a speeding car when much younger as a quick way to get to Heaven. If knew conclusively that I was going to heaven, I would get there as fast as I could.
