| Jun. 17th, 2006 @ 05:34 pm Apathy |
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It's funny to me that apathy is something so easily encouraged. It's like looking at a zombie, with its lifeless eyes and skin falling off its face, and saying to yourself: Gee, that looks like fun.
I honestly don't get it... but I'll succumb to it, just like the next person. Hell, I now live in a state of media reduction, because I came to realize last year that I really was losing my life to television and video games. My parents were right, if not about everything, then at least this one thing. I was becoming so lazy, I couldn't even get the energy up to do that exercise where you monitor how much time you spend on the TV or X-Box, because it was too much effort.
So when I moved to Denton, I didn't get plugged in. I left the Cable TV turned off, and only after living her for four months have I finally signed up for the internet. Even with that, I have to be careful with what I do on it. I'll waste my time looking at message boards or myspace, and let the machine make a dithering idiot of me.
What's interesting is how I see people's ability to get the energy up to do anything fading more and more, the further I immerse myself into media to encounter them. When I observe the writings and activities of people on, for example, myspace, I see people discussing issues with a defeatist attitude already in place. As if the discussion itself wasn't even worth the text, because really who's going to go out and turn their computer off to do anything?
Like this Fry Street demolition incident. I see people talking about the destruction of the one meritable bit of culture actually in Denton as a potentially good thing. Even though they know in the back of their minds that it's making the last section of the city that seperated it from everything else go away, they couldn't care enough to fight the notion of having another Starbucks across the street. Because, hey, Starbucks has okay coffee.
Even I have to make myself think really hard about the potentcy of their ignorance to get mad enough to want to fight for something. I'm not even fighting for the cause, really, I'm just fighting because a large majority are telling me that I can't or shouldn't, that it's pointless no matter how hard I or anyone else tries.
See? I'm getting all riled just typing about it. And I have to surf that rage like a wave, try to direct my intellect and emotion down this collapsing funnel of reality crashing in on my head, and pray that I can shoot out the other side.
I've tried many approaches to increasing my drive with regard to things I care about, from focus exercises to diet modifications, physical exercise, reading more (like I don't do that too much already), and meditating. It really makes me wonder if I'm being subjected to some kind of thought wave that's dampening my, and everyone else's, will.
I read a pamphlet for the Save Fry Street effort the other day, and wondered how many people would even muster the mental effort to read it as well. They're probably too busy figuring out how to get money together to get drunk tonight.
-Sean |
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