Mostly when I walk around a communal area, say, a busy street, I tend to notice information and people organized into businesses: competing groups desperately vying with each other for society’s worth. Apparently true intrinsic value or substance has been reduced to a systematically agreed-upon material we call money. What is this material and why is it valued so strongly? Must the symbol for value/worth become more significant than our values themselves? Money is not the problem, it is the way in which we think about it and the way we often use it. It divides us and guides us into tunnels of greed and envy. It confuses us even more than we already are when we wake up every morning, blinking our eyes and wondering what strange happening the day might have in store. Looking around, it seems like we’re all trying to invent more moments in which we can become more efficient. And efficiency has become, for many, defined as the rate at which money can be gained when it should be defined as the rate at which we create meaning, construct compassion, generate pleasure, and aid others within our lives. Can I really devote my time to the accumulation of symbolic power for self-gain? I don’t know. I don’t think so, but many societies throughout the world seem to be not only following this groundwork, but spreading it as well. Why don’t we ask kids who they want to be instead of what they want to be? We should strive to be good people, not productive mechanisms working in the name of order.
“Get a good job. Be well-off. You’ll retire early and be happy.” ---- no. thanks.
I believe we need an abundance of art: writers, poets, musicians, painters, drawers, sculptors, dancers, filmmakers, photographers, engineers, architects, etc. that feel passionately about making communities more vibrant, substantive, expressive, colorful, and most importantly, more meaningful. We need an environment that harnesses respect for meaningful forms of human expression that deserve to be appreciated in our society. We need to encourage an atmosphere that opens up creative thinking in people’s minds, a new habitat for our individuality. We mustn’t think about moving the world forward (“efficiency”, “systems”, “machines”, “formulas”, "material productivity", “money”) anymore. Instead, we must move it outward (creativity, expression, interaction, communication, compassion, love), expanding and enlarging it in every infinite direction. Every day we are attacking both our ability to think differently and the ways in which we manifest that ability… in both kids and adults.
We shape our culture. How to inspire people to consciously shape their own is a question I ponder.
I desire to know what people most truly believe day and night. Or, moreover, I want them to express it, because the world is seemingly losing the voice of the person, the creator, the individual. We are drowning in ourselves as managed systemic contraptions, losing our sense of compassion, originality, and innovation. We all yearn to be given ideas to think about, art to absorb, significance to nourish. We value each other, not the structures that value their own survival at the cost of our imagination’s. Where there is fire, we shall dance.
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