Jamie Klinger

Shut up. You didn’t know all of this. Maybe you’ve had ideas that have skirted around it, maybe you thought things similar to it, but you never put it together in an article articulated like this one. You didn’t come up with a listing of the problems. And you know what you’re going to do after finishing this article? Continue leading your life exactly as you did before, not changing a damned thing.

People know how good exercise makes you feel but most of us are too lazy to seek that feeling. Why? Because it’s not the easy way out. Our society pushes us to take the easy way out, work work work buy buy buy consume, eat, shit, sleep, live another day. Have no meaningful impact. Consume. Kill. Do you even understand how easy it is to live an ‘average’ life in North America? How many of us are just running through the rat race with blinders on, not even focusing on what we’re doing just to get by another day so we can live more meaninglessly. Maybe you have pets. Maybe you have kids. Maybe your family means a lot to you and you take care of them. How many things do you do at once? You’re too busy in your scheduled life-programming to stop to smell the flowers. To walk outside of your home and admire the beauty around you. Every day, if you took FIVE minutes to stop in a new location on your walk to the local grocery store (I bet you don’t do that either), you’d be a better person. If you turned off your connection to every beep and buzz of ‘connection’.

It’s a lie to be connected unless you’re using it right. If you’re using facebook to meet new people, attend events you never would have attended before, that’s great, but most of us aren’t doing that, we’re further isolating ourselves and it burns. It shortens our attention spans, gives us the illusion that we have more friends, and don’t pay attention to anyone for any extended period of time. Are you with your lover after a long day of work? Turn off the computer, the ipad, iphone, blackberry, television. Set up some candles, a little music, hold each other, love each other, talk to each other. Lose yourselves in each other and find your universe together.

It’s often said that you have no idea what’s out there, but 99% of us don’t have any idea what’s in here.

Update: Apparently the first blog post (about becoming a trillionaire) is a summary of the documentary The Century of Self.