Now in the Weeds of our Discontent
Image via Mungowitz
The world has just surpassed the milestone of seven billion people. Despite dire and repeated predictions to the contrary, major portions of the world's population have organized themselves into societies that, for the first time in human history, have an abundance of leisure time. The tragic irony of this achievement is that, by and large, we haven't figured out what to do with such bounty.
For millennia, men spent all of their waking hours trying to extend their waking hours for another day. Then Moses invented the Sabbath, as well as the general concept of leisure time. For the first time, common man could conceive of a new purpose for living, besides simply securing more life. One of the new goals became securing a more comfortable future. And this spurred creative thinking.
Fast forward to the post World War Two world. With the end of the great depression, modern technology and global free-market capitalism ignited a wave of wealth creation in the Western world, also including the Axis losers of the World War (Germany, Italy and Japan). By the end of the nifty fifties, ordinary people had more leisure time than common man had ever dreamed of having. So along came the hippies of the sixties, the greatest wastrels the world had ever seen. Their "gift" to humanity? How to put leisure time to no-use at all, besides getting wasted and trashing the environment.
Subsequently, the boomers led the way to allowing mass media, especially television, to entertain them while they succumbed to stuffing their faces with barely edible feces, as their lower extremities vanished beyond the event-horizon of their midriff bulges. And gradually, their minds, what was left of them from too many drugs and drunken orgies in school, began to turn off, as TV-land produced an endless stream of alternate reality to keep them semi-conscious enough to procreate new generations of zombies, like the ones currently occupying and defecating on the streets of our cities. The campers aren't happy, either. They want something, but they can't figure out what.
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