The Decay of Society: The Sickness, Part 2

“Life's wheels are spinning, ‘gonna be one bumpy ride”

—Hardline, Life’s a Bitch

The five stages of grief are often put forth when discussing grieving. While we typically couple grief with loss, the dictionary will expand it to mean “The process of feeling distress or sorrow.” High school health classes taught me that there are two kinds of stress…eustress and distress. The first is supposedly the good kind of stress: The type of anxiety that prepares you to do better in a given task: It’s what separates apathy from achievement. Distress, however, is the more famous brother.

Stress is so often something that permeates our lives: From the anxieties that arise in the morning hours through our lying awake in bed at the end of the day worrying about tomorrow. In this endless cycle of waking and sleeping stressors, we often find ourselves with a dose of escapism: Watching the latest celebrities in Hollywood or elsewhere live their lives of misery and take great opportunities and waste them away on the frills, passions, and benefits of the moment. We find ourselves reveling in this misery, most individuals not going past the latest celebutante’s turmoil du jour and failing to get the latest news on how local, national, or world events are shaping the world in which we live.

So often these lives of ours are in the vacuum of a padded bubble in which we have access to so much information, but I’ve seen so many people only go so far as is necessary to make themselves comfortable in their castle, hiding behind a moat, and isolating themselves from any reality that means listening to someone other than a celebrity or comedic news program in order to take in the information that is relevant in some way, shape, or form to their immediate world.

All this arrives to us from a world that has been crafted to be the glamorous one. As a song from a recent movie dictates: “Watch the whores parade for the price of fame,” most everyone in this society clings to some semblance or personal meaning of having glamorous aspects in their lives: From the status symbols of cars, houses, and boats to the bohemian styling of a person that supposedly goes their own way. Living in the bubble, entrenching oneself in the comfort zone, and striving to someone’s definition of glamour and fifteen minutes of fame might be the fun and easy way out, but in the end does it offer the fulfillment that we each want and need in our lives, or does it simply leave us feeling cold and empty as are a majority of the other people that follow this path?

The Decay of Society: The Sickness, Part 1

“I can see inside you, the sickness is rising”

—Disturbed, The Sickness

It’s all the same, but only the names will change. As time marches forward, we are faced with the inevitable truth that history repeats itself, and those who fail to look beyond the façade of the so-called “real world” are doomed to repeat that history, oftentimes at the expense of the integrity of society. What is it that decays at the fabric of the society and sends the world we live in towards the downward spiral towards complete dissolution of those core values which should be the glue, holding things together?

A quick search of a dictionary defines glamour as “alluring beauty or charm.” However, another definition not far from the same breath follows: “casting a spell over something or someone.” From the first impressions of childhood we are exposed to a world that is bombarded by a false construct of who we are supposed to be, what image we are supposed to present, and ultimately the values which we are supposed to hold. No matter how strong our upbringing glamour juxtaposes onto our world a skewed reality of what should be: Conformity that permeates and threatens our individuality. “You are an individual, just like everyone else,” in the words of a greatly humorous poster. In my lifetime I have come to see the shift of individual personalities away from a norm to a point where that is the norm.

Let me take a step back. Glamour a sickness of what I speak. Armed with good intentions as they may be, most of us fail to see past the draw that this sickness has on us. Even as the geek that I am, I seek to define it with a glamorous edge. I can often be seen wearing a button-up shirt and tie, dress slacks, and a nice set of dress shoes. To myself, I have constructed this image based on what I’ve perceived as what I should be. Years ago I surrounded myself with a mentality and an image that I wanted to become. After enough time of living and immersing myself in it, I became it. Behavioral modification at a fundamental level caused my emergence of who I am today. However, with discretion, discipline, and sound judgment I learned to take the good with the bad and mold myself into the person that I wanted to become sans the negative aspects that could come with it.

Such is the world we live in, but lacking the respect, discipline, and good judgment that make their way into the person. People have taken their cues from idols ranging from the Material Girl to all the other creations that Hollywood, for instance, has been able to manufacture over the years. They have manufactured a set of morals and values that, when duplicated, seem to leave a person empty in the end. From this emptiness we often find our worlds slipping away in little pieces and becoming increasingly less fulfilling. We are left with a shell of a reality that, as glamour would have it, lacks substance, but sure can look good on the outside.

Each day in our life we are faced with choices to make. Life is a journey, certain parts are destinations, but in the grander picture it is nothing more than a series of choices. Partly our environment and partly our makeup allow us the vantage from which to make these decisions. In a world that emphasizes the power of the flash, but doesn’t readily show the long-lasting ramifications of making good decisions, we are faced with a conundrum that few can rise above and see the grander picture in all the true glory that it holds, without the sickness showing on the outside.

It is often said that we are the sum of our experiences. I tend to think that we should strive to be nothing less than the sum of our experiences, but the efficiencies of synergy could, in fact, help us to strive for better. Should we allow such faults as pride tear apart at our “somethingness,” eventually leaving us feeling empty inside. At the end of the day, each person needs to know that they aren’t alone on this journey, even though bouts of loneliness will often speckle an otherwise healthy existence. We aren’t how much money we have in the bank, we’re not the job we have, and we’re not the stuff that we have, nor are we the projection of what the world wants us to be. At the end of the day we are the effect of what we put out into the world. If you add value to it, it will, in turn, add value to you. This is the basis for risk.

A true, hearty analysis of risk and how it applies to decision making is outside the scope of this current discussion, let it be summed down to this: For every action, there is an opposite reaction—and when viewed in linear and non-linear payoff terms (immediately realized benefit and “down the road” payoff)—that is not necessarily equal in its return. That is, sometimes the right risk is worth taking because it can offer more benefit to you than you could possibly realize.

However, in order to harness this great power of risk and reward, we need to set aside the false assumptions that we make about the world, based on irrational data that is implanted into ourselves from the earliest days of our youths.

“Is it really me? Mirror mirror gotta know just what you see”

—Def Leppard, Mirror Mirror (Look into My Eyes)

Although many may comment otherwise, life doesn’t really have an instruction manual. This chore is left to fools, philosophers, and anyone in between. We sometimes have the occasional epiphany about ourselves, the world, someone else, or our interactions with it. I think, sometimes, that this is why I look at life the way I do: The art of life stems from the interactions of everyone in it. Decisions dictate behaviors and, in a simple way, life is just a collection of all those behaviors in concert. In this way, physics is the study of the interactions between matter and energy. These elements are analogous to people exerting energy (or, removing it in some cases) into (or from) the world around them.