Comedian examines why everything is amazing but yet people are removed from fully appreciating, fully realizing, how amazing everything really is :-) Taking things for granted or wanting something else than what is, is related to unhappiness. Unhappiness is another symptom of an unsustainable lifestyle in which nothing is ever "good enough". Like bottomless pits always looking for the next best thing. However, "Not good enough" is not neccessarily "bad" either though, how can we progress and learn as a species without the desire to improve our condition and the condition of others?
Robert S. McElvaine has written about the depression and has noted the similarities of the period before the last depression and the big consumption bubble developing in the last few decades. "In 1920 one of three households had a car, 9 years later that was one car per household. The car makers started to provide credit". In 1930 there was an article mentioning a manager of General Motors who said,
Just last week on board a plane someone behind me said that when he was a kid he really thought flying was amazing, yet now he just thinks it is a pain! This is a frequent thing you'll hear, when someone was a kid, everything seemed more vivid, more amazing, you could sense that he would like to feel that way again."The only reason why you always see new car models brought to the market, is to keep your customers dissatisfied with what they have"
Yet this relationship and perception gets covered up with kind of a "foreign installation" as Juan Matus called it. These bubbles or barriers start in the mind and reflect themselves in the bubbles and gated "communities" that we created in the brick and mortar world. Walls that separate the person from the "texture of life" and inclusion.
While this seems like a downer, it seems that this moving away from freshly experiencing reality into this unhappiness or dis-ease, is actually the prerequisite for a growing and sincere desire to get back to reality more aware and grounded then before. As an eastern person so simply stated, "Affliction creates awareness, awareness negates affliction", one state of mind helps create the conditions and fertile soil for another state of mind. Without dark how can we realize and appreciate light?
Joe Campbell observed that people looking for meaning are simply trying to have an experience of being alive. This accumulated misery is all compost for transformation.
What is lost when we are filled in our own bubbles of self absorbtion?
How about everything that has been missing!
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