What Do We Want?

More random thoughts on the rut that my associates have found themselves in (see here for the previous installment). We return to the original observation that we have very little to say to each other anymore when we gather. Conversations seem to boil down to "Yup, still doing my thing". What are we hoping to hear instead? Something, anything, besides the same standard story. And yet that's exactly what most of us are doing, the same thing. Are we just fucked? No matter how I slice it, it seems inevitably to return to the unpleasant truth that we're upstanding citizens who go to work and pay our taxes, but don't do a whole awful lot aside from that. This isn't necessarily our fault; as discussed earlier we find our choices constrained before we really understand what we've gotten ourselves into. Nevertheless, it seems sad (and perhaps even tragic) that, bright folks that we are, we still live in relatively small worlds. When we do manage to break out of the routine, on vacation, its only for a little while. Even then we're often tourists; we're just looking at the places we visit, we're not really engaging with them. That's unavoidable as well; how can you engage with a place that you're only going to see for a couple of weeks at most? After contemplation the conclusion seems clear: the path we've chosen is incompatible with real variation in life. American, great place that it is, puts a premium on "respectability", which seems to be defined as "getting a job and settling down". Having subscribed to this system, however unwittingly, we find ourselves stuck. So the answer to our rut seems to be "Yeah, but what else are you going to do?". Crap.