Human beings have the capacity to make choices...something no other species, to our knowledge, can do. And we love to do it. Choosing new friends, new clothes, a new car, new software for our new computer. Isn't that all a helluva lot of fun?
So why then the great irony? Why have we set up a society that minimizes choices, if not eliminating them completely. in so many aspects of our lives? I was driving somewhere this morning and saw lines of cars carrying people to work. And I thought: How sad! For years and years, they drive the same route each day, at about the same time, see the same signs on the road, perhaps listen to the same morning hosts on their radios, get to the same office, sit at the same desk, handle the same problems, lunch with the same coworker(s)at the same time at likely one or two of the same restaurants, return to the office at the same time, return home at the same time, to eat the same foods they ate last week, to watch the same tv shows. to go to sleep at about the same time for about the same length of time, to awaken at the same alarmed time, to wear the same clothes, to get back on the same road heading to the same office. What happened to the variety we love?
We...that is, whoever set up this anti-human idiocy...must be nuts! Totally.
Why would they have set up rigid routines and taken away our beautiful ability to choose, which no animal can do? Why would they put us on the same roads, reading the same signs, riding behind the same people, doing the same work for year after year? Don't we really like variety in our lives?
But, no. Goodbye variety, goodbye choices, get in that same car and drive the same route to work, reading those same advertising signs, to work in the same colored building, on the same floor, at the same desk, same phone calls, same food at the same diner for lunch with other workers, home at the same time, looking forward to watching the same shows on television (saw this one before, but it was good, like to see it again).
Were the people who set all this up, were they not humans who had the same unique capacity to choose as we all do, and didn't they realize that ironically they were taking away the variety we enjoy so much?
Why would they (humans?) have set up a society of repetition, duplication, regurgitation, rehashing, redundancy, parrotlike, regularity, uniformity? Why?
Isn't it a helluva lot of fun to make choices and have variety, changeability, modifiability, permutability, plasticity, instability, mercuriality, oscillation, pendulation, in your life?
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