It seems that each progressing day of our life the less we learn, the more we assume, and submissively accept life without much conscious reflection. Could this be true? Now I’m not speaking for everybody in the world here but from what I’ve learned through watching myself and others, I feel a little ashamed and………overwhelmed. I understand that life changes each person every passing day but why are children more creative and the elder more wise? Why do the years from 15-50 (a relative time period) leave you reckless and unsatisfied. Whether it is from personal experiences or knowledge read or just plain egocentricities, what is it that traps people in a constant struggle for money? Power? Stature? Popularity? I understand that even the animal kingdom fights for power but that is to protect their children and survival while humans generally do it for the feelings they bring. It’s like we’ve set our lives on emotional hyper drive with no ability to stop along the way, rationalize, and put the pieces back together of things left shattered in our blasphemous wake. It’s not until the day we crash and burn that we realize there is more than just our world within The World and we’ve wasted away by degrading what God had given/you were born with.
So, lately I’ve been thinking on how such an obtrusive habit becomes fact when we are the KING species with the most advanced brain EVER.
It’s ridiculous how easily we turn off our grey matter for extended periods of time and simply run off emotional energy.
Think of it as only using one side of your brain or only one side of your body to get things down throughout the day. So I got to thinking about life in general and remembered a book I had read, The Crying of Lot 49, in which one of the main themes is entropy. A woman learns of her ex-lover’s death and she is left as the sole executor of his will. This forces her to leave her husband and comfortable world to find some explanation on the ex-lover’s death and put order to his will. Throughout the book new information/energy is forced upon her and she becomes trapped in this system of disorder with no ability to separate the good and bad, the truth and lies, and the right and wrong.
Entropy.
Definition: The universal tendency for energy in a closed system to wear down. On a universe-wide scale, entropy is the ultimate degradation of matter to an inert uniform state incapable of sustaining life.
I feel people have become trapped in their everyday life, which we will call a system, with no ability to overcome the disorder caused by the stress and/or emotional toll of it. As a child you are always very hopeful and look for the best in people but as you grow older you experience the selfish, immoral ways of people and learn through society about the rat race to the top, you lose your initial innocence and feel betrayed. The older we get the more we begin to rely on past experiences rather than having an open-mind to future endeavors. It’s as if we are stuck in the past using it as a crutch rather than using the powerful, rationalizing brain we have. This constant struggle to live for the future and the past bearing down is a cyclical avalanche which will lead to the destruction of our system.
I’ve been thinking about another book I read recently, Stumbling on Happiness, which basically explains the reason people are unhappy is very simple: The Future. We are unhappy because we live our lives in tomorrow, or the next 5 years, or the next 30 years and we’ve got this image on how it will look. Do we ever get there? Generally not because life changes, fate changes, and luck changes everything we’ve thought about in just a millisecond; don’t forget that we are constantly changing our goals and plans as well. You can only be happy if you come to realize today is the day and the only day there ever will be. There is no past bearing down on you. The future may not happen…What if today was your last day?
How this applies to work:
Now undoubtedly all this applies to work as well. If we spend all our time encompassed by our work and the amount of work we have to do, we lose sight of the other aspects of life including enjoying what you do and your coworkers. If you only focused on one subject or job and never experienced any other positions, do you think your mind will have progressed? I believe if you stay in one position for too long you mind will become stagnant as it continually uses past knowledge to do today’s work. This is exactly what I said earlier about using only our past emotions to guide our life and leaving out the human brain. It’s hard to analyze the workplace on a macro-level because there are so many different people working on so many different things but when you get down to the micro-level you can begin to understand how a single employee could be come stagnant in the system and not know how to escape it.
Overall, I feel that there are many reasons people become stuck in a sub-human mindset during many points in their life but those with the ability to understand and rationalize their situation are more likely to overcome stagnation. Rather than just letting there emotions/energy continue in the same downward spiral these people will make a conscious decision to improve there situation not only by thought but by action as well. Whether it be improving your personal life or getting ahead in the workplace, everyone needs to overcome the negative energy and information that prohibits the brain from learning from our experiences. Ultimately, if you don’t begin to understand yourself and why you make the decisions you do, then you are not using your brain’s abilities and are running on basic emotions and instincts; this can only lead to a subhuman life based on guilty pleasures, immoral standards, and an encapsulated life…a closed system…an absurd amount of entropy.
