For the last few months, the ship has been in a holding pattern. In other words, not much has happened of note. Nonetheless, I write here because this blog is the only place I can actually discuss how I feel, memorialize the recent past and share some of the ideas in my head since I don’t really have anyone at the moment to do so with.
Currently, aboard the ship (here at home) the biggest issue has been arguing over holodeck (video games) time with the crew (kids). I am a big proponent of downtime but I fear that their rank in the games they play are quite literally, more important to them than their objective responsibilities or even what I want. Each kid, at different times, has fiercely argued with me about how they couldn’t help me with something because how it might affect their precious virtual score. I might be more sympathetic to it if the kids were among the best players in the world or were able to generate credits from playing but none of them get anything out of playing but the machine telling them that “they’re good“.
Just about the entire galaxy has been hijacked by highly educated professionals getting a large swath of the population to get their sense of self-worth from a machine. I’ve previously written about this but I just can’t express how strongly it has upset me that I see my little cadets being entrapped by some external force. You’d think that those with the educational prowess to create such great things wouldn’t unleash such predatory tools but yet here we are. This leads me to a bigger point.
The most capable among us have sold out the rest of the universe to turn a quick credit. I think that at least some people have such skepticism of science and higher education because how some of it has been used to make the average person worse. One only has to look at the food industry and how they’ve used their knowledge of chemistry and biology to sabotage our collective diets. I forgot where I heard it but someone said, “We are confusing a lack of willpower with a chemical hijacking. Everyone thinks that being sick, tired, and overweight is a personal moral failing but the reality is that we are fighting a biological war against a food industry that hires chemists to hack our survival instincts….for profit”. The whole system is cooked…by the very people who are supposed to be the most able to fix things.
Some of the top scientists have time and again helped corrupt leaders develop weapons of mass destruction. A number of prominent doctors and big pharma have peddled different forms of snake oil. It’s not just the physical sciences either. Those who specialized in social sciences have helped develop manipulative marketing, propaganda and ways to inflict psychological harm. Information tech professionals may have helped AI and robots to finally replace human jobs while also destroying the ability to fully trust anything you see online anymore. For all I know, most of my views aren’t even human anymore…..
This isn’t to say that one should discard science or the practitioners. After all, so many technological contributions have improved our lives. It’s just….I try to stay aware of motives and means of the intellectual elite. Reality can easily be skewed and I am doing what I can to remain lucid for those under my charge. Hopefully, my crew will remain vigilant and keep the right priorities. For my part, I make sure that they are aware of how I think; even if they disagree with my rationale. They can choose to be stupid, but I won’t allow my officers to be ignorant. I can only pray that they don’t spend their lives chasing ego and money. I had to learn the hard way…
In this world, it can be hard to know what is real but I am fairly confident that karma is real. As I reflect on my life and so much more, I can’t help but feel like the universe has in no uncertain terms, thrown me at me. Seeing how karma has subtly appeared in my own life, I feel like I can much more clearly understand how it is interacting with others. Having the biopsychosocial-spirtual perspective has helped provide a bit of a scaffolding but so has studying things like math, physics and biology. The way existence works as a sort of balancing equation from the bottom up has been of great interest to me. Taoism and Buddhism really is onto something with the whole being in balance thing, living in harmony and noticing patterns.
The water was perfectly still, it was weird.
As much as I like some Christian concepts, I am still not quite on board with the whole you don’t pay for your sins, all you need is faith in Jesus. At most, I feel like one can say that because of a combination of mercy, grace, doing the right thing and true repentance, one atones for their past mistakes. Maybe that’s what some mean by having faith in Jesus, I don’t know. For the most part, I think I am a very different person than the past me that did regrettable things. I know in my heart that I am trying to not only be better, but to explore a whole different side of existence. I still have my bad moments but in the future I hope those will be fewer still.