Murphy’s Bye-Laws

Walking through a mall for the first time in a long, long time on a Friday night a few weeks ago, we passed multiple random groups of teenagers loitering and horsing around. I suppose they were dressed like fairly normal teens caught up in the fads – no matter how ridiculous. As we passed one group, I overheard one teen say to another, “O-M-G!” No sooner than my next thought started to bud in my brain, it was superseded by yet another though: Shit, I’m an old curmudgeon. This was evidenced by my thought to weep for the future. *Grumble grumble* kids these days *grumble*.

I found humor in this episode and gave myself a mild ribbing for such a knee-jerk reaction. I offer the anecdote now for illustrative purposes in a discussion regarding the state of our culture. Culture itself is so very diverse and diffuse that any kind of objective definition or definitive accounting is impossible. Diversity doesn’t mean there aren’t overlaps, though. Common themes and evolutions can be found across many facets of the conglomerated culture. How one values any facet of this heterogeneous culture is purely subjective and dependent on the individual’s point of view.

In a comment thread over at Sunni’s joint, culture was being judged from two different levels; one from the progression and desire for freedom, and one from the lower levels of pop-culture and the smaller subsets of culture without the overarching theme of the first level.  I will discuss this lower level first since it offers clues to the higher examination.

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There are phrases like “the working poor” floating around. This refers to the people who are actually employed, sometimes in more than one job, who still can’t afford housing, food, and other tenets of the American dream. Perhaps this state of affairs is due to the cost of actually going to work.

In the past I’ve written about the chicken-or-egg nature of earning and spending; the first time I talked about some of the factors affecting the work environment that make us desire escape so frantically; the second time I elaborated on how we spend our treasure in pursuit of an escape from the depressing world of employment, in turn resulting in the need to work in order to pay off the escape. Somewhere else, though I can’t find where, I thought I also mentioned that my spending habits go contrary to reason and become less frugal the more pinched I feel and yet more stingy when I feel like I’m getting ahead. And just this past week I noticed an expansion, or perhaps a corollary, to this phenomenon. The busier and more frantic my employment environment becomes, the more my feeling of pinched finances grows in parallel. This also seems to contradict logic. When working hard for long hours, one is apt to collect overtime, which means actually getting paid more. So why does it seem like I’m with less money when working so much? Is it just an illusion brought about by stress and the apparent contraction of time ([time flies when keeping busy (less time)] x [time = money] = less money)? Read the rest of this entry »

Language Origins

Language is a funny thing. Try thinking outside the bounds of language and one can find that thought, as well as communication, is limited by language. At the boundary of precise language there comes into play a new set of words that are blurry conglomerations of the even blurrier concepts on the other side of this boundary. These blurry concepts aren’t much more than feelings or hunches; one can feel pretty sure there is an “other” side of the boundary between the materialistic and the purely conceptual, but the things on this other side cannot be put to a form – at least not very easily.

The concept of a soul or a spirit is one such word that exists on the blurry conceptual side of this language boundary. Culture is perhaps the largest producer of these ambiguous words and the greatest influence on our individual conceptions around them. Our culture – itself a pretty conglomerated word – could consist of lots of factors from our personal tastes and the personal tastes of those around us to religious and social traditions. The culture of religion and religious teaching that has been ever-present in our history colors much of our language and the concepts behind ambiguous words.

The idea of a soul, especially, has its roots in religion. To a believer in these general religious concepts, the idea of a soul is akin to having an avatar for a person in the unseen spirit world where God, angels and demons dwell. This avatar is lifted to such great importance that the actual physical life of the holder of the avatar is held in less esteem. This avatar then becomes the ante in a high-stakes game of karmic poker. Behave poorly or outside the desired doctrine of a particular religion and that ante is lost forever.

Having rejected the common religious mythology of the soul, I am left with the phrase in the language, but now without an anchor. Read the rest of this entry »