We Can Conquer Everything Except Ourselves
In our world, we play games. We’ve made it so that it isn’t what work we do that matters anymore, it’s all about who you know. It’s what people think you do, the work people think you get done. Spew a bunch of bullshit in a well-written email. CC some important people. Look busy and even stressed sometimes. Make sure the right people notice.
Games. You can have a thousand friends on Facebook and a girlfriend on an online dating site but not even smile at your next-door neighbor. It’s best not to make eye contact, because that might be creepy, it wouldn’t make you look cool, and you might have to say hello. When dating, don’t act interested in the opposite sex, keep them guessing, because otherwise they won’t be interested. Play- play hard to get, don’t play easy, just play games. Here, you can be the strongest man in the world, without ever leaving your house, without doing an ounce of actual work or even lifting a finger for another person. And people will respect you, call you hot, look up to you, even idolize you.
We like progress. We conquer nature; we’ll conquer oil fields, the energy crisis, and that mountain range on the horizon. The only thing we can’t conquer is ourselves. See? We’ve given ourselves cars, trains, airplanes, computers, iPods, even obesity – things that most people don’t begin to understand and surely won’t even try to. No need to comprehend- there’s a helpline for that in India, China. We bustle around—does my car need an oil change? Who just wrote on my wall? – we don’t have the patience to learn, and we certainly don’t want to work out. I’ll sit in front of my TV, thank you. I’ll watch pop culture, I’ll zone out. Really, I’d rather not watch the mountains outside my window, or the children playing in the yard, or the war.
Yes, here we play games. We pay athletes more money than it takes to run a small country, we drop our lives for a football game on TV. Watch this, you’ll learn — this will even help you live your life. Because our world is the toy model of what happens when teams of strangers run around on a flat screen, and in the end, in buying into these games, we stake the outcome of our lives on their rules. These competitions supersede all of our lives; what was once a merry pastime has now become all-consuming, what we live our lives for, how we’ve constructed our entire world. Yup, most definitely, in our world, we live for games.