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The Lovelies and the Reality
Appreciate what you had, but don’t pine for it too much.
A good meal in a restaurant.
A walk in a crowded park full of happy families.
Shopping at a busy farmers’ market.
Checking the pears and melons for ripeness.
Idle conversation with strangers outside the internet.
Qualitatively, we need to appreciate the diversity in life and the activity we had available under non-stress conditions.
Quantitatively, we need to consider that perhaps 80–90 percent of the activities going on before this crisis were ‘busy work’ for civilization to justify profits harvested at the top of the pyramid scheme. Most people would be better off with less competitively frenetic lives, localized focus on living and much less ‘stuff’ and infrastructure to maintain and replace. Every dollar is a petrodollar at some point, with whole economies depending on the availability of dirty value (oil, coal, artificially scarce diamonds, cobalt, slavery, corn syrup, etc) and the stock market casino betting on the competitive moral terpitude of corporations fulfilling the coerced ‘demands’ of our lizard brains.
Are humans the dominant species? McMansions and McDonald’s fill our real estate. Endless parking lots and roads, garages and shops exist to…
