On Novelty

I guess we should be realistic about the fact that a substantial amount of my writing will enter the world as rants. It is  my hope to let it be an outlet effective enough to calm the rage that often boils up in my chest, and in the future, channel it into a more constructive discourse.

A thing that often strikes me as overindulged, although I’d like to say ‘misindulged’, is novelty. What often plagues the unconscionable, domesticated populace is the fact that they overindulge on pleasures as a result of boredom with the monotony of their lives, instead of introducing some diversity. It is true that our monstrous overindulgence takes novelty in its greasy, lustful clutches and devours one novelty at a time, until the fat and juices drip from its face, to be smeared with all the bygone wonders, thinned out to an unrecognisable glisten on its grossly obese belly. Sooner or later there will be none left of whichever novelty we once appreciated. However, to make the issue clear, our obsession with one new thrill stems from our boredom with most other aspects of our lives. It is an emotional reaction to a psychological condition, an instance where we place all our hope in this new thing, whatever it may be. All our ambition for escaping the dullness that renders our lives meaningless is steeped on this fresh experience. Until it isn’t fresh anymore…

It is a problem that occurs in a condition of convenience. Where we are becoming misinformed as to the nature of the effort it takes to attain physical, emotional, and spiritual balance in our lives. People have this idea that problems can be fixed with actions as simple as swallowing a pill, saying a prayer, or pressing alt-ctrl-delete. It is a state of living where you are allowed to have an intention so weak as to render you vacuous, yet still having your mild, listless concern taken seriously, reciprocated out of lust for the currency that has replaced your humanity. At times we recognise this alarming lack of flavour in ourselves and our lives, and resort to the methods and tools most readily available to us. We resort to the crap entrepreneurs and their helpless agents shove in our faces, and the nonsense evangelists smear over our consciences. It takes no effort to use what is given you. No searching, no need to understand. Just the stale, thoughtless faith people have in attractive advertising. So we look no further! We have found our new saviour, our new insta-hero to protect us from the confrontation with our aching conscience. It is what has by now become our addiction to denial that prompts us to take our latest bitch-mint from its plastic wrapper and devour it before we are forced to understand the dire standoff between reality and our rejection of it.

Here is my case with society’s misuse of novelty: This is the information age. Everybody understands it to be that. The markets are flooded with information technology, our private, social and professional lives have been redefined by television and the internet. It is not the mere access to information that drives the redefinition I speak of, for that had its way with us in its own time, when the press was invented and printed books started to permeate society. The changes we experience are a result of ready access to nearly anything that crosses our minds. Some like to say the internet is a limitless resource for information, but if you’ve ever really followed a line of inquiry without getting distracted along the way, you would have found that the internet stops giving soon after some serious understanding becomes of the essence. However that follows the nature of human knowledge at large. I guess it grants a good perspective on the limits of our general understanding regarding a topic when you embark on some proper searches after solid knowledge. Nevertheless the internet satisfies the vast majority of curious appetites, if not successfully distracting them before really needing to do so.

This is also an age of economy! Something that I’d say few people consider. It is an age of economy to a far greater extent than it is an age of information. The reason is that if you remove electricity from the equation of civilisation, the internet is gone, TVs are gone, phones are gone, and most importantly our information is gone. Economy stretches much further than the instantaneous influence upon which information changes society. Economy is a system of production and exchange. It is a system wherein demand can be created simply by introducing an idea. An economy is a system in which a person exchanges his conscious, cognitive capacity, for currency.  Social stance and hierarchical rank is defined by how much currency you can tap from the market and again how much you can privately dispose of, into the market. One might argue that this could not be the entire truth, since there are so many people who’s position is defined by how much people like them or like what they do. And that is correct, to an extent, I cannot argue that the truth is that simple either! But people are shockingly unaware of how much goodness and likability remains in obscurity, simply because it or the person causing it fails to generate a substantial enough income from it. Every individual taking part in a society becomes a building block of its economy, a cog in its machine. If you take little and give little to the economy, you are little.

Living in such a mental landscape takes its toll. A landscape where you as a person have a ‘net worth’, a ‘credit rating’, or a sense of importance derived from the level of comfort and security you are able to afford yourself through subordinating people under you with the simple soulless allure of money. It is a society where your sincere, humanitarian dreams are exchanged for economic  ambition masked with a thin veneer of nobility, where your thought is successfully cordoned and you are led to ‘realise’ that there is no other living than an economically viable living. And this is exactly where we desperately need novelty to intersect! We need it so bad that we grab at it like starved prisoners out of a concentration camp grab at food! We aren’t concerned by the fact that shoving it all down our throats could be lethal, as long as the momentary notion of satisfaction substitutes this overwhelming inner cry for sustenance. It is a blind, forced response, to an unchecked need. Our disregard for inner vitality causes the being that exists just beyond our general consideration to strain, and when the strain becomes too much, the being buckles.

What are the solutions then? You might ask. Mindfulness. We profess ourselves to be a superior race, superior to the animals we pet, domesticate and feed on. Superior to the plants and trees that sustain us. There is a prevailing notion in society that we are the highest life form short of the gods! Yet we fail to use the traits that define our superiority for the purpose of elevating ourselves beyond mal-managed  materialism. Perhaps it is a little harshly spoken, and perhaps this kind of frank discussion of fundamental matters is unbecoming of a person with the privileged stance of a middle upper class caucasian. Let’s put it this way: there is a severe shortsightedness plaguing human behaviour, and it is becoming ever more evident. Big picture trends are a good testament to how disenchanted a significant portion of society is becoming with the ideals we have been pursuing for centuries, perhaps millennia now. One can see it in the films we make and love to watch, the music we listen to, even fashion trends become tainted with a wanting sense of counterculture.

As a race with hungry brains we require challenges, situations that force us into activity. We need a change of scenery, it is in our nature to find balance in the diversity of existence. As soon as we deprive ourselves of the diversity, we lose that balance – whether it be on a material level or on more psychological, behavioural level – we start drifting in to corners, corners that make us feel threatened, out of touch or misunderstood. We are most often done in by our own desire for more. Let’s call it lust. We lust for a certain thrill and become obsessed with it. We are not mindful of the implications of our actions and we do not consider the broad effect we have in exercising our powers, making us mindful of our goals but nothing beyond that! As a conscious race that makes it’s own success, we ought to be more invested in securing that success by managing our use of material and immaterial goods through mindfulness.

We possess the capacity to build institutions that research the fundamental material constituents of the universe, and factories that produce machines that propel us into space. We can grow animals (like ourselves) like plants in a laboratory and send nano robots into their bloodstreams! Never mind these lofty achievements, we are willing to spend more than half of our waking lives on procuring material currency, working braindead jobs, day in and day out! Surely it is within our reach to dig into ourselves and find perspective on our monstrous devouring of all that makes a moment feel good, our undignified pursuit of every fad that appeals to our primitive senses, our shameless indulgence of every insecurity born out of humanitarian disrepair, and use novelty as a tool to keep our wits alive and aspiring to ideals greater than wealth and inadvertent inequality.