Wednesday, January 8, 2014

What have we accepted?



SEE WHOLE IMAGE BY CLICKING HERE

FULL REALLY BIG SIZE VERSION HERE

(The full image wouldn't post here in any legible way - it's a long one!)

I have made suggested here before that maybe, just maybe, depression is in part our own body's (or mind's) rejection of our situation. Poisoned by our environment, by systems which are alien to every cell in our body, by ideas and conflicts that we're told keep our world running and yet create a black pit inside us that grows and grows. We depressed masses are not sociopaths. As much as we try consciously to accept the world as humanity has shaped it, our bodies cannot fully accept it.

I don't know if this is true for you. I do know that the one thing that cannot be taken for granted about depression is it being the same for everyone.

And so while my own depression is currently dormant, I can't help but look around for its causes. The world as it is. And I find myself wondering: what have we accepted? What have we let happen?

What world have we given to today's youth?

Speaking of which, where are they? Where are you passionate youngsters? Are you there lurking behind the troll face memes and Pokemon gifs? The old visible youth presence seems to be gone. Are there youth subcultures any more?

Online connection is wonderful and it's not like the world was better when I was young (it wasn't) but the unfortunate side effect is that you have become marginalised. The world has shafted you and nobody knows if you give a shit because the Internet is so damn vast that it's all just white noise if it's even slightly outside our own personal 'net sphere. It's too easy to ignore. It all holds such promise and gives us access to so much and all that is cool but, in the process, it is like we shipped kids off to a ghetto we never have to visit.

Speaking for my generation, I apologise for the world we gave you. If you're reading this and you're young, please consider the message in the image linked above. Feel free to share it, spread it anywhere, ignore it or do anything you like with it (no credit or link required). Make yourself known. Get together. Not just online where you can be ignored. Where you can be seen. Don't allow yourselves to be marginalised. Don't let the world stomp all over you.



The world is yours.

2 comments:

Red Pill Junkie said...

Hey vato,

Wow! I completely missed this post. And now January seems soooo far away.

Welp, only thing to make it up to you is to link your 'welcome to Earth' message on TDG! ;)

Saludos,

Miguel

Mr. Trombley said...

Hey Animator,

It's an interesting subject you bring up. In 1919, Keynes wrote:

"The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind. Very few of us realise with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organisation by which Western Europe has lived for the last half-century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and particular ambitions, and feel ourselves with enough margin in hand to foster, not assuage, civil conflict in the European family."

Keynes said this at a time when such a feeling should have been at a low ebb, just after WWI in Paris. In a few months from when he writes this, COMINTERN will be incorporated and Mussolini will found the Fascist party. Yet, he writes truly that few in Britain and the United States felt electrified and politicized. Perhaps it always feels that truly political action is unreal and distant, until the riots in the street get beyond control...

But perhaps that is giving young people too much. I am wishy-washy.

I have started a new blog:

http://stochastictalk.blogspot.com/

Hope to see you there!