Society and Control

     The last blog I wanted to write is a quick one about an idea I had when I was driving home with my dad and brother. We were discussing about how police give people speeding tickets and how it takes up a lot of police resources just in order for this task to be accomplished. I suggested that why not just have radar traps along the highway at intervals to track when a car is going over a certain speed and then tag their license plate. Despite the fact that it might be hard to actually get a good picture of someone’s license plate with a roadside camera my brother brought up an interesting point that people would actually hate this. And it’s definitely true. People would protest at the thought of not being able to bend the rules a little bit or at the thought of the fact that they would almost ALWAYS get caught for exceeding the speed limit.

Anyway, I didn’t mean for that anecdote to be too long it was just to lead into a more general thought I had about society. It seems that while people in society are constantly clamouring for control and order and stability, there is a definite need for the enforcement of laws to be somewhat ambiguous. In order words, there needs to be obvious imperfections in the laws and how they are enforced for people to really be happy. If everyone was flawlessly caught every time they broke a law, people would hate it. They would call it totalitarian and an invasion of their privacy. 1984-esque, no doubt? But at the same time, one could argue that these invasions of privacy or totalitarian laws are only to strengthen society by allowing no one to be above the law.

      So it’s a real catch 22. People want security, but at the same time I guess they need to believe there’s little loopholes and not everything will be seriously enforced. In other words, I guess they need some room to breathe. Why is this the case? I’m not entirely sure. Apart from the obvious part about society failing, I don’t see the big deal as long as it was not another human judging us. Maybe a computer system that could analyze whether someone was doing something right/wrong without any bias. But this leads into a whole other philosophical debate…about humanity building god with it’s own hands and how counter-intuitive it would be for some kind of software entity to judge us since of course, it’s not even human. Yet the irony is, why would some kind of higher “god” be anything like a human anyway? As in, have emotions like a human…to be omnipotent would it not have to judge us in an unbiased way? I think it’s almost demeaning to ascribe human emotions to a truly omnipotent “god” or one which might’ve created us. How could we /possibly/ relate to its emotions? It’s like an ant trying to relate to a human. Either way, it doesn’t make much sense to me.
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Lifestyles && Aspirations

I was listening to a discussion with my parents in the car about the how different the people were in North America as opposed to back home. The basic premise was that most people in NA are driven by the American Dream. That is, the dream to make money (ie. get a good job) and then buy progressively better material things that they apparently need. For example, a big house, fancy cars, swimming pool, yachts etc etc.

This was definitely in contrast to the Caribbean way of life where a job is merely something you need to live comfortably and the lifestyle is more focused on working towards the weekend - where you party/drink and have fun with family/friends. I don't want to say that obviously everyone in NA or The Caribbean conforms to these mindsets since I'm sure there's exceptions. But I think its safe to say, living in Canada after all, that there's a definite push towards the American Dream. Ever since we're young we know the goal is to get a job that pays well...but then what? Then we use to money to buy useless things, it seems. To use the quote from Fight Club:

"Advertising has got us working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don't need"

Of course, that quote kind of exaggerates things as I'm sure not everyone in America hates their job. But its just the total capitalist mindset that I don't like. Initially, I thought like the Caribbean way of life seemed much more appealing and something I should strive for. I don't want my happiness to be dependent on material possessions which can be so fickle. But at the same time, why should happiness that's based on socializing with a person/people be any better? A person is perhaps just as fickle/fragile as a material object...maybe even more so.

I guess it doesn't really matter how you attain happiness as long as you're...happy by whatever means you've obtained it (no pun intended). But personally, it seems like it'd be more stressful to try the American Dream route. It's stressful enough to try and land a stable job without worrying about how to constantly acquire more wealth and buy more material things. Or maybe the best way would be a compromise between both things. Material things do make one happy once in a while but I feel like they only make me happy in a very shallow kind of way. But why should people make me any happier? Are we just wired this way? I guess humans inherently want to bond with others...or else society would never happen.

Of course, I guess there's lots of other paths to happiness. I just think its interesting how paths to happiness can change so drastically across cultures/age groups/geographical regions. There could be things like religion that people could claim lead to happiness. In the end, what if happiness is just some neurotransmitter in the brain? What if it's really not as deep as our brains seem to think it is? What would be the point then, in order to work in some way to achieve this so called happiness?

Are Pictures Worth 1000 Words?

I sometimes wish that I'd get more views on my blog. Or more accurately, that more people would read what I have to say and give some feedback. It's hard to tell how much a "view" really entails. It could be a misclicked link, a glance at a page, or someone starts reading and has a tl;dr moment and leaves.

I have often thought about including pictures to maybe capture the attention of others who stumble upon this blog. I chose not to do this for two reasons. First, I'm lazy and don't want to spend time finding pictures related to the topic I'm blogging about. Second, and most importantly, because I sort of don't like the "instant gratification" idea that pictures bring to a blog. In a age where we have sites like tumblr where most people just post a bunch of interesting pictures and call that a blog I think it's pretty useless. Pictures are good and can convey ideas but in an society where the internet allows one to access almost an infinite wealth of information with a few seconds of typing and clicks of a mouse, they only serve to worsen the problem. Look at facebook, for a example. Many people argue (myself included) that if you really -cough- stalk someone on facebook you could find out a lot about their life rather than taking the time to get to know them in person. These examples only serve to show that we're spoiled and have gotten far too use to having all this information at our fingertips to the point where we've forgotten the magic that comes with meeting someone completely new from the first time.

I guess the tl;dr version of this would be that pictures seem too convenient for me. So what if they are flashy and eye-catching? They should be used to enhance what a blogger writes about, and not the focus of it. The internet seems to make things impersonal and, I guess with my blog, I'm trying to make things personal again. I'm trying to write about how I feel and share it in the purest way I know how - through plain old text.