The world today is vastly different from the world of the past.  Many changes have formed in our society, families, tools, relationships, and the way we interact with each other.  Some of the philosophical foundations that we have believed and trusted for thousands of years may have become obsolete and there is a calling for new thinkers in this new millennium.

            The mass of men really do lead lives of “quiet desperation? as Henry Thoreau once remarked.  We work hard to get that car, we study, practice, toil to get that award, that trophy, or that special honor.  We spend our time trying to do things to impress someone and to make people respect us.  Our wants form the framework of our lives, and we live our life trying to satisfy them.  We are driven by external stimuli to the extent that our choice of free will is virtually gone, and we live our lives as slaves to our desires.  Has anyone ever remarked on their deathbed that their one regret in life was not making enough money or getting that one car?  No, they regret things like not spending enough time with their family, or not contributing to society.  Things like those are given unto them.  It isn’t a reward but a gift.  But they neglected these gifts and spent their lives chasing after rewards.

We are so full of potential.  Together, we can achieve anything.  But we choose to waste our potential, our talents, and our assets toward things that are less meaningful.  We choose not to tap into what our sentimental, humanly souls enable us to do but live our lives everyday quietly and robotically, submitting to what we want instead of what could happen.  The vitality of our souls and emotions enable us to do so much more than work and study, yet we drop those and rely solely on our intelligence and physical strength to help us survive.

I think that reason that human beings have instilled within themselves the feeling of boredom when they have an object for a long time, or they do the same thing over and over again is because it forces them to innovate, to think of something new so that they won’t be bored anymore.  This is all very well if this could really happen.  Although it is true that we did constantly think of and make new conveniences and inventions through the course of history that have made our lives easier, we have failed to think of new ways to live our lives.  Drastic changes to our society and the way we treat and talk to each other has not been proposed.  Why? 

Because we are afraid to.

We are afraid that the world will mock us, tease us, for proposing such a “strange?and “weird?idea. 

Why do they mock and tease us?

Because it goes against all of the social etiquette, traditions, and customs, all of the hereditary prejudices and biases that we have vainly and ironically set up to help the human race interact more efficiently.  If we push into unaccustomed directions and break all of our biases and social laws, and live to together mold humanity into the height of its potential, we would be much more productive and happy.  We are afraid to innovate, to

put our new ideas into action, because it breaks our social traditions that we have set into place over the years.  We are afraid to do the right thing.  We are afraid of trying new things to make the world a better place for we think it would be shunned by the world for being strange and weird. 

It is right that we have learned to quell our feelings of arrogance, conceit, and pride, but we have not really repressed them.  All we have done is make it socially inappropriate to express these feelings out loud.  These are natural feelings and should not be overactivelly suppressed or made into improper protocol for even a humble man is proud of his humbleness.

This essay may be inspirational to some people for the moment but they will seek no action and this essay will have no effect on the world.  They will comment on this essay but forget about it tomorrow.  The human race has so many ideas but too few actions to correspond with them.  The bottom line is that we are lazy.  But it is not really our fault because the many conveniences that we have today instill in us a level of impatience and laziness that we never had when we had to hunt and work for our food.  The reason that the people were not lazy when they had to hunt for their food was because thy had to, and if they didn’t, they wouldn’t survive.  We are lazy to act because we have no serious motivation and we think our lives do not depend on it.  But in a way it does, because if the human race continues to act like it is now, it will be a very desperate human race indeed.  So let us, as one people, learn to replace our hereditary biases and prejudices with proactive thinking and actions to correspond with them.

 ________________________________________________________________

People do not wish to appear foolish to the masses; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

Pride is concerned with who is right

Humility is concerned with what is right

         I wonder why so many people put the letter x in all of their screen names and xanga names.  Whats so special about the letter x?  I cannot thing of anything that sets x apart from all of the other letters.  Was it because of one person using it that everyone started using it, or does everyone feel an attraction to the letter x that I fail to share?