| | The further into senior year I get, the less I feel the need to please anyone (other than the professors). I could really give a shit about the politics of this place anymore. (By politics, I mean the way that the school community (not administration, but the students) runs, operates, functions; I don't mean politics as in the presidency and current issues).
Anyways, I'm surprised I've managed to get this far without any time management skills. i simply don't have any. I need structure and order to operate, and college doesn't provide that. I need an office or a cubicle, and a daily check in time. When I'm working an actual job, I get the shit done. It may even more boring than my classwork, but there's order to it. I need to be in an environment that's structured for me to get stuff done, or else my ADD nature kicks in. I miss high school, where each day basically had the same schedule. I still had time management issues, but they were better than now.
Time for the Wawa run for caffeine.
Also, if anyone knows where you're supposed to find meaning in life, let me know. Someone told me it's faith, but I'm not particularly religious. I know you don't find it in your job - I'm sure the cafeteria workers at this school could tell you that. Perhaps in your friends and family? It's just that I'm such an, for lack of a better word, existentialist. I don't think that there is any inherent meaning out there, or that there is supposed to be. I'm not sad about this, nor do I think that life is pointless. I just wonder, where do we go from here, philosophically? How do you reconstruct the world (and meaning, and definitions, and all of that) after it's been deconstructed so terribly? How do you find reality when it has been put through the prism to show its relativistic nature? Meaning, reality, etc are by nature relativistic - i.e. dependent upon the context and the person deciding what they are - and how can you compare the unadulturated, universal truths of the past with the personal, contextual, fallible truths of our modern philosophy?
Isn't this where Christianity is going? It's going from a inherently hierarchical framework (the priest interprets Scripture, and guides his parishoners) to a democratic one (the laity personally talks to/prays to/etc God/Jesus and receives any advice directly). It's more complicated than that, I know, but you get my drift.
Perhaps this philosophy is a byproduct of democracy. Going from a framework where the individual is subservient to society to one where the individual is freer would surely have an impact on the reigning philosophies. There's less of an impetus to placing one's faith in higher institutions (the church, etc), or even to just not challenging them, when he or she can truly make decisions for himself or herself. People are by nature self-interested, and if given the choice between a philosophy that curtails their choices and one which allows greater flexibility, they'll by and large go for the latter. Think about it. Poor people + Middle Ages = enslaved, might as well believe this cock-and-bull philosophy society propogates because it makes me feel like there's a reason for the way things are, and tells me that if I'm a good little serf I'll go to heaven and be infinitely rewarded. Versus, poor people + the West now = more opportunities, hmmmm, I think I'll go do what I want, thank you very much. I don't think democracy and liberty are bad, but the downside to them is that society is much less coherent, and universal truths are challenged constantly by affected groups. Society is heterogenous (more than before at least), and no truth seems able to encapsulate all of it. (Of course, globalism also plays a part, with previously unheard groups being able to propogate their perspectives on the world stage).
Damn, I just took the content of an entire library of books and completely messed them up. I make so little sense, and I reference way to many thinkers, schools of thought. And I'm leaving out so much. Here's my basic premise: heterogenous, democratic societies with largely economically independent individuals develop inherently non-universalistic belief structures. Belief structures and all of that reflect the needs of society, and those aforementioned societies can't support universalism to a large degree. Plus, people are going to challenge it and it'll be destabilized.
How do you say all of this without sounding like you've not slept all night and you barely know what you're talking about?
Gotta get going - work. |
