People like to hurry. Now a days it’s become part of the human condition. We like to hurry from place to place but’s just a small part of the true journey, from time to time. In middle school we pray for highschool. In highschool we pray for college where after that we rush out into the working world where we get down on our (now extremely sore) knees and pray for retirement. We treat each day as just a segment of the journey to the next milestone and when we reach that milestone, all it begins is the journey to the next one.
This kind of reminds me of the "Paths" thing RWHN and others were discussing last year (or so), and I've been turning over my mind a lot recently, having come to a certain cross roads in my own life. We are all destined to die at some point, even Roger who is a GOD. With that ultimate destination in mind, it's no surprise that we want to break it up into little chunks (milestones).
The point I see you trying to make here is that we shouldn't be "skipping forward" to what we believe are the best bits, and that we need to appreciate all the good shit we have in each arbitrary "mile" for what it is. Time, after all, moves at a pretty much constant "speed" from our point of view.
I wonder what happens when us humanoids reach retirement when we finally have been shuttled through 65 years of cattle drives and left us roam free with cash in our pocket and any where in the world to go. If you an American according to the average life expectancy you have 13 years left. Does 13 years of pure freedom account for 65 years of being in a trap? Especially if you’re eyesight is gone and you hearing is shot. That’s the grand joke. We’ve hurried so much through life towards retirement, we go so fast and we lose parts of ourselves along the way that we are just a burnt-out husks of what we used to be.
Everything I've seen is that the same shit happens to you when you're 65 as when you're 16. You just have more experience to call on. If you've been beavering away and sacrificing what you term 'Pure Freedom' for 65 years, why would you do any different for the last 13 years?
I don't think anyone really loses anything by focusing entirely on getting to retirement, they just condition themselves (easy for a human to do to itself) to see their world as being Just That Way, and will likely be disillusioned in retirement when they get there.
I suppose this could be called pessimistic. But that’s not quite true because there is any solution to this problem. You have to work sometime, that’s a fact of life. Even your vacation days cut it most of the time. The answer is side roads. Places and times where we can lose our sense of time. Retire every weekend and every summers break.
You need to retire every
day. Work is work, not life. It's an essential part of life, but only a
part, and there is no reason to gear everything else in your life towards it.
Come on underachievers
Come on all you underpass believers
We'll give you the skill for street livin'
It feels pretty great to just give in,
so just give in
Dropouts, repeat offenders
We'll take the weary, weak, the street bartenders
Show ‘em the best times are on the street
Satisfaction through the thrill of defeat,
ain't it sweet
Once you stop yourself from caring
About owning stuff, that's when you wanna start sharing
Cuz all the things we want are cheap or free
I define success as not working
and I live like a king
We've got no competition
We've got no accomplished mission
We just wanna live and let others live
Of course we'll take anything you wanna give,
so fucking give
Come on, dance like a retard
Life's an endless party not a punch card
I don't understand some people's drive
Let's just fuck and drink and be alive,
not just survive
NOFX- The Agony of Victory
