Versailles
Enlightened
- Oct 1, 2020
- 1,647
It is very pleasant to buy, it is very pleasant to finally get a little bit more of that dream that commercials sell us, the dream of a good life, you know, with that big house, that comfortable living room, that refrigerator full of exotic and delicious products, but with this is not all pleasure, there is also a feeling of emptiness, one in which each purchase you make, each month that you comply with your work hours, each new accounting, paperwork and registration card does not make you feel freer but on the contrary it makes you feel as if you were prey to an addictive substance that if the more you take it the more pleasure and things it makes you feel but you also see how your dependence on it devours you more and more
At what point did they convince us that life is just about this, about working and working to seek the pleasure of buying products and hiring more and more services that sometimes we can't even fully enjoy because we are too busy working to buy more products and hire more services. It is as if we have convinced ourselves that the natural state of things is to live as if you were paying a debt for life, even if you do not even have debts, it is that I wonder how many people have a life full of credit days, you know those days that you have so many things to do that they have no choice but to keep postponing because all kinds of things like having a good dinner, going for a walk, sleeping well, going out with a loved one, all those kinds of things that we normally know as living.
Is this why one of the most obvious and most unusually helpful messages today is to appreciate the little things in life? because while we live pawning our money, our life in our time to get the big good things, the little things end up disappearing from our lives to such a degree that when we happen to enjoy them we feel as if we have lived a great revelation instead of realizing it that this is a demonstration of how little we live in the present, of how empty our day to day is for having committed our daily life to satisfy our desire for a dream tomorrow. What a society so obsessed with megalomania to the ultra-ordinate and the maximum sophistication we have created! that even the ideas and experiences of simplicity and smallness have become objects of consumption through vacation packages from large companies or from some resort where they offer quite surreal things like sleeping one night not in a hotel, but in a real town and being part of their traditional celebrations, places in Latin America where foreigners pay a small fortune to be able to experience the inconveniences and roughness of an experience full of simplicity and those little things in life and everything so that at the end of that they return to their cities to be able to go back to work, to collect money again to be able to dream again of one day indulging in another taste of that life full of little things as if they already knew clearly that those little things don't make sense, no they have space within their lives governed by functionality, productivity and the desire for great things, for great goals.
It sounds cynical but we are not so different, if something keeps our system very alive despite its profound contradictions and dark alleys, it is that it has managed to find hundreds of formulas to maintain a balance between the desire and the pleasure of us, the masses, the people do not consume cell phones, clothes and other things that they know are being produced in some Asian workshop or factory with few labor or ecological regulations because it seems morally good to do so, no, they do so because it is comfortable and accessible because it allows them to access many pleasant things quite quickly, many times because the more sustainable organic and socially responsible options are more expensive, more inaccessible because they are not sold everywhere and sometimes their quality is compromised in order to be organic or good, or whatever.
For this reason, the marketing of morally good but monetarily expensive things is not focused so much on the idea that one personally is going to feel better, but on the idea that one will support others, that one is very good and also has enough success to spend in more expensive things, they do not focus so much on the idea that when you personally buy those things you will feel better but on the fact that you will be able to show others and that you are good and that you are not only good, you also have money because they are successful enough to spend on things that are more expensive not because they are more luxurious but because they are more morally good and this is not something that only happens to those people, no, it happens to all of us, it is common because we are human beings flesh and bone practically hairless monkeys in denial of what their hormones and their confused mind can do to them, monkeys
obsessed with finding a way to deny that neither their morals nor their ethics nor their ideas make them immune to something as basic as pleasure in all its forms, that is, things that may sound quite distant, one that may sound quite superficial and another that It can sound very deep.
In essence they can be quite similar and in essence it is as pleasant to buy a plastic collector's doll to complete your collection as it is to buy that magazine or book by the fashion philosopher explaining and wildly criticizing how the system is one as it is and nothing is of collapsing both, they satisfy a desire something that as contradictory or strange as it may sound, both make us feel good but after a while we find ourselves looking for another new collection to stress about until we complete it or looking for another new super acid criticism that reveals to us how now for all the beauty and sacredness of the world the system is going to fall on itself. If now, yes, as you may have noticed there is a duality between pleasure and frustration, a duality that is present in almost everything, going back to the previous example, both the super-acid and philosophical criticism and the plastic collection and all that also give us the pleasure of feeling that with them we have distinguished ourselves from others, the pleasure that you do have or do something that others do not, but it does not stop here, as I have always said, duality between pleasure and suffering since although an individual has all the collections or has all the books and has read them all and all that stuff will also always be frustrated that he would like others to have that collection or have read all those reviews so that they have someone to share with that taste, that piece of his identity, the irony or should I say, the human thing is that when the collection or the criticism of the philosopher becomes too popular among the masses, instead of the person feeling happy , feels frustrated because now everyone is part of the thing that made him distinguished, now you can no longer be a distinguished being and it also makes him realize that in the end, part of his identity was not something truly authentic and exclusive, but something that very possibly in a correct scenario everyone could have
It is that pleasure and pain are not two sides of the same coin, sometimes they are rather something similar to yin and yang, you know, there is pleasure in pain and pain in pleasure and other times well no, it is not even like ying and yang, it is like a chain where its links are pleasure and suffering, not only are they intertwined but also one leads to the other again and again and again, not for nothing one of the deepest existential horrors that we can to imagine is to appear in a world where we have all the possible pleasure without being able, even if we try, to make an effort, to suffer or to negotiate to do or obtain something because we already have everything and we always feel good, this is quite disturbing if you think about it since as I was saying before, our system, with all its contradictions and problems, can persist without needing to be very good because it does not need to meet our needs, it only needs to maintain our desire to meet our needs and I know, I know what they are thinking, even if our needs were all covered, the system would not collapse on itself, since even when the basic needs are already covered thanks to the nature of pleasure and desire, it is always possible to invent new needs, it is always possible to add to them more and more corridors to the labyrinth where we are locked up and from which we wanted to escape, this is how you get a person with thousands of dollars of monthly salary to say they work the same or even more than someone who is working desperately to get bread of everyday.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about this as if I were above these sensations, mechanisms and vicious circles that I'm talking about, I still get excited when a package arrives or when for a change I can pay all the debts and services but sometimes many things even those that supposedly make us productive beings for society and very functional, it seems that they happen by pure inertia, you simply sign more and more, documents that arrive, you comply with more and more, paperwork, you accept more and more rules to follow, you commit With more and more debts that, well, well, everyone tells you that they are super necessary, that you do it and all that most of the time comes or happens to us without us being able to ask for explanations about it because they tell us that well that's what right, that's why I wonder how many of those things of which we rarely have a full and correct explanation we accept, because merely for pleasure, that is, when thinking about the world and its various crises s and problems, also when thinking about ourselves and what we believe we are, because we come up with many ideas, many possibilities, many ways out, many desires, but as soon as we know that the great solutions and the great changes can take away our comfort and normality, we are paralyzed, we are no longer advancing, I say, we only need to see the 2020 pandemic as it was, there were people who died because in their attempt to recover some of the normality that they had lost they chose to take the risk of a party others simply did not have option, they had to work or they would face starvation, I think that unfortunately what I have just said sums up a lot of how things work, some have the possibility of ignoring certain rules of this system, even to obey it even more and others simply do not.
At what point did they convince us that life is just about this, about working and working to seek the pleasure of buying products and hiring more and more services that sometimes we can't even fully enjoy because we are too busy working to buy more products and hire more services. It is as if we have convinced ourselves that the natural state of things is to live as if you were paying a debt for life, even if you do not even have debts, it is that I wonder how many people have a life full of credit days, you know those days that you have so many things to do that they have no choice but to keep postponing because all kinds of things like having a good dinner, going for a walk, sleeping well, going out with a loved one, all those kinds of things that we normally know as living.
Is this why one of the most obvious and most unusually helpful messages today is to appreciate the little things in life? because while we live pawning our money, our life in our time to get the big good things, the little things end up disappearing from our lives to such a degree that when we happen to enjoy them we feel as if we have lived a great revelation instead of realizing it that this is a demonstration of how little we live in the present, of how empty our day to day is for having committed our daily life to satisfy our desire for a dream tomorrow. What a society so obsessed with megalomania to the ultra-ordinate and the maximum sophistication we have created! that even the ideas and experiences of simplicity and smallness have become objects of consumption through vacation packages from large companies or from some resort where they offer quite surreal things like sleeping one night not in a hotel, but in a real town and being part of their traditional celebrations, places in Latin America where foreigners pay a small fortune to be able to experience the inconveniences and roughness of an experience full of simplicity and those little things in life and everything so that at the end of that they return to their cities to be able to go back to work, to collect money again to be able to dream again of one day indulging in another taste of that life full of little things as if they already knew clearly that those little things don't make sense, no they have space within their lives governed by functionality, productivity and the desire for great things, for great goals.
It sounds cynical but we are not so different, if something keeps our system very alive despite its profound contradictions and dark alleys, it is that it has managed to find hundreds of formulas to maintain a balance between the desire and the pleasure of us, the masses, the people do not consume cell phones, clothes and other things that they know are being produced in some Asian workshop or factory with few labor or ecological regulations because it seems morally good to do so, no, they do so because it is comfortable and accessible because it allows them to access many pleasant things quite quickly, many times because the more sustainable organic and socially responsible options are more expensive, more inaccessible because they are not sold everywhere and sometimes their quality is compromised in order to be organic or good, or whatever.
For this reason, the marketing of morally good but monetarily expensive things is not focused so much on the idea that one personally is going to feel better, but on the idea that one will support others, that one is very good and also has enough success to spend in more expensive things, they do not focus so much on the idea that when you personally buy those things you will feel better but on the fact that you will be able to show others and that you are good and that you are not only good, you also have money because they are successful enough to spend on things that are more expensive not because they are more luxurious but because they are more morally good and this is not something that only happens to those people, no, it happens to all of us, it is common because we are human beings flesh and bone practically hairless monkeys in denial of what their hormones and their confused mind can do to them, monkeys
obsessed with finding a way to deny that neither their morals nor their ethics nor their ideas make them immune to something as basic as pleasure in all its forms, that is, things that may sound quite distant, one that may sound quite superficial and another that It can sound very deep.
In essence they can be quite similar and in essence it is as pleasant to buy a plastic collector's doll to complete your collection as it is to buy that magazine or book by the fashion philosopher explaining and wildly criticizing how the system is one as it is and nothing is of collapsing both, they satisfy a desire something that as contradictory or strange as it may sound, both make us feel good but after a while we find ourselves looking for another new collection to stress about until we complete it or looking for another new super acid criticism that reveals to us how now for all the beauty and sacredness of the world the system is going to fall on itself. If now, yes, as you may have noticed there is a duality between pleasure and frustration, a duality that is present in almost everything, going back to the previous example, both the super-acid and philosophical criticism and the plastic collection and all that also give us the pleasure of feeling that with them we have distinguished ourselves from others, the pleasure that you do have or do something that others do not, but it does not stop here, as I have always said, duality between pleasure and suffering since although an individual has all the collections or has all the books and has read them all and all that stuff will also always be frustrated that he would like others to have that collection or have read all those reviews so that they have someone to share with that taste, that piece of his identity, the irony or should I say, the human thing is that when the collection or the criticism of the philosopher becomes too popular among the masses, instead of the person feeling happy , feels frustrated because now everyone is part of the thing that made him distinguished, now you can no longer be a distinguished being and it also makes him realize that in the end, part of his identity was not something truly authentic and exclusive, but something that very possibly in a correct scenario everyone could have
It is that pleasure and pain are not two sides of the same coin, sometimes they are rather something similar to yin and yang, you know, there is pleasure in pain and pain in pleasure and other times well no, it is not even like ying and yang, it is like a chain where its links are pleasure and suffering, not only are they intertwined but also one leads to the other again and again and again, not for nothing one of the deepest existential horrors that we can to imagine is to appear in a world where we have all the possible pleasure without being able, even if we try, to make an effort, to suffer or to negotiate to do or obtain something because we already have everything and we always feel good, this is quite disturbing if you think about it since as I was saying before, our system, with all its contradictions and problems, can persist without needing to be very good because it does not need to meet our needs, it only needs to maintain our desire to meet our needs and I know, I know what they are thinking, even if our needs were all covered, the system would not collapse on itself, since even when the basic needs are already covered thanks to the nature of pleasure and desire, it is always possible to invent new needs, it is always possible to add to them more and more corridors to the labyrinth where we are locked up and from which we wanted to escape, this is how you get a person with thousands of dollars of monthly salary to say they work the same or even more than someone who is working desperately to get bread of everyday.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about this as if I were above these sensations, mechanisms and vicious circles that I'm talking about, I still get excited when a package arrives or when for a change I can pay all the debts and services but sometimes many things even those that supposedly make us productive beings for society and very functional, it seems that they happen by pure inertia, you simply sign more and more, documents that arrive, you comply with more and more, paperwork, you accept more and more rules to follow, you commit With more and more debts that, well, well, everyone tells you that they are super necessary, that you do it and all that most of the time comes or happens to us without us being able to ask for explanations about it because they tell us that well that's what right, that's why I wonder how many of those things of which we rarely have a full and correct explanation we accept, because merely for pleasure, that is, when thinking about the world and its various crises s and problems, also when thinking about ourselves and what we believe we are, because we come up with many ideas, many possibilities, many ways out, many desires, but as soon as we know that the great solutions and the great changes can take away our comfort and normality, we are paralyzed, we are no longer advancing, I say, we only need to see the 2020 pandemic as it was, there were people who died because in their attempt to recover some of the normality that they had lost they chose to take the risk of a party others simply did not have option, they had to work or they would face starvation, I think that unfortunately what I have just said sums up a lot of how things work, some have the possibility of ignoring certain rules of this system, even to obey it even more and others simply do not.
