You Know, I Don't Know

Have we become a civilization of idiots?

Recently, whenever I’ve started up a conversation with someone on the financial disaster or the Gulf oil volcano, in an attempt to determine if they have any coherent thoughts on these current situations, I usually get a rather wishy-washy, half-hearted response. Quite often this response sounds more like a worn out cheerleader rooting for a losing team. If I dig a little deeper and try to see if they actually have any independent thought other than some verbatim quote from the mainstream media, the inevitable answer is you know, I don’t know.

This ridiculous phrase has become a staple in the American English language. It is as if our brains have become numb and lazy. Television obviously has a lot to do with it, but there is more, this type of speaking has been with us for years. Yet, now it seems to be getting worse. We are barely able to put together a sentence without using I mean, just, like, or you know. Add I don’t know to it and you have a fully inane conversation. We are hardly even aware of the absurdity as we nod in agreement to someone else spewing out the same babble. I mean it’s just like, you know, I don’t know.

This is the same response I get if I ask about the housing crisis, or climate change, or any of the thousand other issues that now seem to face us like an epic tsunami. It seems that we have reached a stage where we are unable to compute the myriad of conflicting data so our brains seize up and we spew out you know, I don’t know. Perhaps we though that Prince Obama, riding his horse of hope to the rescue, was going to save us. That delusion has all but dried up now, and we are faced with a reality we don’t want to look at.

Time to wake up!
Change has arrived at our doorstep and Upheaval may not be far behind. The question we need to be asking ourselves has to do with how we are going to react and adapt to these changes. Are we going to remain distracted by our cute little technological gizmos? Are we going to continue to eat chemically laden, processed food? Are we going to sit back and watch everything unfold in slow motion on our plasma screens?

Or are we going to wake up, unplug and start getting ourselves together, learning sustainable skills, growing our own food, and building communities that can weather the difficulties ahead?
The answer, inevitably, is just like, I mean, you know, I don’t know.

Slow Down

Many of us living modern society live life at a frenetic pace. The measured lifestyle and close contact with nature that characterizes more traditional societies is being lost. People today gobble up experiences, swallow them whole, and then stuff more in. As these undigested experiences accumulate, existence becomes more superficial. Watching television has become a substitute for real experience and even that rarely holds our attention for long –we click to the next channel. Vicariously living through the stimulus overload of television has dulled the senses to the magic of real life. The rapid pace of technological advances creates a sense of urgency while the high-speed transfer of data through the internet and telephone systems brings an immediacy to everything. When we finally do go out and do something, we often feel driven by an urge to get through it as fast as possible. There is a compulsion for instant satisfaction, a pervasive “been there, done that” attitude. Completion has become the goal. Actually experiencing the sights, sounds, and smells has become secondary to the result. All of this leaves people with little time for themselves, or more exactly, for discovering the self.

Things such as fast food, newsbreaks, email and text messaging all contribute to this to a sense of urgency. We cannot escape it. We only slow down to pay attention when something we think extraordinary appears, and even then it rarely holds our attention for very long. Eventually we hurry on to something we think is more important. But when we get there we rush through that as well, since we feel compelled to get to the next experience and the next after that. Our attention span has been narrowed drastically, laying a deadly trap, because we begin to sacrifice the present to the future – which never comes. Unless we are able to fully experience the present, the future is merely an illusion. Without fully living in the present, we will never know just who we are. We will only continue to chase things into the future in the vain hope something will finally satisfy us.

This trap was set long ago by our parents and our schooling and our culture. The striving toward an undefined goal – success – always lies in the future and calls for planning. Thus, when we actually do reach some sort of success, it turns out not to be as satisfying as we thought it would be and we get caught up in planning for the next success. For vast numbers of people the future never arrives while, at the same time, they take little notice or enjoyment in what they have accomplished in the present. In the end, however, it is in the present, not the future, that life is deeply experienced and where one discovers one’s true self.

Of course there are things we all need to do to secure our future, but if we sacrifice the present for some obscure future success, chances are that when we get there we will still be no closer to what we are searching for. If we can slow the pace at which we live and enjoy what we are doing in the present, then no matter what the future brings we will be prepared to experience it fully. We need to bring a sense of peace to daily life by becoming aware of time, of the need to slow down.

By slowing the pace of life and quieting the noise of the world, we can let a little more peace and serenity into our lives.