Why spend money on botox and also spend money on eradicating household pests - just get yourself bitten by a spider on your goddamn lips already.
Why feast like a glutton on junk food and more calories than is needed per meal and also spend on gym membership?
Why poison yourself with tonnes of chemicals - pesticides, preservatives - only to have to spend just as much, and more, on more chemicals - prescriptions, pharmaceuticals - to counteract the effects.
I find myself perplexed by the ignominious state we have deluded ourselves into as a species. We waste so much. We buy into this whole practice of what makes us this modernized society and yet, we have in the very same process sold ourselves short.
Once it was money that really demarcated the disparity in class heirarchy. Either you had way too much or you had none, and if you were in between - which most of us were - you still compared your dollar to your neighbour and resented or gloated. To truly and honestly not care about the weight of a dollar you had to either have too much or none.
Now, it's technology that becomes a telling identifier. It has, by the same means of furthering our society as a whole in the name of progress, simultaneously dumbified its individuals.
We don't think anymore. Like really think. Now computers think for us. We just take what we are given and recycle-reuse-reduce it even further. We repackage what has trickled down to us through osmosis, and wait for our recognition and praise for doing so.
Maybe technology only heightens this; maybe we've always done this, and are no more than glorified hairless monkeys that only do as we see. Maybe imitation is all we are capable of, and to rise above is an escape from a cycle of the mundane to a state of intellectual nirvana. We've invented this thing, and patted our own backs, but at the same time we collude at the other corner of the room to send us right back to where we began.
We've become so less efficient and so bloody lazy. We've become hostages to our own lack of will-power. Slaves to those seven masters - wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony - who we thought that by just identifying and recognizing them as enemies on the radar we preempted their subcutaneous encroachment into our psyches - and fail to in spades by the consequential lax state of awareness without the diligent vigilance warranted. The smallest dose has already made us too lazy and too unconcerned to make the effort to repair ourselves.
We have the potentiality to go far but we won't. We won't really make a long-lasting flavour of gum because then our buyers won't buy more. We won't create a tungsten filament that won't break because then our bulbs won't sell as fast. And it's not just at the top. We won't let ourselves have a dollar more because then we won't get social assistance. We're OK with being down there if we just have to work a little less and get smaller income if it means the taxpayers will provide the rest. And we won't create a cure for cancer because, hey then who will buy our medicines and who will pay us doctors for our services? Let's all remain sick! It's okay! We can buy an iPhone that will tell us how to fix our symptoms.
