Posted by Brenda on May 10, 2000, at 21:23:23
In reply to Re: boBB back.........., posted by boBB on May 10, 2000, at 20:46:37
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Wow boBB - That was quite a mouthful - and thought provoking. I lived on a commune in Hawaii and another in Nevada in my younger years. Is this similar to what you're referring to "getting back to a placid lifestyle" sans society (sic). It was pretty cool at the time (mid 70's), though I don't really think it's possible now. My husband has a young nephew desperately seeking the lifestyle I once had and he can't find it. I really don't think it's out there anymore. I believe its a spiritual craving for some kind of harmony within ourselves.
Also, when I had a high pressure, high profile, human resources job I was exhausted and drained most of the time. Now that I work by myself and for myself that's all changed. Too much people contact drains the life out of me.
Be well - Brenda
When I die, you can all eat little pieces of bread and sip red wine and call it my body every Sunday as an anti-depressant!
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> Oops, messiah complex coming through. Or do they call that dillusions of grandeur?
>
> Maybe I am a bit egomaniacal, me loving having my own "we want you" thread. I liked Cindy W's "Love equals______" post about the tree frog. I'm impressed.
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> For efficiency sake, I'll confine today's babble to this thread rather than comment in each thread that stirred some kind of response in my mind...
> I was thinking on Brenda's suggestion that maybe it is the depression that causes me to isolate. Seeing as how Dr. Bob is kind enough to share his server with us, I really try not to be too dogmatic with dismissing the medical model, and the possibility that some of us are born with genetic conditions that effect our mood, or that we develop chemical "imbalances" that are best treated w/ designer meds. But I am pretty confident my personal isolation (I have a quite public life, professionally) is a result of my value system that does not coincide with the values of a dominant society. The best similarity I can easily bring to mind regarding the way I live is like a "sleeper" in the spy world - a person deployed into an unfriendly territory to live unnoticed among the people there until some mission requires their duty. These people (I've heard - never knew one, or knowingly knew one, if I did) seem to survive for many years in a contrary ideological environment, but survive because of the hope of returning home some day.
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> Well, as Dire Straits sings in Brothers in Arms, "these mist covered mountains, are a home now to me. But my home is the lowlands, and it always will be... someday we'll return to our valleys and our farms, and no longer burn to be brothers in arms." Except, reaching middle age now, I have little hope of ever returning to the natural, earth based way of life I longed for as a young man. I might get lucky, but the ambition is gone. I was always torn between the need to get a placid home for myself and the sense that, to keep such a home, one would have to be available for everyone who has such a longing. Now, I spend my time in a quiet army, my only real ambition in life to eventually (maybe in another 500 years) make that accessible to whoever wants to live that way. But my day-to-day life has come to revolve around developing the skills of psychological warfare. That is why I gravitated into writing - not because I had a degree - I quit high school and bummed for many years.
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> I am lucky because I have a well-formed sense of what I long for. I have little hope of finding it, but I have learned to live without and to sustain myself, as best I can, with whatever temporal satisfaction I can find that does not too severely violate my core values. I can see how others, perhaps who never enjoyed the opportunity of living among tribal people and learning to live in "two worlds", and who never reached a clear picture in their own minds of what they would like the world to be, or that never thought they had the right to help direct big things, like culture and society, I can see how lost and frustrated that can leave a person.
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> Well, I also agree with Janice that this is a tough genre of writing, this internet board dialogue, because what we say can be interpreted in many ways. I write on-line usually, so the litte frame doesn't allow me to view my prose in its own context. The edit function is great, compared to some other sites, but even then, it requires back-tracking, which hampers the thought process.
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> Anyway, in this culture, with TV and consumer goods and career expectations, we are expected to repress our feelings. We watch murder and mayhem on TV and never react. We emote over love relations that are nothing more than a dazzling array of lights with which we cannot interact. We are expected to make things better for ourselves, but somebody else, who we elected, or who was smart enough to inherit a multi-national company is supposed to decide about the big things, like whether we need a consumer society to maintain industrial/military world domination.
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> I can't hard-sell my fragile life plan any more than I can tolerate the hard-selling of licensed pdrugs, (Damn, those anti-anxiety drug commercials piss me off! maybe I am a bit to anxious?). I encourage people to think about, not how they feel about themselves, but the way they feel about their culture and their society. Psychiatry and clinical psychology circa 2000 tend to presume society is normanative and it is a measure of health how well we fit in. I differ. I see as a measure of health our ability to critique society, and a measure of personal strenght the willingness to sacrifice our personal mental comfort for the benifit of an unorganized collective that includes more than just human life.
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> My best friends invoke a metaphor of pushing a giant ball up a steep hill. If we push with all our might for all our lives and move that ball just a little, it was worth it. Soldiers die in battle defending one stupid little foxhole that is lost the next day and filled in and plowed for bloodstained crops the next year. Their actions are considered heroic.
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> One final thing - I was ridiculing myself for being a writer. Carpentry was a bit more honest and healthy profession. Most of what we do as journalists is to craft cute little stories that make people feel like everything is normal. Even the hard news- murder and crime- has a normalizing effect. I got into the line of work to have more than that kind of effect - to make a real difference. I changed jobs since then, and gained skills and respectability but lost much of the opportunity i had several years ago to make a more direct and specific impact. Maybe someday I will use this skill group for what I created it for, but for now it lets me get out and get to know people without having to expose too much of my controversial core self. I guess, in the social heirarchy, it is a privilage for which I should be somewhat appreciative.
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> One more ditty - I know a guy that was driving around town pulling another car all the time.
> I asked him why he alway has another car behind his car.
> "Oh, this is my wife's car."
> "Where's your car?"
> "Mine is the one I am towing."
> "Why are your towing it?"
> "It has a chemical imbalance. I need to get it treated but for now I'll just tow it."
> So I went to see his wife, to learn more about this odd situation.
> "What's wrong with your husband's car?"
> "Its out of gas."
poster:Brenda
thread:32822
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000508/msgs/33122.html