Offbeat

I am not a fan of memes, especially not the ones that ask you to post ‘Amen’ as if that will polish away all the venial sins. I am not the only one, it seems. A new meme asking for an end to the ‘Amen’ is spreading like wildfire. I reckon if God wanted Facebook in his toolkit, he would open an account himself anyway. And there is nothing like living a decent lifestyle full of some kind of real charity and all of that instead of reposting pictures.
Most of those things are used for like farming anyway. If you respond, other things will start showing up in your personal and ad feeds, and that might not necessarily be Bushiri, though if it is a Nigerian preacher, you might want to respond with ‘Amen, and stick with good building codes and sensible engineering’.
All that being muttered, sometimes thing show up that are so bright and wonderful that I have to repost them. My most faourite at the moment is a couple of words over a picture of Wednesday Addams, the ultimate poster child for world-weary cynicism. They read, ‘Life is like Tetris. If you fit in you disappear.’ At least that’s how I remember them.
Talking to a bright star made me remember them a couple of days back. I have a problem with recognising the wonders of people who intentionally disappear. That deprives me of wonder.
It’s not just a question of those people disappearing into the masses, but also there is a loss of identity in people who choose to hide among the masses. Identity is communication. People who choose to hide their individual ideas don’t communicate well enough for me to see them and take interest. That’s a loss to me.
I don’t communicate well with groups, unless I have to stand up and do a presentation in the hopes of money. I really prefer one-on-one chat. And groups that consist of people who hide identity among a group tend towards homogeneity. Imagine, if you will, fan groups who support the same team, or groups of porcelain doll fanciers.
What do they talk about other than repetitively repeating the same stuff, hour after long and dreary hour.
That particular bright star reminded me of awful homogeneity with a reference to the Stepford Wives. For those of you who don’t know it as a book full of interesting social commentary, or a mildly entertaining movie, the men of Stepford alter their wives to become docile and submissive. I think it was drugs if I remember it correctly, but the veracity of that doesn’t matter, because it led me to thinking about drugs anyway.
What I have seen on social media is a massive movement towards drugs as a means to iron out the differences, a whole cocktail of them, with downers as chasers. To be fair, this doesn’t include people who genuinely need them to cope with their complete disconnects from reality. That being said, there really are people out there who use drugs to get rid of their differences from everyone else. And while we are here, remember that the normal running around and daydreaming of childhood now has a classification and a set of prescription medications.
The paradox is that the prescriptions are held out like trophies, along with the symptoms that they treat. The announcement of the prescription seems to say that use of pharmaceuticals is a way to make the person more palatable to the herd, yet the statement of the prescription, and the symptoms it addresses, implies that there is someone else underneath it all. The statement may also imply that the symptoms are undesirable.
In a nutshell, humans are medicating to achieve social acceptability, though I believe it may also be grist to the mill of psychiatric and pharmaceutical profitability. I say this against the backdrop of an interview with a shrink who told me I am the most sane person he ever met in spite of my own reservations.
Stepford is a form of hell, a place where people avoid honest belonging in favour of absolute conformity. That particular village is spreading now.
On the upside it makes the bright stars and standouts so much more important.