Distraction is Hell. Distraction is the black hole which vacuums in all your precious time, swallowing it forever. It’s a hungry beast to which you feed years, in return for only a moment’s amusement.
It takes so long to grow up now. I could not explain to the previous hundreds or thousands of generations of humans what it is like to live without the hardships that formed us. We were suited to the world once. We changed the world, we removed all the pain that made us what we were — and in doing so erased our place in the world.
What happens when your psyche and your body are meant for toil and hardship, and all of that has been removed? You ache for it. You create it where it does not need to exist. It’s true that we play up minor problems and pretend they are monumental challenges, but something worse happens too: minor problems are monumental challenges to those of us who have faced nearly nothing. Our perspective is lost.
Our invented problems today don’t satisfy our need for something more important to be wound up about.
What am I doing? I’m sitting back comfortably and complaining about having nothing to complain about. Very 21st Century.
There’s plenty of hypocrisy in it, too. I could go somewhere harder and do meaningful work. I could face real problems if I wanted to, as could many other people. We don’t because we don’t want real problems. We refuse the medicine; staying sick is more comfortable.