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https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://medium.com/@absurdistan/americans-severed-their-connection-with-space-and-now-were-paying-the-consequences-a82bec6d3a51>
"Skyrocketing drug use, hate crimes, political violence, and school shootings—I
don’t know what else I’ve left out, but what do all of these have in common?
Ultimately, they all have some relationship with meaning-making.
For example, it might be hard to see how shooting up a school is a
meaning-making activity. It’s easier to understand if we look at what sort of
sense it made to the shooter. When we begin to view it as an elimination of all
that the shooter felt rejected from—a society of peers—then the meaning might
be found in its destruction. Violence is never senseless, it only appears so.
“Those who don’t build must burn. It’s as old as history and juvenile
delinquents”, Ray Bradbury wrote in Fahrenheit 451.
When our family members or friends do drugs, it’s an escape. Their creative
potential to truly realize themselves has somehow been hampered. Experiments
with rats have shown that when rats are put in cages with nothing to do if
given a bottle of pure water and a bottle of cocaine water, they choose the
cocaine water. If they have fun, meaning-making activities, they choose pure
water. Are humans rats? Perhaps more than we’d like to admit.
In the absence of creative, pro-social outlets that bestow upon our lives more
meaning, we might feel disoriented, isolated, and lost. We feel fragile, with
our self-esteem taking a hit. It might be so shattered that we struggle to find
worth and value in life itself. Perhaps when we feel like this, we lash out at
the world around us. Perhaps we adhere to supremacist ideologies to make
ourselves feel more self-important and powerful than we actually are. Perhaps
we escape with drugs.
But in the end, all of these anti-social, negative meaning-making activities
exist because those who partake in them have failed to find more cooperative,
positive, pro-social ways to find or render their lives fulfilling.
One of the most basic ways humans find meaning in their lives is from their
immediate surroundings. Ever wonder why rural places tend to be more
conservative? Well, there are many factors for that ranging from less diversity
to lower levels of education. Truth be told, it varies between and within
countries. But one factor is also related to monotonous lifestyles."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
