Our approach to life – makes no sense at all!

We humans are a funny bunch, funny in the sense of our traits and habits, and not necessarily our sense of humour, although to be fair there are plenty who fall into that category for sure. How we apply ourselves in given situations, how we shoot ourselves in the foot, bite our noses of to spite our face and all those other well-worn over-used clichés but of course, reflect something inherent about our nature.

How we use for example, information to suit ourselves, how we lie to avoid arguments with our nearest and dearest, how we make up bullshit and express opinions about topics we know nothing about and never knew we had an opinion on until a conversation about same was had. Yes, that’s the kind of funny I’m talking about really!

Politicians use statistics to tell us a story ‘dug out’ of a report, perhaps one ‘good’ statistic only, when the rest was nonsense, or they remind us that we’ve had two quarters growth as if we should not only understand what the significance of that is but also that we should feel the impact of it.

Investors set up shop in already squeezed urban settings where you end up having to move to live in cramped, over-priced accommodation with strangers, and breathe in the same over-polluted air generated by too many businesses operating at the same time. Alternatively, you can immerse yourself in long commutes each day and in doing so turn a third of your day into half a day that is work related. It just doesn’t make sense in real terms does it, but it becomes part of our life, and more worryingly, normalised.

Humans cheat because we are unsure whether the other person will behave so we cheat anyway on the presumption that they will. We want to resolve conflicts but we don’t talk to the people we need to resolve our conflict with or if we do we find it so difficult to listen to their story and we prepare our answers in advance.

We wait until we or someone close to us has a near death experience before we reflect on our lives and assess what is important. We tend to make decisions based on outcomes that suit us but rarely consider the true impact of that decision or decisions on other people. We measure our self-worth based on material items and often procrastinate so we don’t have to leave ourselves open to scrutiny.

Governments spend billion on renewing nuclear missiles that are never used (thankfully), or likely to be ever used yet, in the case of the British Government, they only addressed the issue of rough sleeping when an invisible but deadly ‘bug’ forced their hand. When you think about it, the billions (or is it trillions) spent on a nuclear ‘deterrent’ must be the most expensive form of puffing your chest out ever. It must be the only project where the expected result is no result.

Market forces re-package original products and ideas that we go ga-ga for, like how many times can you realistically reinvent toothpaste and shampoo or cleaning products? Does that mean all the previous products were dung in the first place?

The ‘Network’ that we are all invisibly connected too, that being the ‘Internet of Things’, has convinced us to part with all our private information nilly-willy. I’m not talking the names, addresses, postcodes, dates-of-birth and password kind of stuff, but all that which we share, post, comment on, take part in – you now the kind – what kind of film are you, what kind of car you are, what kind celebrity you’d be, blah, blah, blah. All that information we give freely without so much as a thought not realising that it contributes to the ‘data-mining’ of companies who have only our behaviour-modification at heart.

We view ourselves as all having individual issues that are distinct from those of others rather than view ourselves as a ‘collective of concerns’ that if we worked together we might be able to resolve issues together.

Our approach to life often makes no sense, is driven by fear, greed, selfishness, etc. We - that’s you, me, us, - we need to do something about that.