Monday, April 24, 2006

Philosophical Musing of Uselessness

It has become more and more apparent that there is a cycle to how some people do things. A cycle which can be cruel or not depending on the task at hand. I'm talking of course about the fact that most everything we do involves some kind of time waiting. Waiting for a bus, waiting for a time slot to roll around, or waiting on a DVD to finish burning. It seems we are all always waiting on something.

The cycle starts when we initialize the action. We come up with an idea, share it, sketch it out in our notebooks (be them in our heads or in actual notebooks), and then we attempt to produce the idea into reality.

The process then goes into the waiting phase. We wait on financial backing for the idea or we wait on the product to pop out in its finished form.

We then enter in another waiting stage which is variable depending on how we present the object. Here, we try to make people believe that what we are producing is the greatest thing of all time and that everyone should have at least two in their own home. In the commercial sense, that is. This phase of waiting can be applied in a variety of fashions from waiting on results back from a loan review to even waiting on something as trivial as for someone to sign on your favorite internet messaging system.

And then the results come in. They are either what we want or what we don't want. That isn't up to us to decide in the end, although some would argue that we can determine how to change it into the results we want. Then what happens?

We wait some more while we either come up with a new idea or make money off the one that was sold to the masses. We wait through the summer until the new school year starts, sometimes doing nothing if we can get away with it. We wait until someone calls us back for another job interview because they liked our applications. We wait for opportunity even though we say that opportunity waits for no one.

We are always in the wings. We can be and more often than not are doing something else while we are waiting, but nevertheless, we are always waiting for something. We only think we are not because we make ourselves busy by doing other things.

Now, there are others out there that are all about taking action and not waiting but doing something. Even the most persistent of activists are waiting for a result, waiting on a change if not demanding it. What makes them any better than the average person that does nothing but wait? Is it because they get their results quicker?

Their results do not come quicker than any other person's attempt to change the world. It just looks like they are. The activists may come off as impatient given my view, but they are more of a catalyst than someone who is impatient. They rush results, sometimes poorly. And rushed changes can result in conflicts as seen from all the revolutions that happened before my typing this entry. Some minor, some major, and others biblical.

Still, there are some out there waiting for a change that we only believe has already happened. There are some that believe we have failed in all past revolutions and other social changes, waiting for people to wake up and realize this truth. You can find this in all the satire we see daily in the newspaper cartoons.

All that being said, most people are waiting for something positive to happen like the second coming or something awesome like that. Frankly, I'm just waiting for our race to go the way of the dinosaurs. Given our current state, I won't have to wait very long.

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