When you're out of balance, there is motion, commotion, pain. But if you're perfectly balanced, motionless and tense, you might as well be dead.
Allow me to posit the anti-positivist proposition that we all ultimately arrive at the limits of our reason. It may be a failure of our human intellect, or a reflection of human depth. Either way, I reject the reasonable, don't-drink, don't-smoke, work-some, play-some, rent-a-movie life.
I'm not expressing this feeling well, because it's damn contradictory. I don't mean that being prudent is bad, or that routine is necessarily soul-crushing. Nor do I mean that hedonism and chaos is edifying - it's a different side of the same coin, or maybe the same side of a different coin. You don't need a lot of drama for a rich and fulfilling life. But you do need to claw a little window out of your own skull, reach for a little transcendence.
People do it differently. Two things that don't go together, but may serve this grand purpose, are kids and drugs. Neither is for everyone - you can OD on both, they suck up your money and time, take a toll on you physically and mentally. From a cost-benefit calculus, we should all be teetotaling and child-free, able to travel, attend cultural events, and enjoy copious amounts of safe sex. But cotdamn, what's the point if that's all you do for the rest of your life!
I'll save rhapsodies to child-rearing and paeans to altered states for another post. For now I'll let the great British singer Amy Winehouse make the case for the latter. Happy New Year and don't reproduce or imbibe any more than me!
Thursday, December 28, 2006
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2 comments:
"able to travel, attend cultural events, and enjoy copious amounts of safe sex. But cotdamn, what's the point if that's all you do for the rest of your life!"
Yeah, sounds terrible.
I always imagined that child-rearing was, rather than the antithesis of moderation, its apotheosis. Coming from a (large) family of biologists, you have to admit that reproducing is hardly a wild-n-crazy thing to do (well, perhaps wild, but in a different sense). I know that having kids is like, fulfilling and challenging and stuff, I might like to do it myself someday, but don't dis on those childfree folks, they're a small minority and they're doing the planet a favor. And they can use their extra time and money to drink and smoke weed.
Well, that's the goddamn dialectic of life, innit? You can raise kids just cause everyone does it, and never reach out of yourself. On the other hand, childless or straight-edge life can provide other means of transcendence, I just chose two that are most immediate and powerful.
The only thing I object to in the childfree movement is their insistence on their moral superiority and whining about the "privileges" of the breeders, but that's another story.
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