Basically, I am writing this to make you thoughtful. Aren’t we a truly strange people?
We crave prosperity and leisure time. In order to get this, we sacrifice many important things in our lives. Our time, our health, our family, our social life. We want to be successful when it comes to the big game. Consequently, we accept a degree of blind achievement which – in our more and more complex society and economy – almost increases geometrically. And we are prepared to subject ourselves to a maximum of stress.
This is how – also through ruthless exploitation of technology – we manage a level of personal wealth which has never before been possible. Mind you, it happens at the cost of an ever-increasing polarization between persons and worlds.
However, the reason we are so well off is not that we are such industrious and ingenious people. In fact, we are so rich because we burn oil and coal ruthlessly with our technology. And because, in a global world, we can let others do the production rather cheaply (and often without considering those other’s interests).
Our constant success forces us to continually remain active. Consequently, our time gets more and more limited. And what do we do with our remaining leisure time? We tour the global world. Or else we kill time using our luxury machines. And we take pains to always use up plenty of oil.
In a nutshell:
We burn fossil energy in order to gain time for burning more fossil energy.
And in the process, we lose ourselves. How absurd!
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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