NOT FUNNY

Sometimes I feel very cutoff from the rest of the world. But that isn't really true, because I always feel very involved with the world around me, with this culture, and with the people I know. Yet whenever I happen to walk by a news stand, or sit in front of a friend's TV for a few minutes I am absolutely surprised by the world as it exists without me.

Are people really so concerned with these celebrities, their looks, and useless things to spend money on? These things are so obviously ridiculous, trivial, and pointless that it is laughable to me that anyone would care about them--but it is only funny for a moment. It stops being funny as soon as I remember that this is what the majority of people spend their lives worrying about. I also remember that I purposely cut myself off from these things because I find them so depressing. Even my friends who say that they only ironically watch The Hills or Twilight are still supporting those factions and enabling more like them to be made.

More and more of the majority of our country is becoming concerned with things like hCG diet skin care and plastic surgery. Where did these insane ideals for beauty and acceptance come from? there are so many infinite for a person to have worth and purpose, yet the only ones we seem to care about are men's abs/wallet and a woman's breast-waist-hip ratio. If that is true then what am I doing wasting all my time reading books, making music, and writing? I should be more worried about whether or not my oil free skin care methods are right for my skin type. Duh.

The sad thing is that everyone that I have just deemed an idiot would look at my lifestyle and think that I am an absolute screw-up. Not because I have no self-worth--in fact it would be easy to note my accomplishments, talents, intelligence, and normal appearance. It is the fact that I have not exploited myself in a way that makes money that everyone would find so disappointing. I am so "normal" in every respect aside from my non-desire for money, that when people who are considered average see me they think one thought: What a waste.

What a waste indeed. If I accomplish nothing important in my life--which, arguably, I haven't--I will still have done my best to contribute as little possible to a society of orange, toned mothers and rich, loveless fathers who care only about success based based on salary.

When I was younger I thought people who think the way I am thinking now were just fools who couldn't succeed, so they designed a world where non-success was still a way to accomplish something. Now that I am older and have become one of those people, that thought is not entirely gone from me. I look around at many of my peers who do their best to join subcultures and be a part of something more meaningful than shopping at the mall. But most of the time they are just looking for excuses to remain like children for a long as possible.

That is why it is so difficult to overcome our culture as it is--because those of us who care and have the ability to do something are guilty by association of those who take the time to want, but not to learn, create, or solve.

On my own I cannot accomplish anything, and that is most likely the way it will always be. All I can do is try to teach the children I might never have something more important than which side of their hair to part--and hope that some other family out there is just as worried as I am about the future idiocy of the world at large.