What makes a good and meaningful life, drafted again

Welcome to the good life. We have pie and punch.

Intrigued? Well the good life, or rather, the concept of the good life is essentially that simple. As Americans, we are bombarded from all sides by images of what the good life entails, and thus everyone has built a perspective of "the good life". I propose that the good life is a life of awareness - most people are not aware that they are being controlled and impacted by pop culture and living what they think is their idea of a good life, an idea supplanted into each of their minds. Many people have their own take on the good life, some people I interviewed, some people who broadcast their ideas through music and others who sell it to us by other means. Perhaps the good life doesn't exist, and it is only a concept created by corporations to help sell their products. Perhaps it does exist and it is easier to attain than one would think. Based on many perspectives, we can work towards debunking the concept of a "good life".

Perhaps the best way to start unraveling the theory of a good and meaningful life is to start with my own belief system. I hold it true that a good life is something people must strive for, not something that you can be born into, such as may be the case with material wealth. No, I find that a truly good life is a life where you operate in full awareness of the factors guiding your life, factors trying to mold you into their image. Becoming aware in the sense that you can see the puppet strings that try to attach themselves o you is not an easy task, one that I am not versed in too deeply. It is the case for many people to subconsciously adopt the motto "ignorance is bliss" wherein what you don't know cannot hurt you. In this case it can be inferred that if you are ignorant of an assailant creeping up behind you, you will be perfectly fine, but if you are aware of his presence, then you are in some serious danger. What good can it do you to be unaware of the puppeteer that is controlling your every action and controlling every thought you think is your own? The way I see it (or perhaps I have been conditioned to see it this way, it is certainly a possibility) someone should try to be as aware of both themselves and everything impacting them as they can.

I am well aware that my ideas are not my own. I doubt that any of my ideas concerning my life and attitude have anything to do with me. I am a product of my environment. I can tell you, it’s a very uncomfortable position to be in; you don't know exactly what your beliefs are, you second-guess everything because you know that it came from one source or another. That's why I believe I find the most meaning in writing. True, most plot devices and in general, plots, have been created before. But the truth remains that when you put pen to paper or words to a screen, it is an original burst of thought from yourself. Even for those not gifted in writing can create something original and meaningful. The quality of the work doesn't have to be good, but it is meaningful in that it was created from the author's originality. Creating a fictional story, a poem, really any form of creative writing has meaning because it defies corporate media. If it's original, it's unaffected by anything but imagination. Perhaps it is cliché to say this, but imagination ultimately boils down to the best tool to defy social norms.

I talked to several people to determine what they felt made a good and meaningful life. Talking to these people made it evident that some people have not given a whole lot of thought to their life’s meaning, and much less to the concept of meaning in general. Person A said "Meaning, well that's the stuff that has importance to you, like, the stuff you like." similar to this was Person B who said that meaning "isn't something that can be easily tossed away, more like the stuff that's precious to you." From these two, we're left to wonder exactly what importance is - what makes something a necessity to someone? I think people have been greatly encouraged to not think critically about "abstract" things like the meaning of life and what makes a good life. Instead, people focus on the more concrete concepts of "things". People put significance into objects, like their new phone, their clothes, and their cars. It seems that people hold things important, and the better the thing makes you look in person, the better and more important it becomes to you. Things in themselves hold little actual value, however. Sometimes people use these things to stimulate other ideas. A person may find a photo album important, as it documents what they see as important events in their lives or the lives of loved ones.

In America we are greatly exposed and more or less run our lives by Popular culture. Within Pop culture lay three different but not necessarily separate categories: Corporate, Folk Culture, and Big Subcultures. For this unit we have delved deeply into personifying Corporate Culture. Within this subcategory of Pop culture lie more subcategories that classify the messages broadcasted by corporate culture. These categories are Dominant, Marginal/Fringe, and Prohibited/Unacceptable. Dominant messages are those that are the basis of the music videos, movies, and books that we all consume. They typically involve "good" values of misogyny, heroism, and going with the flow. Marginal or fringe messages are those like "You can smoke pot and be a drug addict while you're young and single, as long as you clean yourself up and get settled with a nice wife and 2.5 kids.” They start off "bad" and end up "good". In prohibited messages, however, you will only see the direct opposition to the Dominant culture, and this is why you hardly ever see these kinds of messages being tossed around casually. The instances where these are shown are often found alongside the marginal messages, as the two are related. A prohibited message might encourage you to take to the streets and start the revolution, destroying every piece of corporate anything you find.

One medium that essentially serves up corporate messages to teens on a silver platter is the ever-expanding world of video gaming. With 3 current-gen gaming consoles, the attraction to video gaming ranges between age groups of 8 to 20s and
30s. Most every video game has a plot in which you must defeat a foe of some kind. In most of these you play the story's hero. You are the cream of your village's crop, there's something special about you, and you have a predetermined destiny for greatness. This serves as a drag for many teens, albeit subconsciously. They need the affirmation that they can be better than what they are now, that they can do more. Other than that, gaming is like a new sport between teens, a new form of competition where you can truly outshine your peers and earn your bragging rights without ever actually accomplishing much. It is a form of grandstanding, with every game becoming worse and worse, making you capable of doing more and more to humiliate your friends. Not to mention that the games' level of violence is another huge draw; it gives teens the ability to commit deviant crimes without suffering punishment. It allows teens to battle against armies of "evil" creatures, without doing much to reflect on the evil of killing said creature. For social devolution we can all count video games as a major player, no pun intended.

Another method of providing corporate messages is through literary media. Institutions like publishers and bookstores have a huge say in what we the people read. The process of putting a book through publishing from first draft to final, printed copy is a long and hard ordeal involving many rewrites and drafts. Typically we end up with the watered down and editor approved version of the author’s ideas. When the writer first sets his pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) he or she puts out an unpolished brick of a story, one that needs refining in order to pass through to publishing. The first brick of text contains all the author’s ideas for the work and everything he sees going into it. Some of those ideas get lost in the editing process and thus the author is limiting the ideas and the opinions in the text. Clever authors are the ones who lose very little to the crippling gaze of the publishing fiend. Take for example that most Fantasy stories follow the same string of plot as every other one. However, we do have those that pop up to take a different tact. Every story has a hero. Every story has a villain. Every story with a hero has a conclusion where typically the hero is victorious over the villain. He may even fall in love throughout the course of the story.

Thanksgiving/BlackFriday Thoughts

November 27 was the typical American holiday of over-indulgence and "good feelings" for loved ones. Thanksgiving is known to everyone as the day that Americans gather around to eat together and to give thanks for whatever they are thankful for. Initial thoughts going into this holiday were to clear room for the food I planned to eat. Just because it is an ultimately empty holiday doesn't mean that I don't have to refuse copious amounts of free food. In class the week leading up to the holiday break, Andy made it very clear that the holiday was based around early American genocide, where the white European settlers came in and essentially destroyed the indigenous Native American population. Since those early years, America has emulated the holiday in joyous celebration, gradually forgetting the circumstances surrounding the origins of the holiday.
The day before thanksgiving I spent time with my girlfriend Desiree and I first told her Happy Genocide day as we sat down to make our gingerbread house for the big meal. She responded with literally "Chyeeahh," acknowledging the thought as a joke in initially, but then expanding by saying how sad it was that people chose not to remember the killing of Native Americans. "there really isn't any point to this holiday. People take it more as a way to eat a lot and not care, and then to shop a lot the day after. Consumerism rocks!"(This was fairly clearly sarcastic, and it is hard to represent sarcasm in typeface)On Thanksgiving, I wished my parents a happy Genocide day as well, to which my father, looking up from his book, responded "Yep" and my mother gave me a silencing look. It would seem that the atmosphere didn't allow for questioning of the holiday's motives.

On Black Friday I stayed home. This was not, however, out of some anti-corporate and anti-consumerist motive. It was because there is actually nothing out there on the market that I really want right now. Thus, no driving force directing me to whatever bargains may have plagued the minds of the other reckless consumers. I stayed home and sat on y couch and read a book. Though I am aware that had there been something I wanted, I would've likely gone to go and get it. Saturday I went shopping to grab some necessities (admittedly along with some not-so-necessary items) such as new pants and sweater. The crowds had thinned greatly, and I realized that these sales, whatever they had been, would almost certainly drop to lower on January 2nd, after Christmas and new years, where whatever is left over needs to be gotten rid of. People had flocked to sales simply because the TV told them to.

Additionally worth mentioning was the Monday we returned to school and reunited after the small break and I asked people what they had given thanks for. Not surprisingly, I found that everyone I asked said they hadn't actually given thanks and had just begun to tuck into their meal. Perhaps (and this is most certainly an optomistic view) this indicates a decline in the Holiday's importance, and ultimately thanksgiving as we know it will cease to exist in anything more than name.