Crazy Ass Planet

What constitutes a life? Well, I sure as hell don’t know. Maybe that’s not the right question. Maybe the question should be, how do we choose to perceive our lives?

There are certainly lives that are shitty. And there are definitely lives that are grand. The odd thing is, though, the people living those lives don’t necessarily see them the way we do. Some people who have lives we think should be great think their lives suck. Some people who have lives we think are crappy seem to enjoy more from a single moment than the rest of us do in a lifetime.

So what exactly makes us think our lives are good ones or bad ones?

I don’t know. But there are people making money hand over fist who would tell you their lives are black holes of despair and there are people living in conditions that would make our hair stand on end who end each day with a dance.

For some strange reason, in our western culture, it is really easy and quite enjoyable to feel life is tragic and sad and oppressed – and I don’t really know what that’s about except that I think there is something in our culture that remains stubbornly juvenile, obsessively rooted in that phase of growing up where it’s us against the world and everyone and everything is against us, and we’re the butt of the world’s tragedies … despite the fact our lives are probably the most comfortable any culture in the history of the world has ever had.

Of course, it’s not about creature comforts. Which may be why we bitch and moan. Yes, those comforts are there. But the relationships we need to sustain us are not, hence the ever constant fallback of “woe-is-me.”

Most of us are too busy getting those comforts in place to do the work the relationships require, and most of us are too busy worrying about how the rest of the world might view us to turn our attention to what out lives really require.

And the funniest thing of all – and I’m a perfect example – if we just lived, rather than thinking about and strategizing living, we would probably all be a lot happier, whether (objectively) our lives are shitty or grand.

(And I have absolutely no idea what prompted this post. Maybe because I’m listening to Lucinda Williams. By the way … I really like her. But man … that woman’s gotta cheer up!)

Update: I had to change the image on this post. Originally I had a picture of a glum guy sitting on a street corner. But it was such a gloomy image it depressed me every time I looked at it. And the image I replaced it with seemed more fitting.

Tags: Life, Culture, Lucinda Williams

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