Resigning from the Demographic

My life is finally beginning to come together and increasingly I look forward to jumping feet first into each new day, instead of dreading when the other shoe will drop. Up to now, I did not have the time or the inclination to notice one of the down sides of living in this number-driven world... a world in which the ubiquitous computer begins to heavily influence the context and direction of our lives.

On the most superficial level, more and more I am just a number to the world. I am my social security number. I am my employee number. I am the account number on my Visa card. When I call into Visa, the first thing they want to know is my account number. My name merely becomes an alias so everyone else will know who I am.

I have looked at this situation and have examined another aspect of this phenomena. Retailers and ad guys see me as part of the demographic group of white, males between the age of 50 and 65 years of age. So does the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Those faceless and anonymous economists who assess the state of our financial situation see me in just the same way. To all of them I am just one of the numbers crunched so that they can sell me something, get me to vote for their candidates or make some projections as to whether the price of pork bellies will rise or fall.

You know what? Now that I have given some serious thought to this fact, my blood is beginning to boil just a little. I am not a statistic. I am a person who has a life, who has ambitions and aspirations, who has real relationships to the people I love. My life cannot be reduced to being part of the aggregate who will or won't buy a Honda or who will or won't vote for some clueless, but well-packaged candidate for the Presidency of the United States. Although I may be only one American among now 300,000,000 Americans, I want to be addressed by my name, rather than some randomly selected number which has been assigned to me.

That said, how I feel about this subject and $3.00 will get me a latte at Starbucks. I know that nothing I could do or say will change things. Most things in our world are being reduced to formats which can be input into a computer or scanned at the check-out counter. Barring some extraordinary developments, that is the direction our world is going to take.

However, I don't have to like the way things are. But even if I can't change the world, I can change the way I live my life. Rather than being overly concerned about how others see me, I am redefining how I see myself and how I establish priorities for myself. I am especially focusing on the important relationships in my life. I am doing whatever it takes to sustain and enrich my relationship with my wife and my kids and my granddaughter, Parker. I am working hard to make time for my close friends. I am redefining my relationship with myself, sometimes being more demanding of myself and yet also being kinder to myself and more forgiving than I have been in the past. Like I said, I don't have to like this particular reality of our world. Neither do I have to let this get in the way of my living a life rich in loving and being loved and in accomplishing goals which are meaningful and important to me.

Visual Food for Thought -1

Untitled

Risky Business... Living in an Age of Endless Entertainment

I could not find my MP3 player for about two weeks. To boot, there is some electrical problem with the radio in my car and I have just not gotten around to getting it fixed or replaced. So when I am away from the house, I have had far fewer distractions that make it difficult just to hear myself think. And being able to do that, I think is a very important aspect of our lives.

I have written earlier about the danger of starting to live on auto-pilot. What that means is that if we get so busy in our lives, so overwhelmed with things to do and places to be and not enough time to get eveything done, we just start living without any introspection at all. That is a dangerous thing to do, because we might get lost in our own lives.

Anyway, when I found my MP3 player again a couple of days ago, I started chilling out to the music, when I was walking or en route somewhere. Today, as I was walking my Yorkie, Spike, I caught myself thinking that I need to set some time aside, in a quiet place where I can take stock of how my day has gone, of how things are going in general in my life... if the things I am doing now and the direction my life is taking is satisfying and is enabling me to be comfortable with my life.

Unconsciously, I believe I have made the decision to limit the amount of time I spend on being "entertained" no matter what form that entertainment might take. I am painfully aware that there are a lot of people out there who want to entertain me for a price, either in cash or time spent. That is how they make a living and they want me to be one additional in there ratings stats. You know what? I really want to stop being viewed as only part of some tv show's or some movie's or even some recording artist's rating stats. Frankly I want to more than that. For me vegging out in front of the boob tube no longer seems like such an attractive option.

I don't want to get in the habit of living my life in a mindless sort of way. I want to be aware of where I am, of what I am doing with my time and of the direction my life is taking. Unlike our esteemed President Bush, I don't think it is such a great idea to just stay the course, no matter what, or worse yet to not even be aware of what course I am on from day to day.
So I return to my blog once again to give an update of what my mind is ruminating on at this moment. I just feel more alive when I am actively doing something useful, even if it is only washing the dishes, than when I am when my mind gets locked into what is on television at the moment. I tend to become something of a zombie when that happens.

We live in a dangerous age, the age of an endless stream of noisy entertainment coming at us from every direction, screaming for our attention. I don't know about you, but I need that time during which I just take stock of my life at the moment. Without it, I am very much at risk of just starting to drift from day to day, mindlessly. The real danger is that one day I would wake up and have no idea where a large chunk of my life has gone and mourn the fact that I will have squandered even a small part of my life. I am not willing to live that way. And I would respectfully suggest to you that you can't either.

So I will continue to turn off the television set, unless there is something really compelling for me to watch. I will limit the time I spend on other forms of entertainment, including what the evening news broadcast is trying to pass off as legitimate news. I think in this decision I am on the right track. I have things I want to accomplish before I make my final exit.