buy more happiness

My landlord had an eccentric neighbor who used to ride around bareback on a large black stallion with a parrot on her left shoulder. That’s interesting.

Chris (my imaginary friend) and I had a conversation last night about traveling, and how he figured the best part is that you get to meet lots of interesting people. I reckoned that they are interesting because they’re different than you. If you were their neighbor, you’d probably just see them as boring old Vladimir next door, whose collection of exotic animals keeps breaking out and eating your potatoes.

It sounds good, doesn’t it? That the area around us is full of all these fascinating people and we just have to realize it. Still, I can’t help thinking that the folks in my town are a wee bit blasé – aside from the horse-riding parrot-lover, of course. I am on a hobby farm, but basically it’s just a vestigial hanger-on adrift in a tide of land “development”. Suburbia is all around. Rows on rows of identical houses (not homes) where people all eat the same nasty, homogenized, preservative-laced foods and go to the same dehumanizing jobs. They watch the same movies, listen to the same music, wear the same clothes, and actually buy the same magazines to tell them what to think about it all.

I pretend I’m not a part of it, but when it comes down to it, given the choice of two pairs of thrift-store jeans, I will buy the one I think looks “cooler”, which might or might not be those that fit most comfortably while providing shelter from the elements. And if you put me in a room with a TV and a movie rack full of pointless, entertaining drivel, I’ll watch it all.

I gotcha – I read what you’re going to say – “don’t be so extreme, Josh. It’s important to conform a bit to cultural standards so you can be part of all the important things that are going on. Besides, while most people might be like you say, when I choose what I’m going to wear and watch and eat, I’m different. I’m an individual in the midst of conformity.”

To which I reply, hmmm. If you happen to find yourself plunked down in the middle of a mental institution, doing the things everybody else is doing in order to fit in doesn’t make you cool or enlightened or an individual – it makes you a mental. Very few people in this loony bin of a world actually think there is something wrong with them. Our culture is sick, though, and if you look at yourself today and find that you are what the masses might call “well adjusted”, then something’s wrong.

My challenge is this: Don’t be conformed to the patterns of your world, but be transformed by the renewing of – not your wardrobe – but your mind.