cut.and.paste

New-age puritan.
by TroPicaLoaNge.


Keep busy.
Save money. Get the education that best suits your ambitions and the world is yours. Work hard in school if you can. Failure is an option but believe me, you cannot afford to neglect pursuing a further education.
Figure out your priorities.
Find your soul mate - preferably one of the opposite sex - and start a family, buy a house, car, a new lawnmower.
Keep busy.
Buy a plasma television. Watch the latest self-help TV shows and realize that you’re living the highlife. Watch the latest blockbusters. Become one with pop culture. After all, you are pop culture.
Keep busy.
Get a good job. Work overtime if you can. Pay the bills, buy into entertainment, and buy into the standard of living you so genuinely deserve.
Find God.
Just whatever you do, keep busy, stop thinking too much, and figure out your priorities: You have an obligation to society.
I’m sorry to say, it looks as though freewill has become quite a viable commodity.
Wait. That can’t be right; I must be out of my tree at the moment.
My apologies.
I’m actually a living example of freewill. I’m educated, I’m not starving and I have a place to live. I mean, I don’t even have the choice as to whether I want to attend an education or not; that choice is made for me by law. As tedious as it may be, I’m constantly being dipped into varying subjects and trains of thought and whether they are there to help me or not isn’t even a topical question. My curriculum has been carefully deliberated over and over, I’m positive it has been developed to perfection. Just as the Spartan soldier was developed to perfection, so has been my mind. The system of education is there to produce success: A healthy and intellectual and smooth flowing place to live.
On second thought, who am I kidding?
Well, you.
As glorious as this all sounds, what I have failed to mention is that the society in which I live has very deliberately decided for me how I should think and exist. The development of mind is, indeed, a very broad undertaking. There is no single way to get any kind of desirable results. If you imagine this development is a long journey down a very complex highway. Each exit, each u-turn, each time your vehicle breaks down is a new way in which your mind has been introduced to something new; be it literature, pictures, TV shows, ideas. It is where the trip ends that will determine how your mind has been molded, how you will react to certain situations, what political party you will vote for. Of course there are infinite destinations the mind could reach but society doesn’t like something as haphazard as this.
You are a rat in a cage, receiving weekly injections and tests.
Think: a perfectly controlled environment.
Education is a beautiful method of development. All education: Learning to bake grandmother’s famous cheese cake, learning how the Starship Enterprise manages warp speed.
Propaganda.
Repetition.
The books I study in school, the music I am taught, the clothes I am allowed to wear, the expectations that I face: are all deliberately chosen for a greater purpose.
Your vehicle will break down in 5.
Turn left here.
4.
Traffic slow after exit 248.
3.
Someone is sick in the back seat.
2.
Watch for children.
1.
Congratulations, you have just graduated.

The forces that diverge thought exist in almost everything, everywhere. Each new Hollywood box office smash, each new chart topping pop tune, each repeated corporate slogan, all tear at your brain, hypnotize your sense of question, force feed you ideas of what it is to be successful, happy, alive.
I say almost because there are still, and hopefully always will be, those who refuse to succumb to this mental imprisonment, however a small few, indeed. They ask hard questions, argue, imagine a better society to live in. I’m not going too far into this though, not right now.
With success, the simple list of requirements reads as such:
To be successful your face better sell Pepsi products.
To be successful your method of telling time better be gold plated.
To be successful you better realize that the world is inferior to you at all times.
Materialism.
And so on.
Think: teacher’s pet blown into proportion.
Success is not a personal thing, a thing of personal satisfaction. Success is a collective rule. You are only successful if everyone else says so.
Odds are you don’t stand a chance. Reality is, if you can’t fit the mould, you’re just another desperate screaming fanatic on the sidelines. If you can’t be top shelf material, next best thing is to be acknowledged by someone who is.
Option one is to come close. Two seconds too far from the finish line of perfection in a race that never ends. But, what do I mean by perfection?
I mean age defying face cleanser.
I mean the Jenny Craig diet.
I mean smelling great, even late.
I mean human standardization of thought and appearance.
Conventional ‘beauty’.
Happiness is made easy for you. What I mean is that it has been narrowed to an easy science. What I really mean is why bother trying to figure out who you are when you can be told. What creates individualism has been silenced by the idea of “social taboo”.
Sexual deviance
Drug experimentation
“Cuss” words
Think: a new-age puritan
Is it coincidence that happiness is virtually universal? That everyone likes the same music? That everyone likes the same TV shows? Or are these things just that good. Or am I simply generalizing?
Option two is:
You didn’t keep busy enough.
You fell out of the system that was built around you. You’ve been disobedient to all the moral rights. You probably delved into every conceivable social taboo.
You didn’t find god.
You probably broke the law. You probably ran your mouth.
You’re single.
You’re lost.
You’re broke
Now shut your head up, do as you’re told.
Keep busy.

Back to Point A.
Try again.
You probably don’t even know what’s happening around you, the patterns, the manipulation. You feel cured, you feel relived, truth is, you feel easy to work with and society never looked so bright. Truth is you won’t be writing all of this down.
What am I then? Where am I in this cycle of production? What makes any of what I say true or even believable? Why didn’t you stop reading after the first sentence? Why don’t you burn this immediately?
I’m too busy to have all the answers. But I know how I feel about the whole thing:

Disconnected as all hell.