I think we're living somewhere towards the end of the best time to have ever lived. Despite what the news says, violence is at a record low, life spans are longer than ever, infant mortality rates are at record lows, all the information in the word is accessible, and so many things are possible that would have been laughed at not long ago.
However, all good things come to an end and our technology will come at a cost to us. Look up Karl Sagan and the concept of Technological Adolescence and then singularity if you want to sound super smart in front of chicks if these are smart chicks. (If they are normal, just talk about Human-Interest Stories). The future looks horrifying. I'm not sure I even want to be there.
Basically, whether you are an evangelical Christian or old-school Catholic or something, or you're the most scientific, logical atheist and a follower of the Church of Richard Dawkins, the point of life is basically a bunch of selfish genes seeking to replicate themselves, and despite the advances in technology, its possibly harder to do it correctly these days than ever.
Think about how much better it was for men circa 1950.
You're 18 graduating from high school. You have all the education you need, only 1/10 of people have a college degree and degrees don't matter yet anyway. You get a job after high school at the town mill or whatever and they take care of you your whole life, it pays pretty well even if its blue collar when you consider inflation and the fact that gas costs 10 cents a gallon or something like that. You soon marry your high school sweet heart, your kids look just like you, you can afford to live on your own, and she's faithful because Western Culture hasn't ended yet. Even if she isn't a perfect ten, because she's young and not everyone is morbidly obese yet, she's still probably hotter than most women her age now (no chemicals and Frankenstein science needed for her). Every day you get home from work your loving family is there and your wife has your favorite dinner ready for you. No matter what happens at work, your children give you a hero's welcome every single day. The next day your lunch is made for you by your wife in a metal lunch pale made in America by American workers (assuming you're American) and your loving wife kisses you goodbye.
Nowadays, you graduate high school and if you're considered lucky, your decadent baby boomer parents whose generation ruined Western Civilization with their disregard for delayed gratification could pay your college for you. If you don't go to college or get a certification in something or technical school, you live a life of scanning bar codes at retail or living in the nocturnal parallel universe of restaurant jobs (because this is a "service" economy). If they don't, you go into thousands and thousands of dollars worth of debt, even if you graduate in four years. If you get bad teachers, change your major, or you just drink and play computer games the whole time, you take more than 4 years. When you get out, you find there aren't any jobs out there because the economy sucks (because the enlightened, bleeding heart baby boomer generation elected retarded people in the 1990s who decided to basically give away free houses to over-leveraged people who couldn't pay for them (because lenders were being discriminatory it was said (both parties forced them to lend), thus ruining the economy by 2007-2009 when the problem metastasized). Also upon leaving college, you find that your bachelor's is just the new GED. Despite what our Dear Leader president says about everyone needing a college degree, if everyone has one ITS WORTHLESS. Just like how printing your way out of a depression makes that money WORTHLESS. Basically, you either don't graduate high school these days or you have at least a bachelor's. If you don't have experience at even the lowliest of jobs, you won't get hired. You have to know someone to get a job. Basically, to get a job, you have to be the fvcking person who just left the position. Since you can't get a job, you can't pay your loans back, and bankruptcy doesn't clear the debt. You move in with your parent(s) and end up competing with high schoolers to work at the movie theater or something so your parents will shut up about not trying a job. Try being an un/underemployed DJ then...
Even if you have an awesome job with benefits, prestige, money, a nice parking place, you can basically afford a woman, and even if your wife isn't an over-weight ***** who'd rather import children from 3rd world countries than to be a woman and make them herself, if she wants them at all, is cheating on your with people at her job, your best friend, your brother, someone. That job could also be replaced by a machine; computer, sent to our buddy, Red China (life is even better there for their men, with all of their women murdered as babies or sent elsewhere); someone else at a computer in India; or taken by a newcomer from Latin America (if you live in Europe, replace Latin America with the Middle East/Africa) [politicians let newcomers come to countries, even though the people already there are having a hard time finding work (even if those jobs suck?!)].
I've rambled a lot and from reading a lot of stuff here, I know I'm not alone in thinking this. In short, the good old days are over. All we have left is to wait for singularity and for the Affordable Care Act to implant us with microchips.
Enjoy what you can, attempt to be cool to people, your favorite sports team will play and you can experience masculinity you never know when you're gonna have a scholarship or a bench named after you and someone else is using your organs. Life is about reproduction and humanity seems to be reaching the end of its baby production possibility frontier anyway.
Actually, life isn't really meant to be enjoyed in the first place. Maybe it was an accidental soup of chemicals, amino acids, and a bolt of lightning that caused our first germ great^100000 grandfather/mother to be. Maybe we were seeded by aliens. Maybe God made us. Anyway, if you're enjoying life, you're either lazy or living at someone else's expense, and are just contributing to the only real destiny of all: using converting energy into entropy. Usually, in their minds, even the most devout of atheists won't just kill themselves if they're unhappy and death is supposed to just be a sleep anyway (everyone loves nap time!).
I've been out of college and am trying to find work, my living friends all have work and serious girlfriends and when that happens, you don't need friends anymore. Friends are for people age 5-25, if you are older than 25 and have tons of friend, you're probably a childish baby boomer. My days of drinking, merry-making, and believing in having a future are over. C'mon Friday, December 21st, 2012!
Happy Labor Day everyone! :woo:
