The End of Daze

“Well granddaughter, the world was a much different place when I was young. I started to see it clearly at around the age of 20, in 2005. In those times, most people's perception of reality was controlled by something called mass media, not by one's parents', friends', and acquaintances' life experiences like today.”
And that wouldn't have been so bad except that mass media was a highly manipulated medium, and the paradigms it created in people's minds were wrought with misguided intention. The movies, television programs, and the like mostly put forward the paradigm that social success required sacrifice, struggle, or natural good looks at the least. The news coverage made economics and politics seem complex and nearly unknowable to a common man, best left to the rich and politically connected.”
And I could go on and on. The main point I want to make is that most people were afraid to either disregard popularly held beliefs or have beliefs of their own that were not popular. Secondly, these beliefs came from far away and corrupted sources, not from personal connections.”
Nowadays, as you know, we love to hear about people's personal perspectives an beliefs, and we don't mind if someone doesn't share our belief, like the man we met yesterday who thought that the moon was a liquid mass that communicated with our ocean. We assume these days that that perspective is somehow based on personal experience, somehow valuable to that man, and also that it is entirely harmless to us that he holds that belief. Furthermore we wouldn't care in the slightest if someone thought that the moon was an illusion and never wanted to discuss it.”
People's minds were more compartmentalized back then as well. I think this must have related to how many aspects of life did not seem to logically relate to one another. The public school system seemed to me to play a large role in this phenomenon. In school, it was common for students to act nonchalant about the information being taught and do a minimum amount of work, focusing on receiving a good grade from a particular teacher based on that teacher's preferences, acting as if one cared about the teacher's perspective but not genuinely seeking a deeper understanding of the material. Conversely, socializing between students seemed to largely rely upon taking even the smallest social interactions, gossip, etc. very seriously and acting as if one didn't seek any peer approval, even though one truly did seek such approval.”
Employment also followed this model. Most jobs existed as parts of large corporations, where the individual worker did not care about the success of the company, focusing instead upon pleasing their superiors and avoiding responsibility. Interestingly enough, it was popular to both complain about the corporate structure when socializing and also discuss one's personal work efforts with pride. In these ways, the individual internalized the bureaucracy and therefore became compartmentalized.”
There were outsiders, of course. The problem with many of these people is that they lacked either the social support or psychological and experiential framework for success outside of the system. For me, starting at age 20, many situations that I observed and experienced made me feel sad about the path that humanity was on. Genuine interactions on deep subjects were few and far between for me until age 26 or so. Often enough, groups of people would form that were some ways along the path toward a better perspective and motivation but stall along the way, instead falling into patterns of group-think and bureaucracy. It was very few who were willing to meet the challenges of being an outsider head-on and even upon meeting these few, I found that connection did not always lead to support, as there was a mutual resignation toward solitude and a lack of psychological and experiential framework for successful and sustainable support. This charged for me around the age of 26, though.”
A perspective-shift happened for many people around that time. People, rich and poor, moved toward a more genuine appreciation of natural beauty. This impulse was largely corralled by the media, channeled toward global environmental politics and environmental tourism, outdoor sporting products and destinations, and so forth. In the end, though, this recognition that the natural beauty needed no enhancement, and existed everywhere that hadn't been spoiled, won out for a large minority of the population.”
Along with this realization came movements toward many of the popular shared values that we have today. People began to appreciate those who were different from themselves in experience and belief, or lack of belief, more and more. Hand in hand with that change, activities, destinations, and topics of conversation that had been very popular for decades became less attractive to most people. This led to economic and cultural instability, but also an explosion in genuine exploration and the generation of new outlets for creativity.”
“It became very vital for people to share resources after this shift had gained momentum. Luckily, the corrupt government was set up to provide many resources, provided that the ratio of wealth stayed where it was. This was ultimately unsustainable but as the value of money became more and more absurd, people began to realize that they were already sharing resources with one another, through the middleman of currency. This realization led to the most difficult part of the transition, the reorganization of wealth.”
Luckily enough, a popular belief emerged that the wealthy needed to be pitied and not scoured. This belief was based on experience. The masses had realized, as government supplied more and more resources and therefore made a farce of the monetary system, that sharing labor and goods without real concern for future wealth, as becoming wealthy if you weren't already had become an impossible dream, was an easy life. The fact remained, though, that the balance of wealth made no sense to anyone, least of all the wealthy who were now being openly pitied by the poor and free. As the bottom of every bureaucratic pyramid became a sea of helping hands, the top became more rigid and brutal. In conjunction with various incidences of brutality by the wealthy and their henchmen, another popular belief emerged: that suffering at the hands of the wealthy, pitiable wretches deserved the highest praise and support and reporting on that subject became the most popular form of alternative media.”
In the end, there were brutal episodes and tragedy for sure, but much of this was alleviated by time, as more and more heirs and heiresses donated all wealth to the common good, and more and more layers of the pyramid melted into a watery mess of genuine human interaction.”
The rest, as we used to say, is history. There were those famous catastrophes and last stands of the old guard. There were hard times and many fleeting moments of communal bliss. Things have leveled off, very much so, and yet things are still changing.”