Roundabout Philosophy

Here’s the thing about being human: we love bull­shit­ting our­selves. Admit it: how many mono­logues have you had in an attempt to jus­tify your actions, your fears, your suc­cess, your habits, or any­thing else? And how many times have those mono­logues changed in direc­tion in the span of a day, or an hour?

A few days ago, I was dri­ving to work and part of my reg­u­lar route takes me through the formerly-​dreadful round­about on Al-​Khail road, which was jammed in traf­fic. The cul­prit turned out to be dead traf­fic lights, giv­ing every­one author­ity over the road and result­ing in a semi-​deadlock.

That sce­nario to me became sym­bolic of how we con­duct our lives.

We love free­dom. We fight for free­dom. Many across this region have been, and many have died in the process. All of us want our voice to be heard; we want to share our opin­ions on issues that mat­ter to us on a per­sonal level and at the com­mu­nity level — with­out being thrown in jail for doing so. We all want to lever­age glob­al­i­sa­tion and tech­nol­ogy to prop­a­gate our ideas (con­scious or sub­con­scious) into the dig­i­tal realm of this uni­verse. We want to be lib­er­ated from shack­les that have been lim­it­ing our move­ments, choices, and oppor­tu­ni­ties for gen­er­a­tions. And we all want to do so because we believe we’re enti­tled to. As a mat­ter of fact, we are.

But.

We love con­trol. We are wired to com­part­men­talise, label, assess, assign, lever­age, and con­duct our lives in an “orderly, proper” fash­ion. We want to feel empow­ered and the way we believe we do it is by gain­ing con­trol. We want to con­trol how peo­ple cor­re­spond with us. We want to con­trol our social aspects of our lives. We want to con­trol our kids, how the fam­ily treats guests, how din­ner is pre­pared, and our con­duct. We want to con­trol other people’s ideas, influ­ence, power, resources, and habits. We want peo­ple to con­form to our ideas — whether we do so through con­cious coer­cion or sub­con­scious manip­u­la­tion — because our ideas are just too damn good.

But.

We abhor being con­trolled. We want to be free from this “order”. We want to “think out of the box” and “lib­er­ate our senses” and “free our emo­tions” and “be tol­er­ant” and “learn from dif­fer­ences” and and and.

And… what do you get when you give peo­ple free­dom? A dead­lock in a round­about. Because not one god­damned per­son — myself included — would want to wait for oth­ers to pass by if I could squeeze in a bit to the right and wig­gle myself out to the other side of the road. We are oppor­tunists and we take the oppor­tu­nity of this new-​found free­dom by try­ing to con­trol it. It’s all ours. OURS! Free­dom is finite and is to be exer­cised at the expense of others.

“The illu­sion of free­dom will con­tinue as long as it’s prof­itable to con­tinue the illu­sion. At the point where the illu­sion becomes too expen­sive to main­tain, they will just take down the scenery, pull back the cur­tains, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the the­ater.” — Frank Zappa

Has it always been like this? Most prob­a­bly — but then there’s so much of it now, I have to stop and pon­der why all of this is hap­pen­ing. There are some dimen­sions at play, but if I want to look back at his­tory, there are only two con­stants: time, and discontent.

Indeed, being in a state of con­tin­u­ous dis­sat­is­fac­tion is what dri­ves inno­va­tion and what dri­ves peo­ple to break the sta­tus quo. That’s the good side of it; when the good rears its ugly butt, you get greed. Infi­nite greed, and that’s what is the core issue of many of our prob­lems today. And time? Because of all of this more more more approach to liv­ing the world, we end up with stressed and highly frag­mented minds. We want to reach our des­ti­na­tion in the fastest time so we can do as many things as pos­si­ble so that we have time to do even more things — most of which do not add any value. We labour dur­ing the day and moan after hours and hardly 5% of the pop­u­la­tion is truly sat­is­fied with what they do and spend no more time than required to do what they do.

Here’s how it works: in the yes­ter­years, peo­ple had more time to do less things. Now, we have less time to do more things. What this results in is frag­mented minds, frag­mented lives, empty days and time lost. You get all sorts of books on the sub­ject mat­ter as well as numer­ous arti­cles online. Almost every other day I come across an arti­cle with a new way to get things done or to bet­ter your “time man­age­ment”. Sorry, but time is con­stant; it should be called “Clut­ter Man­age­ment”. We end up dis­con­tent and we want to be free from all of this and we want to do it by tak­ing con­trol of what’s around us.

Unfor­tu­nately it doesn’t work. When we live in an age with a brief atten­tion span, our lives jammed with dead­lines (and what a dead, flat line life we live), and we are con­tin­u­ously dis­sat­is­fied and want to do some­thing about it but can’t — because you know, some­one else is exer­cis­ing their free­dom at your expense — we do not sit and pon­der the inter­est­ing aspects and big ques­tions of life.

We let sci­en­tists do that, and we google the results at one point. When we have the time.

Photo credit: Illu­sion of Free­dom by aher­min