The Broad and Narrow II

So I really can't finish a thought. Either that or I elaborate and retread the same lines of argument more than I should. I wished I had taken the time to look it over because I wanted to distinguish this broad and narrow definition of purpose of life from the idea of parents telling their kids to go business major or engineer because of broaden career opportunities. I'm not really worried about the career being the slacker that I am; I'm not invalidating the idea that accounting is a safer bet than mortuary school but I think that's only one factor among many and would be overwhelmed by, for example, a fear of crunching numbers for a living.

The broadness or scope of the meaning is really based on the personal idea of what makes life more than just tolerable (or worse as the case may be). More stupid examples, teaching can be a very rewarding experience for some but not all teachers would feel that way (my personal skew, the percentage is low). Same for a doctor. So it's not very quantifiable and thus it is not wise to try to label a field of work as more spiritually (in the secular sense) rewarding than others. Alot of the backlash towards celebrities and that group I tend to regard as falling in this area: whether it's purposeful or empty is really not for outsiders to judge.

I'm braindead quite frequently, or euphemistically termed as whimsical, and on one of the recent occasions I watched a John Stossel 20/20 report. It's obviously a misnomer because he never reports on anything with any semblance journalism skills; they're all op. ed. piece on camera portraying one side of a soporific (dictionary.com? I wanted to use somnabulistic or however it's spelled.) story. This time he was talking about a subset of the slackers population: the people with money to live that way without being called bums! His interviewee was a guy engaged to some rich heiress, not one with her own library of titles at the local video store, and he had never had a job in his life. Correction: he got a job at an investment company but quit before he had to use the loo on account of seeing those people actually having to work until 2 a.m. midnight. I think that he might have some money on his own, not from earning it or anything or I might just have assumed from the circle he's in. Actually, I'd be scared by that too. Anyway, he quit, and from then on has spent time partying and filling his time with nonsense. It's easy to find such a person disreputable or just downright pathetic, and that's what Stossel counted on when he decided to do this "story". But look, before you decide that it wouldn't be so bad have him put down for the sake or the working population, let's just consider what he's guilty of? Winning the lottery at birth? People have to put in an effort to achieve anything worthwhile, but it is always proportional to some degree of God-given talent, which is another form of lottery, the genetic one. And really, anyone who's born in one of the industrial or relative equal nations where they have an opportunity to work and play with a degree of freedom have already won some form of lottery from avoiding places of far starker conditions. How well would the most successful people you can think of have done if they were born to a desolate family in the third world? Would they even have a chance? Do the people there now have a chance? I mean, I know Oprah came from a bad situation but even she would say it's a blessing for her to have been born is the US; and it's very nice to see that she's giving back to the communities of Africa (it seems pretty evident she has nothing to do with the recent scandals and it's hard to expect complete oversight - even the, say, US government with all its resources suck at oversight (sometimes on purpose, perhaps?) So I guess hurray for genetic lottery. Back to the loafer, he's a loafer but he's been provided the means, albeit through no effort of his own, to be a loafer. So leavef him alone. And if he's a wasteful person, considering the multiplied(?) factor, he's probably doing more for the economy than he would be doing if he was a working productive member of society while spending thriftily. His partying and going to stripclubs is putting some stripper through college, and there's no punchline there because if it's really true and not just an outright lie then I think it's commendable.

To explain with more incoherent ramblings - more name-dropping of the poser variety - with an example from the world of literature. And not English literature because it isn't limited to a less than refined, piecemeal language which, yes, also happens to be the only one I'm semi-fluent in. If I were less of a poser I'd say blow moi. My evidential lineup consists of Proust (that's pronounced proost and not praust, I'm looking at you, Daniel Henney or whoever it was on the Samsoon crew that told him it was praust!) and Kafka. I'll get back to this; needless to say Proust is the narrow and Kafka the broad. Both were amazing, but one was obviously mroe complete than the other - meaning his writing wasn't the only thing that defined him in any meaningful way, in my humble opinion. But I like Proust more - prodigals stick together, not in reality but in spirit.