I have never really quite been one with the rest of my peers (as may be obvious from the name of the blog). I am not going to assign blame. It is no more specifically society’s fault than it is my own. I see the world in a certain way, as do each of us. It just so happens that my particular view of the world is a bit more unique than seems to be the general norm. It could be simple stubbornness on my part. Maybe it is just a different understanding of what is, coming from both a different level of awareness than others and variety in life experiences. Whatever the reason, I am often at odds with what the society I live in seems to value. This is one of the reasons I am now pretty much a shut in, when once I was a rather social being.
There are oh so many aspects of our social culture that I could discuss with this concept in mind, but in honor of the letter Q (for my Z to A challenge) I am going to focus specifically on the idea of quality vs quantity. Essentially, in our society we are trained from birth that more is better. We give social superiority to those who have more “things”, while those who “own” the least become pariah. To me, this is utter nonsense. I find it a completely selfish way at looking at the world. Yet our whole social structure, our economy, even our morality is entirely based on this construct. It has become so prevalent that we measure everything by quantity, often forgetting that quality is even an issue. The whole idea of social networking is designed around the number of followers one has, despite the fact that the only connection with these followers maybe a specific line of thought and the app used. Marketing targets as many people as it can, with the hope that given enough viewers, a few will buy into the mind games, making it all worthwhile.
We are even trained to believe that we must continuously increase the population, yet we lack the resource management to deal with the population we already have. We measure the health of our economy by the number of jobs available, seeing continuous population growth as a way of increasing the workforce, when many of those jobs only exist because we so measure the economy and we already have more people than jobs. We are convinced we need to constantly have new versions of things, without providing a way to get rid of all the “old” perfectly functional things. We have so many choices to make that choosing itself becomes an issue of mental health. All this because “more is better”.
Now I am not going to claim that quantity is NEVER preferable. There are many instances when the more of something the better the situation. But to me, in the most important issues we face in life, taking the time and effort to obtain quality is more satisfying and efficient than having a constantly growing number of ineffective solutions. Don’t repeatedly duck tape when fixing it right once will do the trick. Don’t buy poorly made products over and over when a well made one will last a long time. Don’t pursue thousands of “friends” who really offer us nothing when one close companionship can provide all that we need. Having lots of money; followers; fame; children; moral limits; years; things does NOT make one a better person. Nor does it make one a worse person. Having a quality life is dependent on HOW we live, not HOW MUCH we have. Live well, treat others well, and we are living a good life. This is true whether we have a lot of whatever or nothing at all.
At least this is true in MY view of the world.
