WHY SO SERIOUS?

It's silly the things that mattter to people really. I don't mean 
all those corny things like momentos from the past, or collections, 
or obsessions with wealth. I mean the things that people really 
agree are important: Their job, people they know, their ideals for 
society and the world as a whole. I wouldn't claim to be an 
exception here, but at the same time as I worry about these, things 
I don't really know why I care. Here's why...

Let's start with one's job. Whether you like it or hate it, most 
people care about it significantly. One way or other most people 
stake their future on one, devoting themselves as one little cog in 
the mysterious great machine just so that they themselves can keep 
on turning. They worry about loosing it, maybe because they've 
staked their finances on it, or it's just likely to be a pain to 
find another one. They want to feed the job with the effort that it 
thinks it deserves, or maybe more so that they might move up the 
chain, the next rung, further, deeper, into the machine - who knows 
maybe you can find your way out altogether?

But did you think about what the job is? It might be really 
inconsequential, maybe just entertainment: making movies, video 
games, music, theatre, sports. Things that just pass the time, that 
nobody _really_ cares about except you and those others in the job 
of providing it. Hundreds of people work at a cost of tens of 
millions so that I can pick up for $0.20 a second-hand VHS tape of 
a movie from 1986, watch it for an hour and 45 minutes, then 
conclude "heh, guess that was alright". They pump out an endless 
stream of music across the airwaves with millions of Watts of 
power, and via servers buzzing worldwide to cater to every desire, 
fed from constantly harvested waves of human talent - and I listen 
to old 90s tracker modules instead. For all of your worry, what 
does it really matter?

But of couse you might have a much more serious job - maybe you 
help write software that underpins the top websites on the 
internet, or to build the infrastructure for national 
transportation, or to predict the weather for next Tuesday. Surely 
then it's worth the worry, someone has to get this right or else... 
or else what? What are those websites mainly used for - if they're 
so popular then probably just more inconsequential entertainment 
themselves, or when they want some outdoor entertainment they'll 
join the majority of those poeple interested in the weather, and 
maybe travel out using that public infrastructure. Again so much of 
it just feeds the casual enjoyment of the public, so easily served 
by other means, yet you work hard and worry on their behalf.

Maybe though you have one of those properly important jobs - in the 
police or defence force, medicine, firefighting. You save lives, or 
preserve preserve their peace and prosperity. But what is done with 
these lives, this peace, this prosperity? Jobs. Work. Then, 
entertainment. They're other people working hard so that they might 
have more chance to sit back and enjoy the work of others, within 
the environment that others work to create. What good does it do, 
what cause for so much worry, for so much effort and time? It's 
just a system for its own sake, to keep people busy in whatever 
unstable way it can.

I don't propose an alternative to the system or the society that 
creates it. But I just want to point out that for you alone it 
doesn't really matter. You're in the machine, but it's a machine 
that only creates itself, and nobody cares about that, so why care 
about your little cog?

- The Free Thinker.

Admittedly this is coming from someone who doesn't really want to 
think about just how poorly his own cog is turning.