Usually I write these posts with a degree of forethought, planning and structure in order to create an architecturally interesting as well as generally health and safety law abiding literary construction. However today I don't have the energy nor the motivation to attempt this degree of creative pondering hence I shall write everything as it occurs to me though in reality, I suppose that very few people will ever see this post and of those few people, only about a cubed root of them will actually be interested enough to attempt to comprehend the chunk of text. Hence what I write here is pretty irrelevant all things considered and for all anyone cares I could write my deepest darkest secrets but remain comfortable in the knowledge that it will probably remain a complete secret to the world.
Much as many philosophers have pondered over the question, "when a tree falls in the woods but nobody hears it, does it actually make a sound?" I often ponder, "If a blog writer writes a blog but nobody reads it, has he actually wrote the blog." The answer to which is yes but for a completely depressingly futile cause. Though when all things are considered life its self is generally futile since the main aim of any organism is to leave off springs upon the planet in order to ensure the continued existence of the species and human beings are overpopulated as it is, meaning nothing that I might choose to do with my life matters in the slightest when thought of in a longer time frame.
The only thing that could make life meaningful would be a situation when the survival of humanity is genuinely at stake such as an apocalypse. Though if such an instance were to occur, I doubt I will survive since I have very few survival skills and am not very high in terms of physical fitness. My only possible advantage would be my incessant paranoia concerning a potentially immanent zombie apocalypse. Which, I occasionally consider, might be a manifestation of my lack of trust in those around me since it is that sort of fundamental fear of familiar people ebing turned into enemies that fuels the concept of the undead.
Now, that sounded quite deep. About 2000 leagues deeper than the sort of thing I usually write on this blog which is a little problematic since when somebody who is usually callous and shallow suddenly makes deep statements it tends to give the impression that they are somehow depressed. I assure you, if you are considering my mental well being at the moment (not in the sense that I might be a psychopath on the verge of going on a killing spree but in the sense that I might be suicidal) that I not in the slightest bit depressed. Though if I do become suicidal, I shall blame it on genetics, though that may be quite pseudo-scientific, since my country of origin, Japan, has one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world. So much so that, when people jump in front of trains in Japan, there is barely any delay, only a polite mildly regretful announcement alerting people to a "human accident", sounding like it is more concerned with the delay caused than the loss of life, and an assurance normal services will be resumed in a short while.
Which, in one sense, is quite enviable efficiency since here in Britain, the unfortunate demise of a leaf on the rail tracks can shock Transport For London on such a deep emotional scale that they halt the entire network for a day or so, presumably in mourning. The same comparison of humanity versus efficiency can be made in other aspects as well when comparing the two countries, Britain and Japan. For example Japanese shops are staffed by extremely well mannered staff who will all greet the customer in synchronization upon entry and work at a fast near automatic mechanical pace whereas British institutions tend to employ individuals who prioritize the social relations with their fellow employee than the many customers waiting irritatedly in an ever accumulating queue.
In the end however, I would take the humanity over efficiency since it does give a sensation of actual person to person interaction. The feeling that you are living in a world composed of individual people all leading their own individual lives towards an ultimate demise but are nonetheless giving it their best shot. The feeling that there are a multitude of potentially interesting stories and melodramas mingling, bumping into each other, walking past each other throughout the packed human test tube we refer to as a city.
Although presently even this happiness is slowly being eroded by machinery. For example the automatic self checkout machines which have replaced person manned counters in some shops. They are, though they originally broke down more frequently than a depressed pubescent teenage girl with attention issues, now quite efficient and not only they prevent the human interaction that used to take place in shops but they also make the buyers into nothing more than mere mindless machines. Mechanically moving arms full of desired purchases in time to the monotonous music of the electronic beeps.
Furthermore the mass creation and release of high quality headphones and portable music players, allowing, as the adverts often quip, the user to immerse themselves in their own bubble like world, cuts off individual people. Where everyone used to travel in the bus, hearing the conversation of others, listening to snippets of other people's lives; they now have their own little musical worlds in which they hear nothing but the music they've chosen. Maybe the two people next to you are discussing methods to counter the immanently approaching zombie revolution because they are secretly a member of an underground mystical organization of zombie fighters. The story should start with you, the protagonist, hearing their conversation and being sucked into their world to be thrust into a hugely exciting adventure of epic world saving zombie decapitating proportions. But instead you're listening to Lady Gaga or One Direction or whatever is popular so you don't hear the conversation and the gates to the potentially interesting future of fiction is forever closed, the opportunity missed.
In the end this became just a strange slightly deep rant with the atmosphere of an old person ranting about the good old days. Or in a word, conservative. So to wrap it all up, I might as well end on a highly snobbish posh note by saying the moral of the story is the well worn phrase of Carpe Diem.
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