A friend of mine posted a meme on Facebook. It’s a picture of Snoopy (from the Peanuts comic strip) sitting at his typewriter while his bird companion Woodstock is flying nearby. The words of the meme say:
Not in jail
Not in a hospital,
not in a grave.
Yep, it’s going to
be another
great day.
It almost mirrors something I settled on as a metric for good days a number of years ago. Mine had one change.
“It’s a good day if I’m not in jail, a hospital, or a warzone.”
I can see adding “the grave” to mine.
It’s the warzone part I want to focus on here. I have great respect for our military personnel, but I’d prefer the world to be a better place where we wouldn’t need them. Instead of spending all their time, energy and efforts training for war, then standing ready or deploying to war, they could instead pursue their own interests and do whatever they are passionate about. They could be doctors, or bricklayers, or chefs, or just go fishing. And without wars causing all the pain, suffering and confusion they do, the world could accelerate toward progressing on all fronts. We could make great leaps in medicine, arts, law, cultural pursuits.
Ultimately, I’m just your average overgrown eight-year-old who believes the world can not only be more awesome than it is, it should be more awesome than it is. I believe in Bill and Ted, and I believe that a world run by makers would be much better than what we have now. We could end up with something like Tomorrowland. We’d have a world where people don’t have time to fight because there will be so many cool things being built, or happening. It’d be a non-stop, creative Burning Man.
Even destroying things could be done more creatively. I’ve long looked for or tried to coin a word that embodies the concept of removing old unneeded things through creative destruction. There is just something inherently cool about watching a planned demolition of an old building. But even if you aren’t blowing something up, maybe you’re recycling it and transforming it into something new, and cool, and useful. Like turning old VHS tapes into rope.
I suppose the drawback to my envisioned utopia would be personality conflicts. Creative geniuses tend to be moody, or impulsive, or volatile, and have strong opinions on things. Imagine a world filled with Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. I’m sure they’d butt heads often. Then again, maybe that would be the driving, churning creative force needed to bring about some incredible new discoveries.
It’d be nice if I had some way to find like-minded beings and gather them together. I guess I’ll just have to do it the old fashioned way – put the idea out there and gather people through networking. It takes longer that way, but you gotta start somewhere.
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