KuleKat . com

Interesting? - Who Needs It?

I’m sure you’re familiar with the ancient Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times”. How about chronic energy crises, uncertainty about the climate, massive imbalances in population / age / gender, food shortages, escalation of conflicts and a myriad other challenges that are clamouring at the gates already. Throw technology and political and cultural upheaval into the mix and it’s probably never been more “interesting”.

So where do you and I fit into all this? This brave new world that has such troubles in it. A world of threats and calamities, yet undreamed of possibilities and opportunities. What might be an intelligent response to interesting times?

Well, times they may be a changing, but people fundamentally don’t. Our most elemental desires remain; same as they ever were. People always have and do still seek to improve themselves, their surroundings, their prospects for the future. That’s what life itself is about. A constant quest to survive, adapt, improve.

These days our core needs increasingly find expression in various forms of self-help, self-awareness, self-fulfillment. The word “self” says it all, for commendable as it is to strive to make the best of oneself, to invest in personal growth, the fact is that mainstream Personal Development has long teetered on the edge of sterile self-obsession, with little or nothing to say about the wider world and your or my place in it.

On the other hand, those who survey the major issues of our time, presuming to know who is to blame and what is to be done, invariably miss the point that these are not issues for the world as such. They are caused by and affect people - billions of individual people just like you and me, trying only to squeeze what they can from an all too brief moment of life.

The Writing’s (Always) On The Wall

So one has to ask, what’s the point of it all if the world has either left your perfectly developed ass in the dust or alternatively gone to hell in a handcart? Equally where’s the purpose in being well informed and worldly but closed to yourself, your place in this world and your full potential?

The interesting times in which we find ourselves are entirely a product of the human condition. A mass expression of the basic desires each and every person shares. Politicians who devise policies and launch initiatives to tackle “the problem” just don’t get it - we are the problem.

Cast your eyes around. Few if any of the major issues of our time have crept up undetected. Anyone who didn’t forsee the current energy “shock” at least a decade ago was either not looking or not thinking. The writing was on the wall way back when, and now there is fresh writing on the wall, foretelling the things that will “interest” us in the years ahead.

Even though much that masquerades as information is wrong, stupid or serving someone’s agenda (and frequently all three) it is not difficult these days to form an intelligent perspective on world affairs. Nor does it require superhuman powers to cut through the banal platitudes and pernicious twaddle (Law of Attraction anyone?) that long ago became common currency in the field of introspection.

You cannot suck excess Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere nor refill depleted oil wells, but you can understand what is happening, what might happen next, how it affects you and figure out your own optimal response. In other words connect yourself and your goals with the real world to the real benefit of both.

Your Own Special Song

Since you’re self-evidently still reading this, I’d like to ask, do you want to:

• Find love?
• Earn more money?
• Develop as a person?
• Do the best for your children?
• Make the most of your time in the world?
• Spend more time doing the things you most enjoy?
• Leave this world in some small way a better place for your part in it?

Guess what? You’re not alone. As John Donne famously observed: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”. John Donne knew a thing or two.

I’m not even vaguely suggesting I have any answers to any of the above. But I do know that for the most part we all share these same basic desires; that far better people than those who inhabit the self-help industry have given them serious consideration; and that they underpin not just each person’s own little narrative but the whole human story.

So why dance to the Charlatans’ Waltz? Use your intelligence. As Cass Elliot so wonderfully put it, make your own kind of music, sing your own special song.

Because when it comes down to it, all each of us really have is our world and our time upon it.