I've come to a self-realization recently. It's nothing fun, but self-realizations rarely are. They're usually things like: I eat my weight in carbs everyday or I curse more than a sailor with tourettes syndrome. My realization is this: On a daily basis, I fill my life with more junk than anything meaningful or productive. Sometimes that applies to my eating habits, which sometimes include more Chipotle than salads... but mostly I'm just talking about what I do with my time.
Though I have a few days during the week when I could do volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity, what usually ends up happening is I'll vow to go right after I check my e-mail and I turn on the computer. Then I'll start Facebooking, which turns into You Tube and so on. Before you can say "Brain Slurpee", half of my afternoon is gone and I've done nothing of value. All I've accomplished is turning oxygen into carbon dioxide and converting pop tarts into fat. After filling my head with so much nonsense, it literally will start to hurt. I'll seriously get a headache from all the crap I've watched. And it is crap. Why do we insist on watching these meaningless videos? It's a mind-numbing addiction.
I find that I won't work on my talents, like art, because I have this craving for the meaningless. After all, art requires skill and thinking. It seems that some days, thinking is just asking too much. Instead of accomplishing something real, I'd rather devote my time to a fake accomplishment that means absolutely nothing in the long run. Such as reaching the next level in whatever game I happen to be playing at the time. All I get from them is a false sense of accomplishment and many wasted hours.
After so long, I began to feel ill. Just sick and empty. Isn't there some novel out there that I could be reading instead that has some kind of moral to it? Something that'll make me think and not have to do with the undead, vampires and werewolves? Do such books exist any longer? Is there a movie I can watch that won't make me lose IQ points anymore? After such ponderings, I forced myself to go outside and I felt better. I made myself read some non-fiction (which is blissfully vampire-free). Once again I realized that I'm here for a purpose, and none of it involves status updates on Facebook.
I guess what I'm saying is there's too much junk and some of us are making ourselves sick with it. What you fill your life with is important because it affects what you get out of it. Have adventures, don't just read about them. Learn something that isn't celebrity related. Turn off the TV for an hour and watch a sunset. If you're filled up with garbage, there won't be room for anything meaningful! In conclusion, if I see another stupid vampire novel become popular, there's going to be a mass book burning in the very near future.
