You know we live in a world of reality, a plane of tangible reasoning in which we can discern fact from fantasy, that which is real and that of make believe. The internet has caused us to blind ourselves to that fact. Let's not say the blame is with the internet, it was the vehicle to hope, a desire to make something real. A chance to turn those dreams we had into something more.
Is it foolish to place such expectations on something that is so close to us in a world that at best can be described as something less than reality? It was created as a means of sharing information, that was the concept of the World Wide Web and in its infancy it served its purpose well and it fulfilled that need to be able to exchange information, knowledge and ideas between people. But it has morphed and people learned to take advantage of the possibilities it offered outside of its original concept. In doing so they have created a world of fiction and fantasy that plays on those hopes and desires of others. It has given us the ability to extrapolate beyond our dreams, to overlay fact and fiction, to release our limitations and live in a pseudo reality. Our concept of how we see ourselves and our reality. What we would like to be or what we want from life.
I am not saying we should not have dreams or hopes or that fantasizing about something is wrong or that it makes us different from anyone else. We all have these within us, no one is exempt from this. We do however need to be able to tell the difference in them and not place our futures, dreams, hopes and desires in it and expect it to "pay off". We create and set our own expectations in life, we are creatures of reasoning, something that few species in this world possess. The difference that sets apart from the other species that have that ability to reason is that we have an advanced capability to reason. Or do we? An otter knows it is hard to open an abalone shell with just paws and teeth and reasoning tells him that he must incorporate something to facilitate him getting access to the meal locked inside. He knows and in doing so assists those efforts by using a tool, a rock to crack open his meal.
Even birds possess this reasoning and some species have also been able to expand their reasoning beyond their genetic inheritance. The crow for example already knows that to drop a walnut from a great height onto rocks he is apt to have a meal when the shell meets the ground, but crows that inhabit an urban environment have learned by reasoning that man can do this for them and save them energy in doing so. All they have to do is wait for a light to turn red, place their nut in the intersection and wait for the light to turn green, sooner or later a car will drive over it. Some may say this is nothing more than conditioning on the bird's part when driven to alternative solutions. But is it conditioning or advanced reasoning? I prefer to think it is the latter of the two. In order to reason you have to have the ability to think, conditioning is a repetitive action taught and no one taught these crows, this would require an outside intervention of a higher thinking entity. They could have kept dropping these nuts from a high altitude as they have always done and expelled great amounts of energy in doing so, but they reasoned there was a better way and in doing so expanded their thought process to find it, which expanded their ability to reason. It then became genetically inherent in their offspring. Now you may say this is nothing more than evolution, that they just evolved taking advantage of man's advances, but self evolution requires that you have the ability to reason.
Primates have proven this theory over and over again through out the evolutionary process. From sticks to bones to weapons of mass destruction we have taught ourselves to reason that there was always a better way. Chimps know now that a stick or a bone has more use than pounding a nut and trees limb to release the fruit, they have reasoned that it can be a decisive factor in the outcome of a dispute between rival tribes of chimpanzees or from another species that preys upon them. Somewhere within the time line of evolution, our ancestors reasoned that by adding a stone or a piece of shaped flint the effect of such a tool can be multiplied to his advantage and make their life easier and safer knowing that they had a superior advantage over others.
You may be wondering what this has to do with how I started off this post and where it was going in my process of reasoning. We have let the internet in a lot of aspects cause us to stop reasoning. It is a tool, just like anything else man has created to make life easier and we need to understand that it is nothing more than this. A tool to increase our knowledge and expand on our process of reasoning and evolve from that. It seems that a lot look at it as a means of salvation though. Salvation from their current situation in life, whether it be financial, emotional, relationships and a number of other things we think life has plagued us with. To a certain extent it can assist us in those endeavors to find help in these things, but it cannot save you from it. Reasoning tells us that to affect a change, we are that vehicle to change and once we realize that it is by our efforts we can seek and ends to a current means we can make a change. So many it seems have placed their faith in what they think is an answer when in fact in most cases it has done nothing more than compound the problem they were seeking an answer to.
Case in point, so many seek an end to two things on here and I have found that it is probably the most prevalent reason they are here seeking those answers and in their reasoning have bundled the two together, in effect seeking to kill two birds with one stone. Those reasons are financial and matrimonial. These are two entirely separate problems, but they feel one will fix the other. They have went beyond logical reasoning and extrapolated that line which separates the two to see both as one. Reasoning should tell them that a majority of what they will find is more problems taking that line of thought and will do little more than cause them undo emotional pain. So in some way this, the internet has become a tool that they feel has inflicted pain on them. When in fact when they turned to something such as this as a means to alleviate them from the pain they were going through, they inflicted more pain on themselves.
At our basic we are adventitious creatures, we have learned the easiest way in life is to take advantage of something or someone to our gain. None are guiltless from this fact, not that there is anything wrong with it to a certain extent, but as we all know there are various levels to being advantageous, from it being beneficial to all involved to where it is used for self purposes. The internet has given those with only their personal and selfish gain a fertile and sustainable world to exploit this. Have we learned from it? Have we utilized our ability to reason that by being a victim or witnessing another that has been victimized that we need to change our thought process and realize that for reality's sake, the answer is not here? Or that being creatures of habit we will continue to seek those answers to our lives on here? Being such creatures we continue our reasoning on the basis of objective reasoning and keep playing against the odds thinking that sooner or later we will be dealt a winning hand or as that in a lottery our number will come up. This world has really done nothing more that when utilized in such a manner and not what it was truly meant for, but to personify and give validity to Murphy's Law, that if there is the possibility of something going wrong, it will go wrong. More often than not, it ends up going wrong.
We have tried to create a perfect world paralleled with the imperfect world in which we live. In doing so have created a recipe for disaster when we cannot separate the two. We have left the reality of one world to live in the pseudo reality of one we created thinking we would find something real. Fact and fantasy rarely intermingle and if it does it is on an individual basis. It is when fantasy replaces reality in our lives and causes us to stop using our ability to reason we are setting ourselves up for disappointment, but this we learn too late and is usually realized after the damage has been done. When we have placed ourselves in the path of a storm we could have avoided, escaped from, we have lost our common sense to realize that there will devastating effects if we continue to do so. This is not a benign world, it is a world with very serious emotional consequences and sooner or later can be seen as a self destructive pattern with a very dire outcome. In a sense if viewed in such a manner it can be the ends to a means or rather a meaning to an end.
At this point I feel we need to digress in order to progress. To go back to a more logical process of reasoning and realize the answer to something better is within each of us and stop thinking we will find it outside of ourselves. To separate fact from fantasy and depend on our own inherent strengths to find a better way for ourselves. Relearn those lessons of survival and self preservation to overcome setbacks in our lives. To be dependent on ourselves again and not on something that in order to exist is dependent on us. Stop being fed by something that feeds on us. We need to evolve.
Later...
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