Remember Protagoras? “Man is the measure of all things”?
Without man, there’s no meaning?
Yes, our world becomes meaningless.
The moment we no longer care enough about it.
The moment we stop paying attention.
The other day I had a riveting conversation with my son.
With my 21 years old son.
I asked him to comment on my previous post.
The one about too many people allowing sentiment to cloud their judgement.
The one about even reputable news agencies using click-bait titles to entice readers. Hence reinforcing the habit of sentiment being allowed to cloud reason.
‘Life was never better for so many of us’, explained my son. ‘Since WWII most of us had enjoyed peace. Since the Spanish Flu, we hadn’t experienced a pandemic. Since Salk, we’ve led ourselves to believe we were safe from disease. Since the fall of communism, even the ideological divides have paled down. And now we have enough technology to feed the entire planet, comfortably. The point being that we have no idea how to deal in this situation. What to do. How to behave.
Simply because we have no relevant prior experience.
Until recently, historically speaking, we have successfully dealt with wars, famines and pestilence.
But it’s the first time that we experience such abundance.
We need to adapt to the new reality.
To transform it into an opportunity. Into an opportunity to go forward.
We have to avoid, at all costs, the pitfall of allowing this abundance to bog us down.’
Heartening, isn’t it?
That a person so young can find such deep meaning.
If I may say such things about my own son…
nicichiarasa 