amazingly excellent blog post by someone else entirely

here.

he addresses directly and by proxy a sort of creeping realization that i've previously discussed in private conversations, namely, that at the end of the day, western guilt will get you nowhere and you've just got to suck it all up and party. i'm a disturbingly self-aware hedonist, now, though that may just be a phase, as was my disturbingly self-aware ascetic phase. the point, though, is that there's no escape anywhere. the choice of life is ultimately between happiness and misery, selfishness and benevolence. i am not a saint and i do not pretend to be. i think the blog author has shed the same pretensions.

i spoke previously on this topic ages ago, wow did i sound angry then! things have changed rather quite a lot since then, but evidently i shared some of the same sentiments as the other blogger-dude, namely, that wherever you go, it's all about you (or "me" in this case) since whenever you stop enjoying your dysentary, you can go home but the poor souls who have to live in your exotic roach-infested vacation paradise cannot. they are home, and it sucks for them. or it doesn't. it depends on the "them" and maybe that's the point: perspective.

but my point was and is that i enjoy, appreciate, and perspect this destructive greedy american life enough already without finding out just how miserable i am making the rest of the world, up close and personal. it is my (evidently) long held belief that short of activism, a person can have no significant direct influence on world affairs -- not by voting, not by consumer choice, not even really by dumping money into a charity. so, logically, said sir bedevere, since a) international travel "isn't real" in the same sense that watching a show on the discovery channel "isn't real" and b) seeing poor people might make me appreciate my privilege a little more but i already appreciate it more than most, even perhaps most that travel, and c) the world sucks and there's nothing i can do about it, it follows that the best course of action for me is simply to devote my energy to increasing the happiness of those that i care about. and that's no new idea for me.

(the hole in the reasoning, of course, is point c, because it's disingenuous to say there's nothing i can do about it. could the sentence have borne it, i should instead have written that there's nothing short of becoming an activist or holding political office (though that is probably of quite dubious efficacy) or (more likely to matter but even less likely to actually happen) infiltrating and siezing control of a giant multinational corporation that i can do about the awful condition of the world at large. all that seems like a waste of my energy and talents; best to leave the world in the hands of those that think they're able to change its course and focus my attention on, as i said, increasing happiness at the local level. ultimately, would more people have such an attitude, instead of seeking and consildating power and inflicting non-freedom on their fellows, the world would be a better place. of course, anyone who begins a sentence with "if only more people thought like me!" is clearly either a hippie or a dolt, there being, besides happiness, very little practical difference between the two, most notably when it comes to actual impact on world events.)

of course, this is not to say that i will not enjoy international travel, and i'd better enjoy it, since soon it will no longer be a choice ;)

i still have all my high-school idealism and cynicism. i'm just more articulate now. funny, that.