I’ve grown weary of people merely existing to please themselves.
And what more have many of our lives ever been but that? For what other purpose do I keep hearing the term “college experience”? Can they mean anything different than fitting the most “fun” as is possible into four years of life? And this is when the nausea starts for me…
We love ourselves so much that even college exists only to please and entertain us. This is kind of thinking is a sickness with which we have all been infected.
It is starvation of the soul. It is life on the sunshiney surface. It is rootless, passionless. It is bottom-dwelling, yellow cowardice. The absence of wisdom, nobility, intelligence, history, anything that resembles love, art, beauty, hope.
It is all pretend. The ones who are real do not even exist here anymore. They died long ago.
Our lives are collections. It is no longer as trendy to collect things in order to keep up with the Jones’. Now in order to impress our friends we collect crazy stories, facebook albums, a checklist of countries we went to on free travel, a camera full of pictures of us beside every monument or work of art we could spend two minutes desecrating rather than appreciating, all so we could mark it off some list that supposedly makes you a somebody. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t pretend to appreciate it, because art is cool. We may not be contesting for the highest salary, but we sure are still competing for worldly success. And still we are keeping the spirit of hoarding the most stuff. But we have disguised our lust for more by storing up instead, the latest ideas, causes, movements, subcultures. Trying to seal the status we hold in our own minds as ultimately superior to others by making as many intellectually snobby comments as can possibly be made by one human being in a lifetime. Readers of Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What will recognize this as fighting to the death to “stay in the lifeboat.” Why else is there a hierarchical structure created during pledge week? Im sure it really is to make kids “appreciate” their club. No, I think it is just one more chance for one human-being, being so full of pride they can barely function, to exert superiority over another.
And what’s worse is that we bring God into it. As if he could even stand to be near such hypocrisy. Jesus called the Pharisees white-washed tombs, and I think that description fits us pretty well. We call the name of Jesus because it is convenient to us, because it is trendy to be spiritual at our university, while buried in our heart of hearts there is an altar built to the one and only god we truly worship…
ourselves.
