I was walking with my friend earlier to lunch. We talked about how our worksite has degenerated into a whole corporate structure, with cut-throat mentality that, as he normally says, "Believe me, man. We work with a lot of people nowadays that in order to get some 5 cents they would not hesitate to step on you with your dollar." We talked about such realizations of work-life, and honestly sometimes I get so sick of it that I really just don't want to talk about it. I purposely divert our conversation into family, into friends, into marriage, into photography, into how it is a beautiful day! really. Today though, we talked about the long hours of work and how it makes one become so mechanical. One gets to be so robotic that it affects the way we treat our lives in general. We wake up to the same time. We get into much of a routinized work the whole day. When we come home, we zone into space and lord knows how we can think clearly because of exhaustion and the stuck-in-a-rut mentality. We can't even seem to visit our friends when we feel like it; we have to set up an appointment if and when we get the chance. And the more me nd my friend dived into scenarios, the more troubled we became. We continued citing things but it really got to a point where it is not funny anymore. I ended the conversation with a quote by one of my favorite pychologists BF Skinner. He said, "Why is it that we are so involved with creating robots that think like humans, when we already have humans that think like robots?"

Later on, when I was alone, I thought about the movie Virgin Suicides and the 90s. It got me thinking again about ennui, and senselessless in life, more like a societal (or middle-class) meltdown on the human drive to live. I started thinking, these people who have food to eat, who have money to go out and entertain themselves, who have essentially the proper resources to "live life and have it abundantly,"---why are they so dispassionate about their state? Why are they so listless? restless?! Then I said to myself, "Poor kids. While they have every means to live, the society is not set up for them to have meaningful living. They are trained to live a "proto-hedonistic" life, with not much of training on reflective living, and happiness on whatever is there." Such is the utter state of an object-oriented, goal-oriented society, where everyone is taught to achieve something in order to be happy (as opposed to just the thought of living-in-itself and proper attitude on things with a sense of morality and ethics but with room to be "mischievous" still --hehe!). Tsk! Tsk! Poor folks!!! These folks are really out of it, and a lot of it is really not their making, but rather systemic!!! Sad. Really sad state of current affairs... so I guess our current society doesn't just affect the real poor folks, huh? Unbelievable. Just unbelievable.

Someone told me once that there is a real problem with disparity in richness. He said, The problem is this: poor folks are worried abotu where to get their money, while rich folks are worried about poor folks taking their money away from them. There is a simple solution to this, you know. I will just leave it up to folks to think of what the solution might be.