Chapter 1: In Which I Start a Blog (and ramble)

For years, I've had the same singular thought which I've summarily ignored: “I should start a blog.” Today, I'm done ignoring that voice. Giving in seems more productive than any of the alternatives. It's not because I think my ideas are novel or worthwhile. I mainly just want them to see exposure beyond the echo chamber of my circle of friends.

Hopefully, you'll enjoy reading my thoughts. If not, we can always have an enlightening discussion in the comments as to why you disagree. Maybe we'll both learn something. All I know for sure is that I'm dissatisfied with the world in general. It's not just politics (though it contributes plenty) or religion (ditto), it's the overall attitude of apathy from humankind. Somewhere along the way, we as a species abandoned our critical thinking skills. We traded thought for quick information. We gave up our identity for labels. We boiled down our philosophies to 140 character twitter-friendly zingers, and I'm not sure why.

"The world is a mess and I just need to rule it."

I'm not saying labels are bad. They have their uses. However, there is no combination of labels that accurately and fully describes a human being. We are all so much more than the sum of groups to which we belong. It's the tendency to take shortcuts that bothers me. If someone asks for my political affiliation, isn't it much more accurate for me to tell them where I stand on matters of security, foreign policy, and economics rather than give a one-word party affiliation? If there is a party that I identify with, I haven't found it yet.

We've gotten lazy. We have the most unique linguistic ability on the planet, and we're squandering our words. We answer in text speak, in tweets, and in emoticons when we have billions of combinations of sounds to more accurately express ourselves. When did we willingly trade our freedom of speech for a freedom to talk, and why?

Is this the best of all possible worlds? If not, do we not have a responsibility to make it better? That starts with honest and open communication – something I think we all need more of. Of course, like I said, my ideas aren't new. Mr. Huxley probably communicated what I'm trying to say in a short paragraph better than I did in this first rambling blog post:

"The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand -- but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted."