P1: One day I want to be psychic.
P2: What’s so important about this future date that you’ve got to bypass all the clairvoyant fun today?
P1: Whenever, then. Reading people’s minds! No-one would screw with me again.
P2: That was almost mature for your age demographic.
P1: Yah.
P2: But if you could hear what everyone was thinking all the time, wouldn’t you go insane?
P1: That’s cliché.
P2: Things that haven’t already been proven possible can’t really be stereotyped, actually.
P1: Well, what if I went insane trying to find a way to read your mind?
P2: I’d say you’d be screwed either way, and you wouldn’t have to worry so much about people screwing you.
P1: Dang.
We all strive to discover and achieve new things. Rarely do our innovation-seeking selves move past the ‘now-now-consequences-question-mark-oh-screw-em’ mindset to stop and ponder the insanity dilemma.
Say you have a preoccupation with achieving a needless goal. All except the most brain-dead are guilty of stoking a pointless pursuit within the flames of obsession.
For example:
- Attracting hordes of the opposite sex with the single convenient purchase of a car / designer lingerie / slot any other marketing farce you can think of into either one of the former categories
- Acquiring a house where the number of bedrooms are perfectly cubed from the number of friends who’ll be insanely jealous of and yet still highly admiring of your non-materialistic, non-ass self
- Racking up the most friends / page views / subscribers / links / Diggs / Pokes / pleas for help from Nigerian princes online in a completely legitimate way to prove what an awesome person you are
Then there are the somewhat warranted, wishful goals of the more forward-thinking minds out there:
- Ability to cure any ailment in the human body with a single pill
- Ability to instantaneously transport people via particle beams
- Fuck it … let’s just say everything that’s ever been framed in the pages of a comic book or science-fiction romp for the sake of pithiness
Now consider the following quote from a thinker who had more than a mild case of world-weariness when it came to humanity’s penchant for hopeless idealism:
“The gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation.”
– Machiavelli, ‘The Prince’
While the proper context for these words had more to do with manhandling political regimes than beaming miscellaneous body parts through time and space, the inherent message is just as pertinent to the insanity dilemma.
Focusing on what we don’t have sucks.
Especially when acquiring said improbable things will only lead to another goal with an impossible solution: an answer as to whether you’d be better off driven insane by incomprehension or innovation.
