i'm coming up for air

So I was thinking the other day, what if everything tasted the same? If everything tasted the same then taste would be immaterial. It would be as if we didn’t have taste buds in the first place. Just like if everything looked the same, sight wouldn’t exist. Take this a step further: if life is the same day after day, would life really have meaning and would we be aware of our existence? You could take this to all sorts of levels.

I wonder if there is a lifestyle so redundant that life itself becomes meaningless. Working at a factory for your entire life might lead to a conscious coma, where you just go through the motions day after day. Working at an office or in a cubicle might put you in a numb state also. Going to school gets me every now and then. I can sit in my dorm room and stare into nothing for prolonged periods of time without much feeling at all. This is how we’re supposed to be I guess. I’m preparing myself for a patterned life of sitting behind a computer desk. There are probably lots of people who feel this way about their jobs. They’re creatures of habit, and I’m being taught to be one right now. Soon I’ll enter the work force as an energetic young adult out of college, and not long after I’ll be molded into the same machine that so many people have become.

I don’t really think that this will happen to me, but neither does half the population. No one wants to predict their future as one that is spent behind a desk, but what other jobs are there? I could be an explorer or an astronaut, maybe a fireman or a police officer. Sometimes kids know better than anyone else what will make them happy for the rest of their lives; it is in that stage of life, where we can be ourselves. Our true selves, something so pure yet so rarely seen in today’s society. It’s no wonder that we all steer away from our childhood fantasies, no respectable college offers Cowboy as a major, and besides we’re at the stage in our life where we are supposed to be making sensible decisions. We can’t go into the real world as cowboys; boxes can no longer serve as intergalactic spaceships and going down a slide doesn’t bring about the same carefree feelings that it used to.

It’s a shame that we only have a small window of opportunity, between the age of zero and seventeen, to be ourselves with no worries at all. After this and even during this stage we are pressured to conform, and then the process of conditioning begins. Innocence is lost and our disease spreads to others like wildfire. Maturity takes hold, and we breathe our final breath.