The real waste of life is not working a "9-7 banker's job" or whatever this fool thinks is his problem.
The real waste is being a whiner and an ingrate who still imagines -- at 46 -- that ludicrous banalities and cliches like writing a worthless novel or traveling to "help the poor and homeless" are the things that make life worth living.
The real waste is working a banker's job for years and not being enough of a man to have a thousand different thoughts, impressions, and feelings about that job and all the myriad things and people that it involves. The waste is buying into the idiotic cliche that such a job is necessarily "empty" or "soulless", as if it is not a part of life that accrues depth and interest over time if one only allows it to, and keeps one's eyes and one's mind open to what life truly is, to its everyday modest charms and possibilities.
The real waste is being so foolish and conventional as to believe that the true depths and subtleties that make life worth living are only contained in the exotic locales that one has failed to visit or in some thin and conventionally defined literary achievements imagined in one's youth -- as if a very young man could ever have anything of real interest to say.
There is no greater vice than ingratitude -- not because it is morally wrong (which it is) but because it so cognitively evacuating. In the search for a thinly imagined ideal, it hollows out and reduces the actual lived life, depriving it of the true and rich meanings. This is where the real waste lies, in the ingrate's turning away from life, in losing the world. How terrible.
The real waste is being a whiner and an ingrate who still imagines -- at 46 -- that ludicrous banalities and cliches like writing a worthless novel or traveling to "help the poor and homeless" are the things that make life worth living.
The real waste is working a banker's job for years and not being enough of a man to have a thousand different thoughts, impressions, and feelings about that job and all the myriad things and people that it involves. The waste is buying into the idiotic cliche that such a job is necessarily "empty" or "soulless", as if it is not a part of life that accrues depth and interest over time if one only allows it to, and keeps one's eyes and one's mind open to what life truly is, to its everyday modest charms and possibilities.
The real waste is being so foolish and conventional as to believe that the true depths and subtleties that make life worth living are only contained in the exotic locales that one has failed to visit or in some thin and conventionally defined literary achievements imagined in one's youth -- as if a very young man could ever have anything of real interest to say.
There is no greater vice than ingratitude -- not because it is morally wrong (which it is) but because it so cognitively evacuating. In the search for a thinly imagined ideal, it hollows out and reduces the actual lived life, depriving it of the true and rich meanings. This is where the real waste lies, in the ingrate's turning away from life, in losing the world. How terrible.
same old shit, sixes and sevens Shaft...