“Work harder, millions on welfare depend on it,” was this year’s winning statement, surely taken from some talk-radio host’s list of zingers. Consider it, followed by an outburst of laughter, a pretty good picture of the penetrating insightfulness so apparent at such family gatherings.

But to shed some light on this little Limbaugh/Hannity-esque wisdom, imagine what a village of potential car owners would look like if we extrapolated the United States population down to 100 people. This village has 14 illiterate members and 27 who have a college education. Five of the villagers earn a third of the villages entire income, while 6 of them earn less than .3% of it. Forty of them think and hope your village is headed toward a biblical end-times Armageddon, and 7 of them own a Britney Spears album.

With this economic disparity in your village, you have two very general options. The one, clearly opposed to this Sarah Palin-style blurb, is that the most well-to-do help out the least well-off. Aptly termed “distributive justice,” this is sort of the Robin Hood approach of “Steal from the rich to give to the poor.” But it’s not stealing if it’s justified, right? So says the most famous of champions for this view, philosopher John Rawls. He has us imagine viewing our village wearing theoretical blinders — a “Veil of Ignorance” — that prevents us from seeing our own status in the village regarding our wealth and natural abilities. From this standpoint of fairness, he suggests we would rationally do whatever benefits the least well off. In this case, if you were to come into this village inheriting the wealth of your parents, you won’t be that much the worse for losing a chunk of that money. The impoverished, then, would receive a Robin Hood-style handout.

And in the right corner, also hailing from Harvard University: philosopher Robert Nozick. Contrary to Rawls, Nozick’s “libertarianism” more closely reflects that famous French term laissez-faire, or to “let things alone.” In this case, with everyone in your village truly free, they are also free to exchange goods and services as they see fit, without the government “stealing” some of their time and money to give to others. Nozick equates heavy taxation with “forced labour,” as some villagers must work in order to give to others — sort of a reversed slavery as though the poor downtrodden villagers are sitting around sipping lemonade while the five rich villagers fly around in their jets, sending a check every week.

It all comes down to the question: “What is fair?” Imagine that two of our villagers board an airplane together, one six-foot-six and the other five-foot-one. As they sit down, the taller one says, “This isn’t fair. We both paid the same but you have much more leg room.” The shorter passenger shrugs his shoulders, asking, “Should we cut your legs off to spite your body?” “That doesn’t make any sense,” the tall passenger says. “My point exactly.”

In some situations, it is feasible to adjust the proverbial airplane seats to provide similar leg room for all — even those born into a situation completely out of their control — so that they may at least enjoy the basic liberties of life without infringing too much on those born into the luxurious first-class.

There’s a group for everyone I guess. Maybe our meat-eating, fur-wearing, animal-hunting human animal friends needed a support group. Everyone needs to feel some measure of acceptance, I suppose.

They stole the acronym from another, more active group, PETA – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (did they even consider the equally facile PFTETOA?). They literally stole the name, as determined by a court of law (PETA v. PETA) in which tasty-PETA eventually had to surrender the domain name peta.org to ethical-PETA on grounds of cybersquatting (actual term). It looks like, when making websites, ethical animal-treaters stand while meat-eaters cybersquat.

Who could have a problem with PETA and treating animals ethically? While they do many good things, they also bark up the wrong tree a bit, which, unfortunately, meat eaters and powerful corporations bring into the public eye.

The methods of PETA are certainly questionable at times. As one PETA spokesman states, “Of course we’re going to be blowing things up and smashing windows” in order to maintain the rights of animals, whom they view as moral equals. This esplains (that’s Ricky Ricardo speak for “explains”) their placing a dead raccoon on the dining table of Vogue editor Anna Wintour in protest of her support of fur. With the horrors of the fur trade invisible to many, PETA’s campaign intends to being to light the methods used, such as live skinning and holding animals captive in small cages for their entire lives before slowly killing them to protect their fur. It’s hard to imagine how people can support Tasty-PETA’s pro-fur stance once they learn the facts.

Taking a different tack, PETA-sponsored super models and actresses such as Christy Turlington and Kim Basinger have posed on billboards as naked as jaybirds to protest wearing fur, with the byline “I’d rather go naked than wear fur.” It’s hard to determine just who that dissuades. One can imagine their continued threats to Americans: “And if you keep wearing fur, then we will collect even more models and actresses and make you look at them naked!” (They dressed Martha Stewart in a nice button-down shirt for her feature.)

In a nice bit of irony, Pam Anderson’s car auctioned to benefit PETA had leather seats, and Jenna Jameson was photographed eating oysters, fishing, and wearing a leather jacket just days after her anti-leather PETA-sponsored campaign was launched. (Note to self: Don’t hire porn stars for ethics campaigns.) Then, following a 2003 terrorist bombing in Jerusalem, PETA was understandably distraught. Who wouldn’t be? Jerusalem is a major population area. They wrote a letter to PLO leader Yasser Arafat asking that, in future terrorist acts, they not use animals as they did in this case, in which a donkey carried the explosives.  Donkeys… always getting the ass-end of the deal; I don’t even think there’s donkey virgins waiting for them after their martyrdom.

PETA president Ingrid Newkirk launched a “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign to compare the slaughter of animals to the treatment of Jews in the Holocaust. What no one could have seen coming, many considered this tasteless and offensive to Jews and relatives of Holocaust victims. Though as the very Jewish, literary Nobel prize recipient Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, “In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal [Nazi prison camp].”

PETA does actually do some great work in many other arenas, bringing to public attention the horrendous, stomach-turning treatment of animals by such corporations as McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken (nothing “Kentucky” about them if you ask this Kentuckian), and Armani, and other institutions such as circuses. They highlight the severe injustices done through such practices as the violent force-feeding of ducks for foie gras, treatment of young calves to make veal, and the severe pain inflicted on animals by such cosmetic companies as Cover Girl in testing makeup on them. At the least, a boycott of these companies will clip the wings of such practices.

Granted, Newkirk and PETA have clearly embraced being the black sheep of the community, fighting an uphill battle in our man-eat-dog, man-eating world. So she’s likely to make an occasional over statement, such as her defense of equal rights for all beings: “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” dfjks, lfghn (Sorry, that was my head hitting the keyboard.) Regardless of whether you think a rat is a boy (morally speaking, of course), a little bird’s-eye view might encourage you not to throw the puppy out with the bathwater. We might even come to understand that a society that continues to consume animals in the ways and at the rates most of us do, is bad for economies and steers us away from establishing a sustainable way of living. And remember, there’s a chance that the Buddhists got it right and that if you fall prey to these traps of the “Tasty-PETA” sort, you yourself may come back as an animal, and it probably won’t be a bull in India either.

I had a chance to review the DVD and my first impression was that the film would appeal to those who follow Alex Jones. I am no fan of his and I am no fan of conspiracy theories or theorists. No doubt many will jump on these last few sentences and start wielding opinions based on faulty assumptions about the meaning behind them. However, the deeper I got into the film, the more I realized that his views can exist on their own merits.

Much of Ruppert’s views are based on the notion of peak oil. As we run out of oil wells to tap, or even as the oil wells become more difficult to gain access to, oil will inevitably rise in cost, eventually reaching heights which most will no longer be able to afford. Given that so much industrialized society is dependent on oil and oil based products, society will start to buckle under the weight of oil scarcity and eventually start to collapse. Food, using oil based chemicals for pesticides and fertilizers, as well as needing oil for shipping and refining, will skyrocket. Plastics will become more costly to produce. Energy will become more scarce, eventually creating a breaking point.

Ruppert is dismissive of most alternative forms of energy, such as clean coal and nuclear. He notes that solar and wind power look promising but our current inability to transfer or store that energy makes even those a house of cards. Despite the flaws in alternative energy sources, I would hope that his pessimism turns out to be premature.

Oil and energy isn’t the only thing falling under scrutiny. Our deeply flawed banking system, which is built on little more than promises and good-feelings, has been on a path of self-destruction for a long time. Ruppert notes his prediction of the current economic crisis years in advance of its arrival.

A Cry from the Wilderness, the newsletter which Ruppert published on a regular basis, says much about the life of Michael Ruppert. A former Los Angeles detective turned governmental whistle-blower, he seems to have lived a hard and lonely existence. Perhaps from stress, or maybe a habit developed to pass the time away, Ruppert smokes nearly a pack of cigarettes during the course of the interview. He comes across as having developed a slight narcissism, surely a coping mechanism which has helped him carry on through difficult times. Through all of his frustrations though, a compassion for humanity still blooms.

There are moments when a viewer will surely have doubts about the validity of Ruppert’s opinions, yet the overall result of Collapse is a sort of “hard look in the mirror.” I hear a lot of talk about recovery in the news, mostly related to the economy. I don’t believe that and neither should you. Collapse is an arrow that pierces through the noise and clamoring of mainstream news outlets, to give viewers a wake up call they need, no matter what side of the political aisle you’re on.

Judge for yourself. Get Collapse when it streets on Tuesday, June 15.

There are those that say “art is everywhere.” Well, I suppose that may be true if you consider our universe to be the canvass of some higher power. Art might also be everywhere if you’re one of those, “look at this blank red canvas and tell me that isn’t art” types.  But not if you want the word “art” to mean anything. If everything is art, then nothing is art. Imagine finding the entry in the dictionary:
Art n. –1. Everything 2. Anything 3. Whatever

Philosophers, not surprisingly, have spilled some ink on the question “what is art?” Post-modernism, for starters, provides an answer just one small step removed from the parody definition from above, basically holding that art is whatever one thinks is art. At least here we have a criterion: Someone at some point has to have considered something as art. This likely leaves us wanting more. As we walk into a room to see a pencil lying on the floor, we have to survey billions of people to see if anyone considers it art before we deem it not so.

Intent-based theories push us one step further to answering the question — that it is not the viewer’s discretion but that of the creator. If someone creates something with the intention of creating art, then it is art. As for our cockeyed pencil, we just need to discover if someone has intended it as art and declared it so. Our opinion plays no role here.

Author and philosopher Leo Tolstoy gives us something deeper in his aptly titled “What is Art?”: infectiousness. He suggest that true art requires that spectators are “infected by the feelings which the author has felt.” This likely brings us closer to what we want from a classification of art, though we must be concerned if we don’t feel the joy Beethoven intended in his Ode to Joy and thus declare it “counterfeit art.”

Now that we have made this topic perfectly obscure, we come to an even more pressing question, “What is good art?” This is a Picasso of another color. As a matter of pragmatics (and politics), the U.S. government’s National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) claims to answer this. Under the banner “a great country deserves great art,” one of their missions is “supporting works of artistic excellence.” In 2008, they had a budget of over $140 million to accomplish this mission. The issue of “good” art definitely came into question in the past when they awarded grants to the likes of Andres Serrano for his Piss Christ (a jar of urine containing a plastic crucifix) and Robert Mapplethorpe’s collection of erotic photos.

Plato once wrote, “It is impossible to understand the science of shoes until one understands what science is.” While an apt quote for creationist “science” proponents, it also highlights the difficulty in assigning value to an already slippery concept. Does good art relate to the skill needed to create it? Although nearly every beginning guitarist can play most Green Day songs, the band has still earned the moniker of goodness. And art icon Andy Warhol’s Red Disaster poses no challenge for the artistic neophyte: a canvas of pure red. Not much of a disaster for him as it currently hangs in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (emphasis on Fine). Likewise, not all art that is difficult to make is necessarily good.

So does good art involve popularity? Was Picasso’s Garcon a la Pipe good because it sold for over $100 million at an auction? Is Neil Diamond better than Green Day just because he’s sold more records? But Van Gogh didn’t sell a single of his nine hundred paintings in his lifetime. It would seem odd to claim that he wasn’t good then, but is now. Nothing attracts esteem in the art world like being dead.

This topic admittedly involves as many (if not more) questions than it has answers. Part of the art philosophy, maybe. But answers exist in this realm, and the unrequited questions can maybe illuminate the very je ne sais quoi of art that makes it so powerful in the first place.

So the question still remains, “what is art?”

In the 1960’s we learned about a poor mountaineer named Jed who, one day was shootin’ at some food and up from the ground come a bubblin’ crude. Oil, that is, black gold… Texas tea. Well, if the Beverly Hillbillies story had taken place in the 1980’s, ol’ Jed might have instead become a millionaire off of blue gold… water that is. What my father would call “sky juice.”

So you wanna put some dirtier, less palatable water in a bottle and ship it around the world to sell? Sounds like a racket to me. Excuse me while I sip some water fresh from my tap, which I got for free.

If people are willing to spend billions of dollars on phone psychics each year, why not water too? It sounds like such a sure-fire bet that maybe I should start my own bottled-water company and I’ll name it “Naive.”  Maybe I could give it the French word for Naive instead, just so consumers feel more pristine.

If this week in America is like the week before, and the week before that, then we drank over three-quarters of a billion bottles of water, and will drink over another three-quarters of a billion next week. In a time of great financial struggle and concern for our planet’s survival, this life force must be cleaner and better tasting… right?

Most blind taste tests actually show the palatability of tap water. As a matter of fact, the tap water industry is more regulated than the bottled water industry. Of course, more regulated doesn’t necessarily mean better. Even in our more highbrow case of wine tasting, expert oenophiles — fancy name for “wine snob” — are easily tricked into thinking a white wine with red food coloring is actually red wine, or that wine from a “$90″ bottle tastes better than the same wine in a bottle with “$10″ on it. Okay, so humans are gullible. We form lots of preconceived notions. I’ve often claimed that the human mind is so adept at self-deception that it’s a wonder we know anything at all. But what’s the harm?

For you, the consumer, the only harms are your drinking a less-regulated product at a greater cost (not exactly how a free-market is supposed to work). For you, the environment, the only harms are the massive fuel and emissions required to ship this heavy substance around the world, the oil used to manufacture the plastic, and all the bottles left to deal with. For you, one of the billion who don’t have access to safe drinking water, you’re probably not reading this article.

To further illustrate, Princeton University ethicist Peter Singer uses the concept of a “Global Village.” He suggest that we have a moral duty to all the members of our village, even if we don’t see them, and especially if we can do so without “sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance,” as in his clear-cut example in which we should muddy our pants if it saves the life of a drowning child. Singer’s examples may have a more narrow application than he’d like to believe, but here the lesson remains apt.

A quick trip to Fiji provides a perfect application. Due to the country’s isolation and volcanic soil, much of their population cannot get safe drinking water. The Fiji Company boasts of this on their website: “Fiji is far away. But when it comes to drinking water, ‘remote’ happens to be very, very good.” So they paint a hibiscus flower on every bottle and ship it ten thousand miles to San Francisco, where someone sits in a bath of perfectly safe drinking water straight from the springs of Yosemite, sipping Fiji. Little does our bather know, there is likely more fecal matter in the bottle than in the tub. Fiji water has three times the colony-forming units for E. coli — the bacteria found in human feces — than the “recommended maximum.” Mmmmm, drink it up.

So, in light of the thousands in our “global village” who die daily from diseases transmitted through contaminated water, Singer suggests we instead “Put that dollar in a jar… carry a water bottle… send all the money to… someone who has real needs. And you’re no worse off.” However, if you’re like me you probably have worked in places with less than stellar supplies of drinking water. I would suggest bringing a large sports-bottle, that can be filled with filtered tap water and reused again the next day. That way you still get fresh and clean water without contributing to anyone else’s problems.

We use more than 50 million barrels of oil per year in the production of bottled water, which results in at least 3 tons of carbon emissions. Embarrassingly enough, on a per ounce basis water costs two to three times what gasoline does. It’s funny, in that not-so-funny way, that we’ll drive 5 or 10 minutes out of our way to buy fifteen gallons of gas for 10 cents cheaper per gallon and then walk in the Gas Mart and plunk down a couple bucks for something that we could get for free. Suckers are born everyday… and we get thirsty.

When we hear someone comment on our “small world,” or perhaps even play the 6 Degrees to Kevin Bacon game, we forge just how small we have made our world to begin with. We never take a random sample of the 6.8 billion people, as if dragging our fingers blindly through the World Phone Book, landing it on two people’s names. Instead, we whittle away our world into tiny pockets and sections. Take the oft-given example of seeing someone on an airplane “randomly,” as they say. You have already narrowed the demographic immensely: the two hundred people seated around you all have the financial wherewithal to fly, the interest in doing so, and are either from or visiting the same place as you.

The opportunity for finding successful connections is much more immense than we realize, because we’re not looking for a specific connection. When you board the plane you don’t speculate whether or not you’ll see the girlfriend of the guy that sold your son his house. Most people have a wide-reaching net to cast. Imagine a father of two traveling from his hometown with his wife. This couple belongs to five different social groups and clubs each containing hundreds of members, they work in different industries, participate in a community church, have a core group of neighbors, and went to different high schools and universities. Each child is married and the four combine for a total of 2000 friends on the Facebooks, each with their extended families, universities, workplaces, interests, ect. Amongst this long list lies the possibility for so many connections, that we should instead be surprised at how few of these serendipitous and coincidental connections we actually make.

We can also find connections where there perhaps are none. Dopamine is a chemical in the brain that helps regulate emotions, causes our natural highs in areas of uncertainty, and harbors much of the blame for gambling addictions. We get a little shot of it every time we have a victory amid randomness or find a pattern where there is none. Neuroscientist Read Montague explained that when the brain is exposed to something random, like slot machines, clouds or with many conspiracy theories, the brain automatically imposes a pattern into the noise. But you haven’t found some secret pattern in the stock market, that’s not the face of Jesus on your potato chip, and the Illuminati aren’t behind any curtains concealing the truth from everyone (no matter how many times the hundreds of thousands of websites tell you that someone’s in control over the flow of information). As Jonah Lehrer put it, “Your emotions have sabotaged common sense.”

Flipping a coin ten times, people exhibit greater amazement at a streak of perfectly alternating heads and tails than at a random outcome, even though the odds of both are the exact same. Likewise with a streak of ten consecutive heads, people often surmise, though incorrectly, that the coin is “due” for a tails. This is known as the “gambler’s fallacy,” and has resulted in untold amounts of money flowing into casinos.

Finding phantom patterns in things is not only natural but fun, along with that little dopamine high it elicits. For example, we can now prove that the popular children’s dinosaur Barney is the biblical Antichrist as laid out in the book of Revelations numerical pronouncement that the beasts number is 666. First, Barney is an actual beast — so for some literalists we’ve got that bit covered. Following the Romans practice of substituting a V for a U, we can see that Barney is a CVTE PVPLE DINOSAVR. Extracting these Roman numerals leaves us with: CV VL DIV, and their Roman numeral equivalent: 100+5+5+50+500+1+5=666. The odds are just too astonishing. Feel that dopamine.

The world is approximately 6.8 billion people and counting. We make it smaller all the time. Ironically, with the prominence of the World Wide Web, our respective “worlds” have become even smaller yet. Instead of branching out and connecting with “random” people in, say Honduras, we tend to become more and more sequestered in our own shrinking niches. We frequent websites that cater to our bias, surround ourselves with people whose worldviews don’t stray too far from our own, even move to neighborhoods that tend to share our political preferences. This often results in a constant reinforcement of our views instead of our ever having to actually challenge ourselves to a higher accountability. ‘Tis a small world indeed — here in my Liberal Clogging Group for Lizard Lovers.

Human Rights groups have said frequently that torture only works on television. Actually, torture doesn’t really “work” on television any more than a couple guys are actually in their apartment debating the virtues of quantum gravity theory vs. string theory in CBS’s The Big Bang Theory — it’s television: It’s made up. Though given that people develop such emotional ties with their television sets and the people “inside” them, one can understand that this might happen, especially on such gripping shows as 24. Indulging for a moment, I must say that in my not-so-humble opinion, 24 is the greatest show ever made and is the only television show I watch (aside from news programs).

However, in spite of my outright man-crush on Jack Bauer, I must confess that the show raises some serious concerns over the perceived necessity of torture, as well as further moral questions surrounding the issue. For those doing research outside of the television, we might get a more accurate analysis. If it turns out this is wrong, we can then look at the more pressing question, “should we ever torture?”

To better investigate this, I’d like to turn to those doing the fieldwork of interrogation. Army Colonel Stuart Herrington led many of the interrogations in Vietnam and claims that most common detainees provide the desired information as a result of minor “no-stress methods” of interrogation — though he refers to the better batting average of more fanatical terrorists in which the success rates of “stress-free” questioning drops to about six of ten. Nothing like a little baseball talk to help illuminate torture stats. How exactly could one hit a “home run” in this scenario?

But the problem encountered with the aggressive, Jack Bauer 24-style torture is that victims will say anything to cease the pain. As Air Force Colonel John Rothrock shares, “If I take a Bunsen burner to the guy’s genitals, he’s going to tell you just about anything.” Though it does seem that we could test the accuracy of the confessions of detainees — go check the building they claim to have been hiding in, or the under the rock where they said they hid the bomb. If it’s not there, then turn the burner back on. It’s not like anyone’s trying to get them to confess their love for us: “Tell me you love me and mean it.”

Here the problems begin to arise for our “pro-torture” advocates, such as the potential reciprocation of other countries toward the torturing-country’s soldiers, as well as creating an image of savagery and undermining an intended agenda of peace.

A KINDER, GENTLER TORTURE

It’s also hard to test what could have been accomplished without torture instead, as every scenario differs so greatly. “If we didn’t use the Bunsen burner on you, would you have told us that anyway?” Interrogation expert Michael Koubi notes that no two people react the same way during questioning. Considered one of the most successful interrogators of all time — the proverbial Babe Ruth of the questioning world — he shares such methods as sitting quietly for hours just staring at the detainee, placing a bag over his head, or giving them a little slap or two. Certainly more humane than the human playground style torture at Abu Ghraib.

Of course, this forces the discussion further into defining torture. Just what qualifies as cruel and unusual? “Then I sat in a room for two hours with Lady Gaga playing and no way to plug my ears.” It recently surfaced that the Bush administration’s all-star “torture squad” — Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell — authorized “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT) but not “torture.” This circumvented their definition of “torture,” which includes the intent to seriously injure or kill. These EITs include waterboarding, in which a detainee is strapped down with a cloth over his face and water poured onto it, providing a “controlled drowning” scenario — the same technique employed by the likes of Pol Pot and which the United States prosecuted in war-crime trials following World War II. But they would like to make it clear, it’s not torture anymore, it’s just EIT.

THE NEEDS OF THE MANY. . .

Much of the discussion of torture hinges on the utilitarian analysis: Doing these things to other humans is clearly bad/painful/unfortunate, yet the good that results — numerous innocent lives saved — clearly outweighs the harm of one terrorist in pain. In 2001, an al-Qaeda terrorist detained in Dubai was subjected to beatings and eventually divulged information that prevented an attack on a U.S. embassy. He — or more correctly, his questioners — seem to have proved that torture works. Philosopher Micheal Levin advocates for torture “as an acceptable measure for preventing future evils.” He has us imagine that we capture a terrorist who has planted a bomb in Manhattan that will detonate that afternoon causing the death of millions. Clearly, most people would advocate any means possible in preventing this, even severe torture, the kind of scenario that plays out frequently on 24. Add to this scene someone close to you who’s life is also threatened, and this should be enough to turn even the most ardent of nay-sayers.

Once one admits to this, it becomes only a matter of degree, not principle. It’s reminiscent of that ol’ bar ploy in which a man propositions a woman to come home with him for a million dollars. When she excitedly agrees, he renegotiates with a new offer of five dollars and she reacts out of utter disgust, “What kind of woman do you think I am!?!” to which he replies, “We’ve established that. Now we just need to agree on a price.” Once you agree that torture is justified to save millions, we’re only haggling over the numbers. For those with a heavy conscience, Levin provides further justification on more of a rights-based analysis, suggesting that not only did the terrorist voluntarily act in such a manner, but in doing so he “renounces civilized standards.” And, if this doesn’t push the conversation far enough, some prefer to introduce the “torture the terrorist’s daughter” scenario, in which it seems that torturing one innocent person could potentially justify saving thousands of others; yet another moral dilemma which viewers are faced with vicariously through the character of Jack Bauer on 24.

So it turns out that torture does work, sometimes. And that there are scenarios in which most everyone justifies it, though a great many instances arise in which torture not only fails to work, but actually does more harm than good. And when you add in the inalienable rights afforded to “all members of the human family” by the United Nations (which has a much broader definition of “torture” than the torture squad’s), we must reconsider our treatment of the non-fanatical detainees — perhaps telling them that this is the last season of 24 would be torture enough.

But it isn’t just narcissism that can push generations of people into becoming living zombies. The drive to achieve, to climb the ladder, to gain more, or even the fear that you are just missing out on something are just a handful of the factors that drive people into living lives that might not be as fulfilling as they could be. The recent study on a group of students that tried to “unplug” for a day (of which I wrote about recently) highlights this well.

The ancient Indian philosopher Chanakya was once questioned by one of his disciples about the legitimacy of the claim that one can live in the world yet not live in the world simultaneously. In his shrewd, sagelike manner, Chanakya responded by giving the student a pitcher of water filled to the brim and instructs him to traverse the entire town’s festival that day without spilling a drop; thus avoiding penalty of death. At the end of the day, after the student has successfully accomplished the task, Chanakya asks him to describe the day’s festivities. Clearly, he knows nothing of them, having focused solely on the given task. Lesson learned.

Cultural historian Christopher Lasch’s 1979 bestselling book, The Culture of Narcissism, brought to light the empty self-indulgence created by an information age. He believed that an overabundance of information actually resulted in a weaker sense of self and thus an incapacity to form meaningful relationships. You have to truly love yourself before you can love another. Worse yet, the bytes of information zipping around today make it seem like Lasch’s book described something out of Leave It To Beaver.

Facebook came around at just the right time, as psychologists noted a 30% increase in Americans’ personality test scores for narcissism from 1982 to 2006. They couldn’t have anticipated announcements like “… is getting married”, as she’s texting right before walking down the aisle; or things like “… can’t find my keys and is late for work.” It’s like people are creating maps of their lives instead of really living, similar to a family that must record their vacation so that later they might see what they did while they were texting their friends about how much fun they were having. You’re there now, you’re with them now, you can actually live now.

The ever-elusive “Now-moment.” It’s said that time flies when you’re having fun. This “fun” often results from “living in the now.” Much of our internal angst derives from our constantly juggling what we coulda, woulda, shoulda done, with what we could, would, should do; all while we can’t actually escape the immediacy of life itself. Fear results from anticipating something that might happen in the future, and anxiety as a result of what did happen in the past.

A major component of the arrow of time lies in our own view of it: when we’re younger, time seems to go more slowly — progressing from age 1 to 2 effectively doubles your mileage around the sun. When we’re older it seems time passes more quickly. When consciously aware of time it can barely seem to pass at all. When unaware — such as when sleeping, or caught up in what Abraham Maslow calls a “peak experience” (losing yourself in music, in an athletic event, with someone you love, profound religious experiences, etc) — time ceases to be a factor. Further still, Einstein shows us with his Theory of Relativity that time isn’t even absolute. Instead it is relative to your position. My favorite philosopher, Alan Watts, filmed an hour-long program for PBS discussing the nature of time shortly before his death in 1973.

Many cultures and worldviews avoid much of our angst about time. The Buddhist Wheel of Time treats time as something that circles back upon itself, creating cycles of life and death, making it a rather arbitrary exercise to pinpoint a “beginning” and an “end”.

Linguist Benjamin Whorf presses us to imagine how differently we would view our lives without our notions of past and future, with no interest in “exact sequences, dating, calendars, chronology,” but instead with just the present. “Language shapes the way we think,” he wrote, “and determines what we can think about.” (More specifically, he made the claim that the Aztecan Hopi tribe actually lived this way, which turned out not to be the case after communications were improved. However, with Dan Everett’s recent work with the Amazonian Piraha, speculations about a life with little notion of time and studying the relationship between language and thought has been renewed.)

In the Bible, a thousand years to G-d is said to be like a day. Typically this is stated in some pseudo-scientific way as religious communities try to square their religious views with the scientific evidence for evolution. However, it could be said that for the ardent spiritual observer, a thousand years in the presence of G-d could also seem like a day, as they lose themselves in what is surely an overwhelming experience.

Recently in my home state of Kentucky (famous for college basketball, horses, hospitality, and its beautiful women) a law was passed that makes it illegal to text on your phone while you drive. The law was passed with good reason — texting while driving is roughly twice as likely to result in a car crash than driving while under the influence (D.U.I.). Despite the aforementioned hospitality, I sometimes see bumper stickers that read “Hang Up and Drive”. Perhaps it’s time for us to hang up and live, so that we might start to get a little more control over time in our own lives and avoid losing so much of ourselves to unnecessary distractions. After all, who’s got time for that?