"But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing."--David Foster Wallace, "On Life and Work," Wall Street JournalImagine a world where everyone lived for the sole purpose of someone else. At what point did the human population reach a tipping point where it became a struggle to see the world from a more human-centric perspective? Must have been when we settled down and decided to become farmers.
RIP Mr Wallace. If you were alive, I would ask you, Freedom, perhaps, but whose idea of freedom besides your own? Is freedom, in the sense of DFW, meaningful and worth striving for if everyone else is too shackled to realize that is what true liberation is? What does it matter if you are the sole fish who knows you are swimming in water and the other fish don't care?
I guess that was 3 questions.
