shredder wrote: Am I being a bit too quaint?
Not at all. I almost got mobbed at a party a week ago when, in the middle of an intense discussion about the effects of THE crisis, I dared say that it might have SOME good side-effects (none intended), certainly not on the short term. Modern society has a good capacity to adapt and regenerate. Let's take food, for instance, I expect many expensive and artificial products to disappear, making room for less expensive and more natural alternatives.
Going deeper, having to make do with less might change the way people see their lives and each other and make them wonder a bit more about the purpose of it all. In some less wealthy countries (Portugal, for instance, which I have recently visited) people seem to enjoy life more than in richer countries where they are more concerned with keeping up the standard. Less worries (because there is little at stake or to lose), more hope, which doesn't mean they don't appreciate the fine things life has to offer - on the contrary, they enjoy them more as they don't take them for granted. Perhaps that's it: we should not take our lives and our created world for granted.
shredder wrote: it is apparent to me that many aspects of modern life seem to be driven by the desire to get there first, wherever “there” is.
True, and we never seem to get "there", because "there" keeps moving, like the horizon, as soon as we appear to have reached it. So, where are we really going?
The following lines were written by Octavian Paler, a philosopher and historian of the antiquity I admired, who sadly passed away a year ago well into his eighties:
"The logical way is this: we leave and then arrive somewhere. We leave for a moment, for an hour, for a lifetime, perhaps we should not have left at all, but this is not the issue, the issue is that we arrive somewhere, we always arrive somewhere, perhaps we don't arrive in time, we don't arrive where we should, we don't arrive where we wanted to, but we do arrive somewhere and, as long as we arrive somewhere, everything is logical, even though logic and happiness are completely different notions; nevertheless we left a place and arrived somewhere, we took the wrong way, but we still arrived somewhere, but when we no longer arrive anywhere everything becomes illogical. Where are we going if we don't arrive anywhere?"