"I's Be Fine, Hoooo-o-ney!"

Okay, here's somebody who's 'On It' like Teflon, honeys
and home-slices.

Thanks to SWIFTSPEECH! for turning me on to this.
Here's an excerpt from Charles Eisenstein's e-book,
The Ascent of Humanity.

(following the excerpt is a link to his site.) This is what
I'm talking about!

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The teenagers in their idealism and their defiance, the depressed
in their rejection of the lives offered them, the anxiety-ridden in
their sense that something is not right... all are quite sane. Any
psychiatry that doesn't recognize this is doomed from the start.
It tells us the problem is not the world, it is ourselves. It merely
adds to the chorus of voices telling us, "All is well, all is normal—
who are you to think any differently?"

That's the same message we get from the media that immerse us,
suggesting with their  subject matter that we can afford to care
about the trivial and the superficial: the sports, celebrities, and so
forth. As well, the whole mania for "entertainment" suggests that
our world is sound enough that we can afford constant distraction
from it. "Things will be fine. Don't worry." I imagine myself on
board the Titanic. "Hey guys, we're pretty far north, don't you think
we should slow down? Hey guys, isn't that an iceberg up ahead?"



"Charles, relax! Have a drink. Come listen to the band. Everything
is fine—see, no one else is worried."

Not only do we live today in a fraudulent, life-denying society into
which nobody fits, but the incompatibility of that society with human
fulfillment only grows with each passing year. Along with it grows
the need for medicating expanding swaths of the population. We
have seen this happening with the increasing ubiquity of SSRIs and
similar drugs across every age group. The world grows more painful
physically as an increasingly toxic environment gives rise to new
diseases, as commerce and industry corrupt the food supply, and
as the tempo and pressure of life-as-usual quickens. All of these
factors accelerate the conversion of citizens into patients.


[...]

When we awaken to the enormity of our crisis and the magnitude
of our loss, often the first response is a crushing despair. I have
been through that; I know what it is like. Yet on the other side of
despair is fullness and an urgency to live life beautifully.

We can choose a different world—the "more beautiful world our
hearts tell us is possible" and to which I have dedicated this book—
but to choose it we must be familiar with what we are choosing.
We must be fully cognizant of the world we have chosen up until
now. Knowing the pain of the world fills me with energy and
confirms the rightness of my life's direction. Otherwise what would
stop me from occupying my hours with the trivial and the vain,
staying comfortable for as long as possible until I died?

We need not avert our gaze from ugliness and pain in order to
live a happy life. Ignorance is not bliss. Quite the contrary:
the more we insulate ourselves, the weaker we become, the
less able we are to take on reality. The more we numb and defer
the pain, the more afraid of it we are, until we willingly submit to
confinement in the (temporarily) secure, predictable, controlled
semblance of life our society offers.

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http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/