I’m not big on New Years resolutions. I think the problem is you typically try to keep your resolutions manageable by aiming low. This seems to make sense because a small goal is attainable and therefore, it is argued, you’re less likely to become discouraged and give up. But a lifetime of slacking has taught me that small, attainable goals are also the easiest to put off because, after all, since their so small and attainable you could really do them anytime; so what’s the rush. Next thing you know its New Years again and you haven’t accomplished your resolution from last year because you kept procrastinating.
Or maybe that’s just me; a procrastinating hopeless romantic who favors big ideas rather than small ones. But whatever the case I figure the beginning of a new year is a good time to discuss the list of things you’d like to do before you die.
There are actually two lists, one on at SP Sports and one at the Society page. That’s because when I started my personal list a year ago (I know I’m a nerd for keeping such a list) I quickly realized that it broke down into two parts: life goals and sports goals.
So what we’re doing here is the list of life goals, things you want to do before you die. I’ll put down my list and you do the same in the comment section because I’m sure I’m leaving out some cool stuff that I should aspire to do. Between the lot of us we can come up with the most complete list of things someone should do before they die.
See the Western US – I’ve been to Africa like a half dozen times and lived in England for grad school but I’ve never been west of the Mississippi River. That must be remedied. And by “see the Western US” I mean extensively, not just drive by it. I want to see the pacific ocean, the Grand Canyon, Vegas, Area 54, all the big stuff, but I’d also want to do the little stuff like the seeing the largest ball of twine or just stopping at a diner in the middle of nowhere Arizona/New Mexico.
Travel Cairo to Cape Town – A lot of people do this, but they do it like the faux hippies or yuppies that they are. No traveling first class, no spending lots of money to buy creature comforts, no waxing poetic. Just hardcore, real traveling; with no itinerary, no timeline, and the absolute minimum of money and supplies.
Write a Book – Jim, how actually has written a book, and I have always wanted to write a book about the two of us traveling from Cairo to Cape Town. So I could knock out two in one go if I did that. And yes, there are a number of books about someone making that trip, Dark Star Safari being the most famous, but they are typically unsatisfying for me personally. The guy in Dark Star Safari is a 40 year old guy travels like a 40 year old guy would travel; on luxury liners and first class trains. Anyway, the book doesn’t have to be about that, it could be anything. And it doesn’t have to be long, get published, or even be that good.
Learn a Cool Language – I took a total of 8 years of Spanish and barely remember any of it. So wouldn’t it be cool to learn like Xhosa or Zulu or Tibetan because even if you only remembered a little of that language you’d still know more of it than your average Joe? And I’ve always had this weird fantasy of me and my kids (were I to have them) knowing a secret language (like Zulu) that we could speak to each other in without anyone knowing what we were saying.
Own a Boat – Preferably a catamaran large enough to travel the world in. This is the most unrealistic of all my goals because not only would I have to strike it rich to afford a boat, I’d have to live by the ocean.
Own a Motorcycle – I’ve already got one picked out: a 2008 Harley Davidson DYNA Super Glide (black). The price starts at 12 grand. And for 1 grand more I could get the Super Glide Custom and have a seat big enough to put my ladyfriend on the bike with me and could get it in Pearl Blue (sort of a Duke color).
Learn Automotive Repair – All I want to do is take a class or something that grants me enough knowledge to do the basic stuff. I’m not trying to build a hotrod or anything, I just want to be able to look under the hood and know how to fix a broke down car.
Learn to Surf (Well) – I’ve been surfing and I know ‘how’ to surf but I suck at it. Plus, I’ve only done it on a long board, which is too easy. I want to carve on a short board and be able to surf big waves and stuff (kind of a sports one now that I think about it).
Travel – To narrow that down I’ll just list the countries I’d like to go too: Turkey, Spain, Egypt, Morocco/Tunisia, Mali, Australia, Argentina (I’m sure there’s more, but anyway, if traveling is your thing too just list the places you’d like to go as I’ve done).
Ok, that’s it for me as of right now. Figure out your list and put it in the comment section. Or just leave a comment ridiculing my list, your call.
Some people, such as Time Magazine, like to jump the gun by naming their Person of the Year before the year is actually over. Not me. I like to put that shit off for three weeks into the New Year. Either way, it is my great pleasure to present the 2008 SPPOTY to Jon Stewart.
January 23, 2009
Mt Everest, Postmodernism, and Why I Hate Modern Society
Posted by Trey under Rambling Ruminations, Social Commentary[5] Comments
I read that during his term former President Bush and Karl Rove had a reading competition to see who could read more books in a calendar year. The article, written by Rove, says they each of them was pushing 100 books in year one of the competition, before the pace slowed to around 40 to 50 books per year for the next two years. Of course you could argue about how much of the information in the books they retained, but that’s not the point. All I’m saying is I read that article and decided if the leader of the free world and his number one adviser can crank out 40 books per year and I usually only do about 10 in a year, I should up my game.
As it would happen, I’m only three books into my amped up reading schedule and two of the books can be combined to explain modern American society and its problems (or at least my problems with it). After reading The Sun Also Rises (which has nothing to do with this post, it’s just a good book), I finally got around to reading Into Thin Airby John Krakauer (a book I’ve been meaning to read for about 10 years), and am now deeply immersed in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffsby Chuck Klosterman. The latter two books, I believe, have imparted me with great insight into modern society; why it sucks and why I’ve always known that it sucks but could never really nail down the underlying reason.
In 1996 I was in 9th grade and beginning to really foster my outdoorsman desires (by that I mean I went camping with my friends so we could get drunk and potentially hook up with any chicks that we could coerce into coming along with us). During that time I read an article in Outside Magazine about a journalist who went to Mt Everest for the magazine to write about how commercialized and lame climbing Everest had become. As fate would have it, 1996 was the most deadly year on Everest as 15 people died on the mountain that season. During the day Krakauer made his summit attempt a storm trapped climbers in the death zone, killing 8 people who attempted the summit along with Krakauer (there were two companies leading people up Everest that day along with an Indian-Tibetan border police team that was attempt to summit on the other side of the mountain; 4 people on Krakauer’s team died including the head and assistant guides, the guide for the other American group died, and 3 of the Indians died on the mountain’s North side). Needless to say an article just didn’t do all that went on during the assent justice, so Krakauer wrote a book about it. It’s an exciting book and I recommend it to anyone that digs adventure reading or fantasizes about climbing Everest.
I myself fantasize about climbing Everest and after reading that book I now realize that this is a problem. Ultimately, Krakauer chalks up what went wrong on the mountain to the over commercialization of Everest and the idea that anybody can conquer the world’s tallest peak. In fact, Everest doesn’t demand a whole lot of technical climbing skill so it would appear that if you are in good enough shape to walk up a steep incline and lucky enough to avoid altitude sickness then Everest is do-able. Truth be told, many people with little to no climbing experience have indeed summited Everest and gotten down safely. Add to that the fact that you can use supplemental oxygen, plus there is a rope to latch onto essentially the whole way up, plus companies like the one Krakauer was a part of have guides whose job it is to make sure you get up and down the mountain safely and it would seem that the greatest obstacle Everest presents is having enough to disposable income to bankroll the trip (just to get on an assent team costs around 60 grand, then you’ve got to buy the plane ticket to and from Nepal and all the equipment you’ll need).
Since everyone thinks they can do it and since safety demands that only a limited number of teams be allowed on the mountain, you have an economic situation where demand is high and supply is extremely low (there’s only one mountain after all). So the Nepalese government makes bank by charging people to go on the mountain. The idea is to limit the number of teams on Everest for safety, but Nepal is a Third World country in need of foreign currency so they push the envelope as far as they can by granting permission to as many teams as they possible without obviously making things unsafe. Furthermore, the companies on the mountain are competing with each other, so they are under pressure to successfully get their clients to summit lest they be perceived as a failure and thereby lose clients to companies that have a better summit success rate. The result is a mountain full of people who are supposed to be responsible for safety pushing the envelope in order to secure financial viability.
Krakauer does an excellent job exposing the dire consequences of commercializing something as dangerous as Everest, but he fails to meaningfully delve into the reason that drives such commercialism; postmodernism.
This is where Chuck Klosterman is helpful. Klosterman’s book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is a collection of articles about modern society with philosophical observations drawn out of contemporary examples like Pam Anderson, the Real World, and The Sims. Though he makes many different points, the underlying philosophical theme is postmodernism. What counts as beauty or celebrity or love is just whatever has been socially constructed by a society that is encouraged to make these social constructions at every turn. While I find all this fascinating, I also find it insanely frustrating because I think he’s right and I wish he wasn’t.
When I was getting my BA in philosophy I quickly realized two things: Utilitarianism just plain makes sense and postmodernism is the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard. Therefore, if postmodernism defines modern society, then that explains why I am so negative and critical of modern society.
Postmodernism at its most basic level just means that everything is subjective. For that reason artists and hipsters who like art love postmodernism because it means ‘anything and everything can be and is art!’ I personally hate art. I mean I appreciate people who can paint pretty things or whatever, but that’s not what modern art is. Now, it’s a toilet seat on a wall or a drawing of Jesus standing is piss. See these douche bags realize that all you have to do is throw something in a museum, make up some story about an obscure ‘truth’ or point you’re trying to make and boom, you are a famous and celebrated artist. Given my hatred for art, the idea that postmodernism could be used to accurately describe the modern society in which I’m confined sends shivers down my spine.
Nevertheless, I’m slowing realize that postmodernism actually does describe modern society. Klosterman’s observations aren’t just funny, they’re accurate. Once you look at the world through the lens of postmodernism, all the ridiculous stuff (Paris Hilton, political pundits, movies, bands, and tv shows that suck, etc) makes sense inside that paradigm.
At some point, I don’t know when exactly but I imagine it was some time either in the 60s (when personal freedom was emphasized) or 80s (when computers and corporations flattened the world and made it accessible to the individual [Thomas Friedman sucks because even though he coined that phrase he would never ‘get’ the point I’m using it to make]), radical individualism became the name of the game and therefore shifted public morality away from any semblance of community, pluralism, and objectivity in favor of a random collection of individual subjective morality. Hence, everything counts a la postmodernism.
But here’s why I find Klosterman infuriating, he just sort of accepts this reality. He diagnoses the disease but is fine with living with the ailment rather than trying to cure it or amputate the infected bits. He beautifully analyzes how MTV’s Real World started off as a social exception but became a social norm. Initially the people on the Real World were crazy. They were people that you’d never ever come into contact with because they were exceptions to the general public. As he puts it, they all had a one dimensional personality, which used to be a personality anomaly. No one you knew back in high school or college would try to fight you for accidentally opening your mail, no gay person you knew back then insisted on constantly talking about how they were gay, etc. Now, however, the people on the Real World are just like every kid you and I see on the street. They are utterly shallow trend chasing douche bags that overreact to anything and everything. Today’s general public actually aspires to have the once anomalous one dimensional personality. Instead of being exceptions to the rule, the current cast members are the rule and the general public follows their lead instead of ridiculing them as we once did. In that sense, it’s actually more of a reality show now than it was back in the day.
That’s why I don’t watch the show anymore. I can’t take that these people are now the norm. Klosterman, on the other hand, continues to watch (or he says “study”) the show. (He also points out how the NBA is inherently unfair, but continues to watch it whereas I hate the NBA). This gets us back to Krakauer’s book.
According to our postmodern society, any goal is valid and anyone is capable of anything. Thus, there are people who have no business climbing Everest, littered all over the mountain. And while certain measures have been taken to prevent another disaster like the one in 1996, the fact that people in a postmodern society will continue to think they can climb Everest will ensure that high demand continues to commercialize the mountain and therein make it as unsafe as it was in 1996. Another disaster on Everest WILL happen because the underlying cause of that disaster is the social disaster of postmodernism, which validates the faulty thought that anyone can climb the highest mountain in the world.
As I said in the beginning, I fantasize about climbing Everest and now recognize that this is a problem. It’s a problem because I’ve never climbed more than a tall tree but if I had the money I’d go climb Everest. The thing that separates me from most people, I think, is that I am able to recognize that this Everest fantasy is OBJECTIVELY INVALID. I have no OBJECTIVELY viable justification for why I OUGHT to climb Everest. In a NORMATIVE sense, I am just plain wrong.
The reason I’ve capitalized those words is that they are all terms that imply an objective philosophy. I still believe in an objective world view despite realizing that postmodernism defines our current context and I think that’s where I lose Klosterman. I reject postmodernism and if that means rejecting modern society then so be it. I’m glad to be a cynic is a supposedly golden age. I’m glad to sink to the bottom if the top is a bunch of bullshit. I’m glad I don’t have to just accept Paris Hilton or Lindsey Lohan as a simply reality of the times we live in and can objectively say they are wastes of space. And I’m glad that I’m wrong to want to climb Everest (which doesn’t mean that I’ll stop wanting to climb Everest, just that I acknowledge that I’m objectively wrong to do so) because it means that there is something objectively right for me to want. It means that there’s something greater than myself, that things are limited, that reason leads to objective answers and things are discernable.
And it means that I don’t have to watch Lost.