On Disposable Society

America.

For 60 years, we have been number 1.
The most powerful nation in the world.
The most influential country.
We invented modern society.

Boy, did we screw up.


You hear it talked about all over the place... we have entered a period hallmarked in part by "disposable" things. It started with little things.
The original?
Probably Gillette razors.
I think i've written about them before, but, King C. Gillette followed the business philosophy that a successful product is one that is purchased over and over again.
We buy a razor, and we buy new blades every few months.
We throw the old ones away.
Light bulbs are another great example.
We buy a light bulb, it stays lit for ~500 hours of use, and then we toss it.
The World's supply of Tungsten is dwindling... because we use light bulbs.

You can buy a brand new Hyundai Accent for $10,775.
At that price, you can use it for 6 years, and when it starts to fall apart, you can junk it for a new one. Disposable Cars.

Computers... another excellent example.
People buy computers (laptop in particular) and say, "woah mang, this thing is sooo fast!!"
Then apple rolls out the next iMac in a month, and the first thing you do is start complaining about how slow your computer is.
So you get a new one, and junk/ebay the old one.

We live in disposable society.

TV repair men are hardly ever seen anymore.
We don't pay people to fix our TVs. It's cheaper to just buy a new one.
And that's the thing.

IT'S CHEAPER TO BUY A NEW ONE THAN TO KEEP THE OLD ONE.

is there something wrong with this?
i think so.

There is a dual element to this phenomenon.
The first part is the money.
But there's the second part.

SAT scores are curved in such a way so that 500 always falls on the average score.
The College Board actually slides grades up so that the average will be 500.
Over the years, average scores have technically gone down.
What does that mean?
Americans are getting dumber.

In the same ammount of time, our obsession with media, entertainment, and networking has skyrocketed.
We don't spend a lot of time learning how our world works anymore.
We spend our time fussing over things that are completely meaningless.
The result?
BestBuy can get away with charging $160 to put a wireless router in your house.
Auto shops charge $101 per HOUR to work on your car.
It is more expensive to get your TV fixed then to buy a new one. (already mentioned)

What does it come down to?
We're so lazy, we'd rather pay someone to do something, than do it ourselves.
We're so cheap, we'd rather rope off hundreds of acres of land to dump our crap in, then bother to make re-usable products.

What does it come down to?
One word: Mindset.

We have this "slouchy" mindset.
We complain that american companies outsource all the labor... but people in India and the Philippines are willing to do more work for less pay.
If americans were willing to do more work for less pay, there wouldn't be outsourcing.
And if business owners weren't greedy, or if consumers didn't demand lower prices, there wouldn't be a reason to in the first place.
It's because of our lazy, slouchy, pass-the-buck mindset and attitude towards work.

There are people who sit on the couch all day, in their mom's house, complaining about not having a job.

HELLO!!
if you want a job, GET ONE.
go outside and DO SOMETHING.
We are americans.
We have more freedom than any people in history.
We can do anything we want.
Anyone can get rich, you just have to be willing to figure out how.
But we'd rather sit on our couch and complain about how bad the world is.
It's disgusting.

One plea:
Fix It.

Stop spending all your time on myspace.
Don't watch TV for 4 hours a day.
Get a job.
Grow in faith.
Get into ministry.
Set yourself into motion so you're not standing around doing nothing.
Go to uturn.

On Taking Advantage of What We’ve Been Given

Hey all.
so i was reading my Bible last night, and my eyes fell upon Isaiah 39.
Verses 5-8 read:
Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, "Hear the word of the Lord Almighty: The time will surely come when everything in your palace, and all that your fathers have stored up until this day, will be carried off to Babylon. Nothing will be left, said the Lord. And some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood, who will be born to you, will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon."
"The word of the Lord you have spoken is good," Hezekiah replied. For he thought, "There will be peace and security in my lifetime." [NIV]

Its easy to read that and think nothing of it.
But read the last line, Hezekiah's quote, again.
"The word of the Lord you have spoken is good... there will be peace and security in my lifetime."
The king of Judah had just been told that everything he owned, and that his fathers had build up and saved, was going to be carried off to Babylon.
Realize that at this point in time, Babylon wasn't a particularly strong power- they were being ruled by the Assyrians.
Imagine if some crazy hippy dude walked up to you and said, "hey mannn... ya know, someday, everything your family owns is going to be carried off to the canadian edge of Maine..."
you probably wouldn't say, "this is good, my dear friend."

See, Hezekiah was glad that there would be "peace and security" while he was still alive.
That's all he was concerned about.

Now flash forward like 3,500 years.
here we are. We are more or less in peace.
sure, we have a war over where Hezekiah was a few millennia ago, but over here, we're at peace. No one's family estates are being trucked over to Maine by hicks with Fords.
Most people wouldn't argue the fact that we have "peace and security".

Now see, Hezekiah was a really good king. He worked hard to make his people stop being retarded got them all to worship God and such... and it shows how grateful he was for Peace and Security... He didn't even think twice when Isaiah told him all his stuff (which he was proud of, i'm sure) was going to be taken. All that mattered was that, until the end of his reign, there would be peace.

A Roman poet known as Horace famously wrote, "Carpe Diem", which translates into English loosely as "Seize the Day".

I think Hezekiah would agree to that sentiment.
He was thankful for what he was given- and look at what we've been given: Americans have more stuff than anyone in history.
So we should try to make the most of it.
We should work with what we've been given and take advantage of the peace and security that we have, to make the most impact that we can.

"I-Glasses"

So we all know the term, "rose-colored glasses", right?
When someone makes a situation seem less severe, or nicer than it really is, we say that they're looking through these metaphysical "rose-colored glasses".

Something that has been bothering me lately is sort of an artifact of these "glasses".

They say that there are many sides to every story.
The problem with that is that each of those sides comes from a different person.
In reality, there's only one side to a story: what actually happened.
All these subset "sides" is merely an opinion that can change dramatically based on who you ask.

This can be seen very easily with highschool drama.
Take any situation you may be familiar with.
Every involved party will have its own story, with the facts skewed in one way or another.
And something you will notice about this:
Every person's story is crafted in a way that lifts up that person.

Nothing is ever that person's fault, or he's the victim, or did something really nice or good, or whatever.
This is probably a natural human thing; everyone pretty much does it to a degree.

In essence, we have a natural tendency to look at our lives through glasses tinted with a shade of "me".
If you looked through glasses with red lenses, everything would appear red.
So looking through glasses with us-colored lenses, everything appears to be our "color";
maybe you could call this self-centered-ness.
Regardless, i'd call them "i-glasses".

If you look at a bunch of your friend's myspace pages, there's a trend towards using the word "genuine" in the "who i'd like to meet" section.
And it's true; everyone likes people who are genuine.
But are we, ourselves, genuine?


I'm sure we all know people with this tendency to stretch stories to fit themselves.
But we should strive really hard to not be like that- look at life through glasses colored in the opposite of yourself.
Be genuine to your friends and family, and don't be petty.
Go out of your way for other people, and try to make yourself unimportant to yourself.