Lazy society

Society... is lazy, I just noticed.

Lazy, lazy. Expectant, spoiled, taking for granted that they have the right to have access to everything and anything that anyone else does.

I say this as perceived from a guy who was lived in two different US cities for the past... 2.5 years now. I think about society today, and I see... laziness.

I woke up this morning at 5AM, and I was hungry, so I went to look for some food in the refrigerator. I had nothing left except dry oats, with no milk to pour on it, so I thought about how could I get some food and satisfy my hunger. It was too early for the grocery store to be open, so I started thinking about other options. Where else could I get food at this time? Hmm, a 24h restaurant maybe, but they were fairly far away, and I just wanted to have a bite of something quick, not have a full breakfast yet.

I realized then how dependent are we on others' services. The grocery store. What ever would we do without a grocery store? I would not be able to eat without grocery stores - for sure I wouldn't be going to restaurants every day to eat. A majority of the people in the city must be equally, if not more, dependent on them. What about other shops? Clothing stores, furniture stores, telecommunication companies... what would happen if they weren't around. There is such a HUGE dependency on companies, corporations... we're glued onto being part of society by the way of life we have grown with. I, at least.

But it's not just the dependency. Do you notice how, tacitly, automatically, we expect there to be all of these things everywhere, whenever we come into a new place? At least I do. I move somewhere... so there MUST be a grocery store nearby, right? Or else how would anyone else LIVE around there? But such a huge dependency... it seems to me... is potentially catastrophic.

So what would happen if grocery stores were no longer able to serve us? If they just decided "nah, we're tired, we're no longer going to open our stores", what would happen? What could we do? Can we get food ourselves? Do people know, at all, how to grow food, fetch water, supply for their own needs?

We don't :(. I think it's sad. People don't know how to fill their own needs. They know how to do so, GIVEN that everyone else acts as required, but now by themselves. This may sound a tad exaggerated, but I think this dependency is sickening. And a lot more so because many of us don't even know it's there. Sigh.

Parallel search

Last night, I was in my room when I happened to remember the scene in "Stewie: The Untold Story" where Stewie from the future invited a girl over to his apartment, and now the girl wants to have sex with him, but he is scared and doesn't want to go into the room, and baby Stewie is ordering him to go in there and DO IT! Funny scene.

Anyway, I then tried to remember where had I watched this movie from, and I couldn't figure it out at first. "Netflix? Hulu? Redbox? Movie theater? Happened to start watching it in someone else's living room?" None of those options matched, so then I tried harder to remember, and then I found the answer: "It's on my hard drive! That's why I watched it several times, too!"

I was surprised I didn't figure that out since the beginning, though, because I don't have that many sources to watch movies from. So I pondered on what had gone wrong with my initial memory search, and I tried to remap what had just happened inside my knowledge retrieval system. Well, for once, I had not eaten much that day, and I felt my thought processes being considerably more sluggish than usual. As a plus, though, I think that same slowness allowed me to figure out what had happened more easily.

The feeling I had when I tried to remember was that of a parallel search. I asked myself the question: "Where did I watch the movie where Stewie travels into the future?", and then answers simply popped up into my consciousness, simple as that. "Netflix: No". "Hulu: No". "Redbox: No". "Movie theater: No". I don't recall a conscious effort to retrieve the distinct options - they just came to me. It was as if retrieval signals were sent towards the areas of my memory of when I had watched movies, and the one that matched the movie I was looking for would return the correct answer. A parallel, asynchronous search.

The option "Hard Drive" didn't show up, though. What happened to that option? Did I not send a retrieval signal in the direction of my hard drive movie-watching memories? Or were they just too distant/faded at that time? (It's been a while since I've watched movies from my hard drive). Maybe my partial-lack-of-food weakness caused my memory to not use up much energy for a task so trivial.

In any case, I thought about it for a fairly long time, and I felt urged to write what I had felt, so here it is. It's quite interesting to even think about brain processes, in any case.

Morning Sunshine

I woke up today feeling very refreshed and energetic. So much so, that I decided to write a blog post about it.

I didn't go to bed very early... I went to bed a little before 4AM. I have believed that 5 hours is enough time for the body to sleep, although I had not had evidence of that in a long time until now.

So I've been wondering what was the reason for my perky arousal, and I have listed the following possibilities:

1. I ran for 45 minutes straight yesterday. Slowly, but constantly.
2. I didn't eat right before going to sleep yesterday. I did eat a generous dinner at Lulu's at about 9:30PM, but I avoided the pre-bed snack I always tend to grab.
3. I lay to sleep in a meditative way. I straightened my body, I relaxed my mind, and tried to "flow out" the thoughts that had not yet expressed themselves during the day.

And then I just woke up this morning - not groggy, not sleepy, not tired. I feel well! I have a meeting at 11AM and I am not rushing to get there and stressing over whether I still have time for a 2-minute shower. I... it's wonderful :). I'm procrastinating my whole day with this blog post, of course, but this is... I hope it will later help remind me about good habits and their happy consequences.

Now off to start my day! Morning sunshine! :D