What Kind of Life Do You Want?

If you intend to do life in this world, you have to be more cunning than those who would tell you how to do it.

Even your neighbors these days profess to know more about how you should live than you do. And the commercial media profess to know more than they do about how to live your life.

Doing life as you would have it done has always been in spite of, not because of these influences.

We buy and sell our politicians by how we personally like their performances in the media. We don’t learn how to think in school. We learn how to consume and how to posture ourselves. We don’t know what the long-term issues in our world are, only those immediate and transient issues dramatized by the media.

Maybe we don’t seek to become like each other. We huddle together in our social media to differentiate ourselves. But as our minds shrink to fit the media and the way our computers and the media are programmed, we simply become more like each other.

This is a part of the real world in which you have to do life. You can’t change it. But you need to be aware of that reality.

-Lee Thayer, Thought-Leader, Excerpt from Doing Life, A Pragmatist Manifesto