Disclaimer: I include myself in the following rant. When I say 'we' or refer to general social attitude, I am considering myself to be as guilty as everyone else, sometimes moreso. I say this FIRST so nobody misses it, totally gets the wrong end of the stick and starts complaining that I think I'm better than anyone else. I'm not.
Except for Matt Belamy. I'm better than him.
Why do people ask for or dish out advice? I ask for the simple reason that I truely can't remember the last time I heard the sentence 'Yes, you're right, that is a fucking stupid idea, thank you I'll not do that!'. On rare occasions you'll hear the first part, but often followed by 'but I think it will be ok if I'm really careful' or 'but it's different for me' or, in my case 'but I'm sure that's not what's causing my headaches and impotence' (that's a different story for a different rant). Albert Einstein defined insanity as performing the same action over and over, and expecting different results. If that's true, what does that say about people who not only do something they've done in the past to ill effect, but also don't heed people telling them not to do it. Is there such a thing as Insanity squared? (I tried to use the superscript 2 there but for some reason it doesn't exist in this blog, which I dislike)
By the same token though, maybe I'm insane for continually offering advice when I know it won't be followed. People have called me mad for less. I come to the irrefutable conclusion that our society at large suffers from severalfold insanity with selective hearing and memory. It's made even worse by the fact that a lot of people (and I don't include myself in this one) will listen to, and do, just about anything that involves very little actual thought. Facebook chains being my particular bugbear lately, and I flash back to last year here.
Get rage against the machine to christmas number one, THAT was an example of how to properly use a facebook chain. It wasn't a gimmick, it wasn't purely for comedy's sake (such as this year's surfin bird or rickroll campaigns) it made a fucking point. Fuck you, we won't do what you tell us. We can band together into a cohesive and passionate group of individuals who love music and hate the state of the industry thanks to it's capitalist overlords. We are going to make a statement, to those suited douches and the mindless drones sitting in front of the x-factor with their brains switched off, that the world shouldn't be this way. We should speak as one, and listen in return, respect ourselves enough to think for ourselves, and respect others enough to try to treat their points of view with an open mind. This year? Cartoon display pictures to give peadophiles an early christmas, and numbered statuses for sycophants who, if they really cared about your opinion of them, would already know what you think of them (it's called being friends).
With that, I've gotta say, as one, let's all wake up, listen up, and stop being fucking insane. Now I'm off to grab Unicorn food off a hedgehog in Latvia. Word.
