Late nights and low expectations

Sleeping. Fast food. Television. Girls Gone Wild commercials.
With all of the free time I have, you might think I would find something more productive. But I haven't. I've put off an oil change for my car for a week, neglected to wash more than one load of laundry since graduation and still have not unboxed any books.

The lack of motivation, Pangloss, is one of the many negative factors of our condition. When we first graduated, this was called decompression. We had earned the time off. We deserved an uninterrupted break. But I can't seem to break the cycle.

Part of it is undeniably my job. If I keep late hours, spend my mornings asleep and eat high-carbohydrate food without exercising, I'm going to be sluggish. But the job can't bear all the burden. If I wanted to do so, I could be asleep most nights by eleven thirty. Instead, I stay awake to play "Asteroids," which wasn't cool in the 1980s and isn't cool now.

I think that another part of it, though, is that I'm able to get away with it. I have such low expectations for myself that I hardly have any interest in motivating myself to exceed them.

No rose-tint here

I can see why you would say that I was romanticizing, Martin. However, let it be noted that I have no qualms about criticizing the past and examining its nature, good and bad. My description that you quote was perhaps a poor phrasing of what I intended to convey. I intended those descriptors of "farmer," "craftsman," and the like to indicate an era when such professions were the dominant form of work. I'm not saying that farming was idyllic and without hardship; indeed, it involved privation and trial unlike most could tolerate today. And such times often lacked liberties or comforts that we consider essential and basic tody.

But the issue is not whether such times were a Golden Age, which they were not, but rather how such a civilization compares to our own. If we want to claim that certain parts of our modern age are better than the past, then we must also be willing to grant that parts of the past are better than the present. Do the ills of the present outweigh the ills of the past? That is the issue I am posing. I merely contend that I would rather deal with hardships of the past over the hardships of the present.

It is as much a personal choice as it is a moral distinction. But you're a good post-modernist, Martin, so I'm sure you'll settle for the former.