Bombarded with “Serious Problems”, it’s easy to forget that “Serious Problems” serve to distract us from real problems. If we’re busy worrying about Global Warming, and who’s divorcing whom, and sports contests, we don’t focus as much on real problems as we should.
So, there are “Serious Problem” factories hard at work, cranking out endless media releases, each “Serious Problem” designed to distract us from our own, very real problems. If we ask ourselves what our biggest problem is, we’ll come up with something hard. We aren’t getting along with important people in our lives as well as we should, we need a job with more pay, our children seem to be out of touch with what’s right, etc. We all have lots and lots of very hard problems.
Few things are easier than to ignore hard problems and focus, instead, on what we’re told are more “serious problems”, like polar bear populations, Greenland’s icecaps, volcanoes in Peru, or what Oprah wore to the Awards. The more distracted we can be from solving our own, real problems, the more easily we can be made dependent.
One of the best “Serious Problems” to emerge recently was “The Nitrogen Dilemma.” No one could actually define “The Nitrogen Dilemma”, but since it makes up three/fourths of our atmosphere, it can be made to seem something about which we should be very concerned. On further investigation, “The Nitrogen Dilemma” was concerned with things that could happen to nitrogen, and if those things did happen, there might be serious consequences.
Or, there might not.
In the meantime, we may want to consider that we should not pay any attention to any news release that does not immediately affect us. Keeps from wasting a lot of time, and makes the people whose job it is to continually distract us gnashing their teeth in frustration.
We may profitably wonder just why it is that we are so easily distracted by the Imaginary Problems that appear to us on a daily basis. We want to feel knowledgeable and intelligent about what’s going on in the world. Since very few of us will ever understand international cash flows, it’s doubtful that any of us actually are knowledgeable and intelligent about the inner workings of the world’s societies.
But, our vanity won’t let us to admit how ignorant and helpless we really are. Vanity prompts us to struggle absorbing, digesting, and making sense of an endless array of media releases. That results in even more mental confusion, as we keep trying to make sense out of things that make no sense at all. Frankly, it may turn any of us into the functional equivalent of a moron.
Not paying attention to any of the supposedly “Serious Problems”, and then realizing that we’re making progress in solving our own, real problems, will invariably prove the truth of the old adage, “Ignorance is bliss.”
