Return of the Kings – by Johannes Adolphe
That’s the trouble with everybody – you’re all so bored,” rants Johnny, the protagonist of Mike Leigh’s 1993 film Naked. “You’ve had nature explained to you and you’re bored with it, you’ve had the living body explained to you and you’re bored with it, you’ve had the universe explained to you and you’re bored with it. So now you want cheap thrills and like plenty of them, and it don’t matter how tawdry or vacuous they are as long as it’s new, as long as it flashes and f-kin’ bleeps in forty f-kin’ different colors.”
Twenty-five years on, he would surely feel even greater despair over today’s hyper-speed world of digital distraction, hedonism, and increasingly short-lived fads. We are drowning in escapism—in engineered fun and novelty—and we’ve completely lost touch with how we got here. To borrow from Peep Show’s Mark Corrigan, another fictional character who gets the absurdity of our modern condition, we’re crushing candy, quoting Shakespeare, and hiding in the toilets of our own homes. It’s the confused high point of Western civilization.
Over thousands of years, great men—thinkers, engineers and scientists—gradually figured out what makes a mass-scale society function smoothly. At some point we reached such a level of mastery that millions could all but escape from reality, their basic needs met through little to no toil of their own. We now live among hordes of zombified consumers who—diverted by fidget spinners and Facebook feeds—seemingly give no thought to the blood, sweat and tears that went into building this bizarre utopia.
Are you one of them? Well, if you’re not sure, consider this. Every day, whenever you want, you turn a tap for water to begin rushing out at the exact temperature and speed you desire. Have you ever given this a second thought? Have you ever wondered for more than a few seconds where all that technology came from, or how people managed before it existed?
Read the rest here: http://www.returnofkings.com/162628/what-ignoring-plumbing-and-its-history-says-about-modern-civilization
Ha! Great article. Love that first paragraph.
Maybe in my next life I’ll be a plumber. Plumbers certainly are unsung.
I dare you to write a second line to this couplet below. I had one but am too embarrassed to post it.
To plumbers everywhere I raise my glass…
🙂
NOT ONLY THAT, BUT PEOPLE SHOULD STAND IN AWE A BIT THAT WATER H2O, WHICH IS ; HYDROGEN(A FUEL) AND OXYGEN(AN ACCELERANT) IS BOUND IN SUCH A WAY THAT IT DOESN’T JUST EXPLODE AND KILL US ALL……. ESPECIALLY AROUND ALL THAT MAGMA……….https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/09/05/article-2198591-14D878B9000005DC-363_964x641.jpg
JUST REMEMBER THOUGH, THAT IT JUST “SPRANG” INTO EXISTENCE, NO THOUGHT REQUIRED, AND WE ARE ALL JUST “HUMANS”, DESCENDANTS OF APES(OR FISH) BWAHAHAHAHA!!!!
It’s too bad so many young folks–masters of digital whatever–refuse to learn “old school” skills like plumbing, carpentry, electric, changing tires, sewing, bush craft, cooking on wood stoves, etc. If one is not prepared to “fix” whatever when we have an EMP attack or lose power or days upon days of single digit temps to where the plumbing freezes and breaks and then there goes the water…then, IMHO, one is not prepared.