I've run out of intelligent things to say about housing. Note: Probably about thirty blogs ago. Essentially a house is something that provides shelter for you on a day to day basis. In the early years, humans, and I use the term loosely, would hunker down in caves around fires and then scrawl pictures of themselves hunting woolly mammoths to impress the local women. And though we may now look back at those etchings, and scoff at the craftsmanship, standards were lower then and the local women were sufficiently impressed enough to help males turn those cave-dwellers into the dominant species on the earth.
Human beings advanced, doing a variety of things like inventing the wheel and the Inquisition, and moved into larger stone dwellings called castles. Some of the poorer folk lived in straw huts infested with lice, but I'm sure they all had good times. The castles were cold, like the caves, and had rats, like the caves, but now the men didn't draw on the walls, they employed other people to paint things on the walls for them for a sum of money. This was done to impress artsy scullery maids and proved somewhat successful. The folks who lived in the thatched houses pretty much worked hard and then died. Most Americans today have a whole lot less in common with those people than with the people in the castles.
Human beings continued to evolve in various places and replaced the small thatch houses with solid stone things. This was generally regarded as a positive step, a more equitable sharing of wealth et al enabling this change. Note: Some of the broader strokes in the latter half of the housing development are more typically associated with Western Europeans and good old United Statesians. People in traditionally poorer countries having figured out long ago that paying 350,000 dollars for something that was essentially free is just plain nuts. These stone dwellings became cities and people sort of learned to live together by doing things like closing off the run of open sewage into drinking water.
The housing development took a slight detour in the nineteen fifties in the good old America's, where it was determined that too much of the land was green and was in need of paving. Ergo; everyone moved out to the burbs where happiness resides, and sort of replicated each other's life values in the way that pretty much every human being has ever done. But it was way sadder because that particular lifestyle made it so evident. And this plainly evident ununiqueness made people a bit uneasy. The men no longer put paintings on the walls to attract the women. The women themselves now became the attraction and they summarily cooked good meals and kept a neat house so that other members of the species would be impressed, compare themselves, and generally find that they were falling short in all sorts of ways just as the early mammoth hunters were acutely aware of how much better the best hunter was and desired his wife/mate/share of the meat. Humans had come a long way.
Thus, the boomers all decided that they were unhappy and disillusioned, and they probably invented a whole lot of other words that pretty much just meant unhappiness. But nay, not like the eons of human beings who had come before them and who were pretty much united in unhappiness, death, disease, infant mortality, bubonic plague et al. These people decided that they were uniquely unhappy and that happiness lay somewhere in the external world: new cars, new wives, new psychologists. This did not make anyone happy but all of these things cost a lot of money and demanded that people start making more. But where was the money going to come from?
No comments:
Post a Comment