Yup

It struck him that the understanding of our place within the universe was either radically important or deeply uninteresting. On the one hand it seemed fundamentally important whether a person believed that the universe was created and sustained by an all powerful being who’s true aim, problems aside was the redemption of some portion of humanity. Or whether you thought that the world was a mere accident in a myriad of accidents, or some sort of cosmic inevitability that was ultimately meaningless, just a collection of matter that had a tendency to form organisms, who in turn, formed more complex organisms. In short, whether human history was directed towards some goal, or whether human existence was just a monumental accident. This, it seemed to him, should be the essential sort of question that every human being should come to terms with before deciding how to live their life, whether things like ethics and morals etc. were even relevant, seemed somewhat contingent on this conclusion. And yet, people, himself included, tended to give more sustained thought to whether they’d prefer Chinese food or pizza for dinner than on the nature or direction of their existence. Why was this? Did everybody secretly already know in their gut whether they believed in anything beyond themselves as cosmic jokes or not? Or were these questions so difficult to answer that they just functioned in the background of everyone’s mind, like a computer running some endless processing function.

The real problem was that, from a societal standpoint, at least in the technocratic western world where he’d been weaned, the answer to the question was a non-sequiter. What does the creation of the universe or your place in it have to do with rent, with a spreadsheet, with staying in shape? You’d hear, and heard a couple in his church going days, a sermon or two that said that it made all the difference, but he often wondered if that was true. People who professed to believe in the direction of God in the world always seemed hopelessly naïve, or so like their non-believing cohorts that the belief didn’t seem to matter. It was too hard to walk a reasonable middle ground. And either way, it didn’t seem, with the way society was made, to matter at all. We were no longer sacrificing cows or other human beings to deities for rain. It had become a thing that a person could consider in the privacy of their own home, like whether to have cable or not. In short, religion was on the fringe. He wasn’t even sure that that was a problem, or whether it was just a natural result of being a citizen in any developed nation.

He spent one summer as a tour guide of the world’s smallest mountain along the coast of CA. It wasn’t technically a mountain, but the company determined that the phrase, world’s smallest mountain, was catchier than, not technically a mountain, but still pretty small. He’d run a gondola, a very short gondola up to the top of the mountain for young couples looking for romance or older couples not wiling to climb stairs. At the top of the world’s smallest mountain was a tiny village composed of a gift shop, an ice cream shop, and two restaurants. It was his first introduction into the adult world of work and he found the work world deeply mystifying and stultifyingly boring all at once.

Is this really what people did all day? Pushed a button to start a gondola? Smiled at strangers? Did it not occur to anyone else that having seventy percent of the population working in the service industry was deeply bizarre? That each of us serving each other, with a, if the company was good, fake plastered on smile was vaguely orgiastic as though we were rewarding ourselves for doing the very things that we’d been saving up to be doing. It would be like working at Disneyland all summer to afford spending a day at Disneyland. He meant something, else, but it almost seemed analogous. Everyone was actually in this deep symbiotic relationship where they all worked for each other, but the real underlying problem of this beautiful system is that most people hate the customers they work with, or at least dislike them, find them annoying. And yet, if seventy percent of people are working in the service industry, what’s being communicated is the fact that seventy percent of people don’t actually like themselves, or don’t respect the job that they do. When not working they find themselves deeply annoying. How could this not create a nation of people alienated from themselves?