Settling for Less

“How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?”
Charles Lindbergh

Settling for Less

I am still surprised that as our technology advances at how we settle for the crappy version of the technology.

Just to list a few, when the Compact Disc came out, it offered studio quality sound but everyone was content with iTunes and it’s compressed product. Grand high definition movies are watched on tiny screens. Emails with attachments have been dropped for 256 character texting. We are content with frozen dinners.

Why is that?

I wonder if it always has been true and that it is part of our human nature or human culture to be quite content with a crappy experience. Watching The Avengers on my phone is skimming the top of the experience but there I go, happy has can be. Remember that the Reader’s Digest versions of condensed novels were very popular, so it is nothing new.

If I am to be questing for a more profound life and looking to find more depth in my experiences, I don’t think that streaming and binging and texting and McDonalds is the way to go. The crappy version of life is offered and to find depth in them is impossible. Face it, choosing margarine over butter will never lead to a profound moment in your life.

The crappy version of life is the scatter-shot way that we watch Netflix who produce hundreds of shows and they hope one will be popular. Why would we choose to randomly guess over and over? That doesn’t make sense at all!

Hip Hop music fits perfectly in the crappy version of life. The sounds are machine made or stolen from other artists, so there is no need for high fidelity. The thin surface is ideal for the words part, “uh uh, gonna do some hip hop, at the candy shop”.

Life offers a menu of choices and quality should be part of those choices. Settling for less is in our nature. Shouldn’t we be offended at Eggos? I certainly am! Those things are disgusting but, well, maybe I’d feed it to my kid.