Thought Bouquet

Rather than write a long blog with a point at the end, today I'm just going to comment on several little things.  I like to call this a thought bouquet, as if each little musing of mine is a flower and when all together they make a nice bouquet.  A more accurate metaphor may be a junk drawer in which one finds a gum wrapper, scissors, a used piece of tape and an eraser, however we're going to call it a Thought Bouquet.

1) One thing that has come to my attention recently, and was touched on in "The Perils of Perfection",  is the fact that all of your active social media accounts will still be active after you have died, because you are not around anymore to deactivate them.  Unfortunately several of my friends have died in the past year, so I have some recent examples to draw from. Their Facebook pages have become a sort of online memorial for them.  People post words to remember them by or pictures and memories every couple months on the day they died. They become immortalized with a growing amount of information about who they were.  So although unlike LiveOn, the service mentioned in "The Perils of Perfection", no one is continuing to post on your behalf, you are still active online. What happens when all of your Facebook friends are also dead? When do you move to an online graveyard? Will Facebook eventually become a site of only people who have died? It's strange to think that one day we will all have pages memorializing us. But perhaps Facebook will be obsolete by the time I die. 

2)  In "The Perils of Perfection" the author talks about a futurist who wants to make contact lenses that could make homeless people disappear.  This was entirely disturbing to me. This made the man or woman, who for one reason or another cannot live in a house, equal to garbage on the street or pollution in the air, something that's an eyesore and should be removed from society, rather than a human being who should evoke our compassion and recognition as an equal. Compassion is one of the most important elements of being human, and although most people walk by without a look or a word or a smile at the man or woman on the ground or the bench, a normal response is pity at the very least. But more and more commonly people have begun to respond to people in desolation or poverty with annoyance or in extreme cases, disgust.  I was looking into why this may be happening, because it's truly unsettling and I came across a very interesting quote from an interesting source. The current Pope wrote about it saying "The great danger in today's world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience. Whenever our life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor."  The idea that our society has a "complacent yet covetous heart" was very interesting to me because I see that every day.  No one cares about anything. It's cool to be apathetic.  People get less hyped up about the soccer games, or a really interesting debate, or anything that actually involves human interaction. However, an online shopping binge, now that's a thrill. By Ayesha Khanna suggesting that we creat contacts that only show us what is pleasing to us, she is solely focusing on the individual pleasure and losing the importance of humanity and coexisting. Also I think it's important to deal with and learn to accept things you don't like. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/the-perils-of-perfection.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&

http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html