Derek's Blog on everything and everything else...

As we enter the last few years of the 21st century’s first decade; I often pause in amazement on how things have changed!! Isn’t it amazing that I can open and lock my car @ a 20-metre distance by just pressing a button; or hook up with dozens of people on FB whom I wouldn’t even recognise on the street; or being out of the country and talking to family on Skype, without paying a cent to any phone network; and having a cell phone that is also a DVD player, HI-Fi; video recorder and camera!!! WoW, must tell you being a 70’s / 80’s child – things have certainly changed, especially when your kids have no idea who the Rolling Stones are or that Michael Jackson is actually black. Now – my grandfather was born in 1918 – can you imagine how this new world must seem to him. When he was a kid, there weren’t even cars, running toilets or electricity!!

Yet, with all changing so fast, the thing that stands out most is how replaceable everything has become. From cars, cell phones to relationships – it seems that everything (things and people) has a life span. On average a new car is driven for three to four years, a cell phone and computer has an average life span of two-years, and the average marriage last’s for about five years!!!

Now, the question (to my mind) is whether this is a collective mind-set, a psychological phenomenon, or is it just about money??? If more people had more money, would there for instance be a higher divorce rate? It seems that we have entered a world where money has to be spent on a daily basis – or else we face economic collapse. It is to the interest of law firms that we get divorced, it is to the interest of pharmaceutical companies that we have to stay sick and to the interest of religious organisations that the world stay loaded with sin… On a deeper level, could this be our inability to evolve spiritually – there seems plenty of evidence that great spiritual leaders (not religious leaders) had very little need for material possession or constant renewal of possession and relationships! Is our paradigm of ‘everything has to be renewed and replaced’ a manifestation of unconscious anxiety to ‘kill time’ in absence of higher purpose???