How to Enchant Your Life, part 1 - The Water We Poop In
Our Fishbowl Is That Small
[Part 1 of a four-part series, How to Enchant Your Life. Go here for Part 2.]
The abstraction-made-real that’s Papa Culture is water to us fish. We’re in a glass bowl, watched by someone whom we suspect is us, waiting to see how we play Papa Culture’s game. We fear we’ll end up losers, sitting at the game table, watching everyone else win at life.
We’re trapped in this fishbowl game because that’s what Papa Culture wants. Self-contained, easily monitored, easily caught. That sense of isolation shrinks our souls because it separates us from our magik.
The Game Inside the Fishbowl
We intensely feel desire, but we hardly know what we want. In our youth, Papa Culture’s demand to play the game snuffs our chance to greet the universe and ourselves with joy—or even mercy
Our governmental, corporate, and financial institutions drown us in lifelong debt to achieve the education we’re told is essential to winning the game—or at least, a mortgaged home, a family, and a 401K. Yet, what our education system seems to have best prepared us for is to be a pawn in a large company that herds us along the gameboard like school did.
“You’ll find your own way,” Papa Culture assures us. “Pay your dues. Win the respect of those above your paygrade, who, after all, are there because they play so hard. Trust me!”
All the while, we consume, telling ourselves,
“If I can just get that promotion, I can afford that SUV that’ll be my family’s ticket to camping, where we can finally enjoy this game!” …
… Until the last night around the fire, when we dread the work on Monday that will pay for this trip, our credit card balances, and auto loan. That ball-and-chain lasts till our company downsizes us out of those plans, which were never really our desire.
And what is it we desire?
“To for a moment not play the game, so I can be me … or maybe start finding out who I am. But there’s no time for that. Work saps my best energies. What’s left a few hours each night, vegging out, not carrying any load—especially wondering who I am and what I want. I swear I’ll deal with that when I get the promotion. The higher pay will help me trim down those school loans. I deserve recognition after all I’ve done to get this far!”
The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging
The fishbowl glass squeezes in around the gameboard. The promotion makes us a bigger target for the other players. What happened to what we aimed for when we leapt in? This abstraction maintains its fiercest hold in the rare moments when we nose the water surface, past the food sprinkled into the bowl.
“How do I get out of this? What else is there, anyway? Desire won’t pay the bills, Bethany!
We can’t swim through our fishbowl walls. Papa Culture reinforces the fishbowl walls and lays out the gameboard. Consumption with no end, no reason, is the game. We play because we must, and we must because play. We make ourselves a tiny game piece to fit on the gameboard inside the fishbowl. Our world is the water we feed in and poop in.
The Next Part
More in Part 2: Papa Culture’s Game …