A Moment of Clarity

aquatic beautiful bloom blooming

All my life, I owned all this intellect, and yet, nowhere to apply it to of any consequence outside of the pages of my own journals and weblogs. I believed Academics were meant to hone my skills of expression. Yet I only found that my pen dulled as the expectations of my output became nothing but producing endless drivel full of summary and nothing that left me inspired to add my own commentary. I also found myself being wrong about a great many things, so that when I actually could be proven right on something, my shortcomings would be brought up in evidence against me to invalidate arguments that I had correctly made but suddenly found unceremoniously dismissed.

At work, because I was too dangerous to the welfare of everyone above me, or so they thought, I was doomed to an endless cycle of entry level positions. They saw my coming up as a threat to their own selfish interest and did all that they could to make sure the day never came where I supplanted them. All I ever intended was to benefit all those around me, because that is how I was raised to believe that organizations work. While in theory that is true, that every whole can become more than the sum of its parts, in actual practice those at the top take the lion’s share of the benefit from most of the pyramid below. While I’d love to flip the pyramid upside down, I then realized that such a maneuver has been tried on multiple occasions, only to find that the cycle of the rich getting richer eventually just happens all over again because it seems that people simply don’t know any better. Perhaps the better solution is to tip the pyramid over on its side and let the natural forces of gravity decide the fate of the majority.

This is likely just a bunch of abstract philosophical rhetoric and nonsense, but it sounds good enough to be fit for print. I’d like to say that capitalism isn’t the problem, as we’ve seen other popularized economic models fail spectacularly time and again in just the past century. The issue isn’t so much the “free markets” as much as it is the unscrupulous actors who motivate and skew them towards their own favor. Realistically, there is no such thing as a “free market” because the laws of natural economics dictate that there must be an exchange of labor, capital, technology, or assets in every transaction. Yes, nature has its own technology, and the study of that is what we call science. We are simply mimicking what we find to be true in nature. While we may foolishly believe that we are somehow improving upon it, we are in fact simply reflecting the hidden aspects that the Divine Mind intended us to find, or at least that is what I prefer to believe.

On many occasions, while questioning the purpose of my own existence, I find myself partaking in these existential pondering sessions in which I come to some wild conclusions. Each and every one of us finds ourselves every so often at these moments of sudden clarity. Unfortunately, most of us dismiss them either out of being distracted by things of the moment or as inconvenient truths we would prefer to ignore. I still believe, despite great volumes of evidence to the contrary, that human beings still have a limitless amount of untapped potential. But, we will never reach loftier heights if we do not stop picking on one another. We expend so much of our energy, itself a valuable and very limited resource, on matters that only serve to degrade our contemporaries. We are all forced into roles within the telling of an epic of nonsense told by fools who stand to make some sort of profit, real or imagined, from breaking the stories.

You wouldn’t believe the things I used to think about as a child, presupposing many of the concepts that scholars think up as their theses and dissertations with better ways to run things. I then tune in to podcasts with hosts interviewing these so-called experts of their various fields, find myself pausing them before they get to the pith of their talk, make a comment to my Beau, then restart the playback and discover that they inevitably parrot my offhand comment. This is not because I am some uniquely gifted genius who simply has come to know of what someone will say thanks to some divine intervention. It’s because I’ve actually thought about these things before and rarely are we ever alone in actually considering things. But, in actual realizations, such a small percentage of us ever become inventors who make real our hopes and dreams.

That is to say those who we remember as the great inventors did not conceive of their inventions in a vacuum. They simply dared to act, in and of itself an act of bravery in the face of ignorance. Ironically, what inevitably happens is that when something new and exciting breaks into the world market, you have dozens, if not more, smacking themselves in the head asking, why didn’t I think of that? The irony is that most of them probably did, but never bothered to act. I am not at all skilled with invention in the physical sense, but I do know how to craft my words just eloquently enough to relate my discoveries to you in prose.

Amelia Desertsong is a former content marketing specialist turned essayist and creative nonfiction author. She writes articles on many niche hobbies and obscure curiosities, pretty much whatever tickles her fancy.
Back To Top
%d bloggers like this: