1. Religion:
Something that was created as a give and take relationship between the rulers and the subjects. The rulers proposed god as a fail-safe alternative to conscience, something to keep their subjects in check when their conscience fails. The subjects in return get something to blame when their life doesn't go the way they want it to.
The trade-off would have been fair enough, provided 'Religion' did its job as intended. But it doesn't, considering the number of crimes committed in the name of religion. The anthropomorphic structure of god 'idols,' is a screaming reminder that god is a creation of human mind rather than other way round. If only we weren't deaf enough to ignore it.
2. Astrology:
Not much different from religion, but in a sense more idiotic. While religion's existence can be defended on the basis of abuser-abused relationship, astrology exists for no other reason than that people are naive enough to fall for anything.
I won't even contend how much effect a lonely rock floating in empty space has on our lives. The sham of astrology doesn't perplex me very much. People accept and discard lies all the time to maintain their sanity. What perplexes me is the audacity and confidence with which astrologers dole out their predictions despite knowing that it has as much probability of being true, as it has of being false.
We have 12 months in a year. Assuming that an equal number of people are born every month, that makes 500 million people sharing the same month of birth. A daily horoscope smugly assumes that this entire bracket of people share same luck. Never mind that at any given time, as many people in this bracket are dying of cancer as those conquering castles.
3. Marriage:
Marriage and credit cards are not very different. Both buy short term happiness (stemming from the short lived whirlpool of feel-good chemicals), at the cost of long-term dissatisfaction. Marriage generally serves as an escape route when life hits a logical dead-end.
Typically marriage is a by-product of a quarter life crisis, when life has ossified into a routine, friends have largely been replaced by office acquaintances, an ever expanding spare tyre has appeared where your waist used to be. With every passing day, life seems to lose more of its meaning. In short, either your options for dopamine hits have been drastically reduced, or you have developed dopamine tolerance for things that used to cheer you up, so they don't seem as fun as they used to be.
So what do you do? Swallow the red pill, get married, have a temporary dopamine hit, develop tolerance and come back to square one (but with a heavy baggage that can't be shed easily), or Swallow the blue pill, dive into deep end of hedonism pool, surround yourself with several dopamine sources, never getting too cozy with any single source. From a rational perspective, it isn't much of a choice, but neither is credit card, but you buy it too, just because happiness that is comfortably within your reach blinds you to the other options.
Ideological differences aside, marriage makes even lesser sense economically (at-least from the standpoint of men). Men buy something when it is broken and can't be fixed. They prefer functionality over aesthetics, experiences over 'things'. Give them money to burn, and they would burn it on humping hookers, eating something exotic, traveling far and wide.
Marriage wrings this tendency off men. They end up spending money on things and people that used to be immaterial or unimportant (like furniture and relatives). Expensive suits are bought to hide growing unattractiveness, status is bought to hide a growing mental vacuity (again temporary patches for a deeper problem).
4. Child-rearing:
An extension of marriage, a stepping stone that helps you graduate to mid-life crisis from quarter life crisis. Children are like ever ringing death knells, constant reminders that you are redundant and replaceable. Rearing them made a sense when your survival was uncertain, when progeny required little investment and doubled up as caretakers and cheap labour since early age. Not in a world where medicare is ubiquitous, and rearing children is costlier than ever affair. In most cases, children are a fallout of a dead end in marriage, a desperate attempt to kick a marriage out of monotony by people who don't have enough experience in judging rewards against efforts (which was why they married in first place). Once the kid is out of the box, they spend two thankless decades of their lives in rearing their child into a presentable and independent human being. Once the child attains these traits, it leaves the nest, and shows its face with ever increasing rarity and making its presence known through a phone call every now and then. A wasted investment. The whole activity is not very different from nurturing a pet that will eventually die, but atleast pets require much less care.
Something that was created as a give and take relationship between the rulers and the subjects. The rulers proposed god as a fail-safe alternative to conscience, something to keep their subjects in check when their conscience fails. The subjects in return get something to blame when their life doesn't go the way they want it to.
The trade-off would have been fair enough, provided 'Religion' did its job as intended. But it doesn't, considering the number of crimes committed in the name of religion. The anthropomorphic structure of god 'idols,' is a screaming reminder that god is a creation of human mind rather than other way round. If only we weren't deaf enough to ignore it.
2. Astrology:
Not much different from religion, but in a sense more idiotic. While religion's existence can be defended on the basis of abuser-abused relationship, astrology exists for no other reason than that people are naive enough to fall for anything.
I won't even contend how much effect a lonely rock floating in empty space has on our lives. The sham of astrology doesn't perplex me very much. People accept and discard lies all the time to maintain their sanity. What perplexes me is the audacity and confidence with which astrologers dole out their predictions despite knowing that it has as much probability of being true, as it has of being false.
We have 12 months in a year. Assuming that an equal number of people are born every month, that makes 500 million people sharing the same month of birth. A daily horoscope smugly assumes that this entire bracket of people share same luck. Never mind that at any given time, as many people in this bracket are dying of cancer as those conquering castles.
3. Marriage:
Marriage and credit cards are not very different. Both buy short term happiness (stemming from the short lived whirlpool of feel-good chemicals), at the cost of long-term dissatisfaction. Marriage generally serves as an escape route when life hits a logical dead-end.
Typically marriage is a by-product of a quarter life crisis, when life has ossified into a routine, friends have largely been replaced by office acquaintances, an ever expanding spare tyre has appeared where your waist used to be. With every passing day, life seems to lose more of its meaning. In short, either your options for dopamine hits have been drastically reduced, or you have developed dopamine tolerance for things that used to cheer you up, so they don't seem as fun as they used to be.
So what do you do? Swallow the red pill, get married, have a temporary dopamine hit, develop tolerance and come back to square one (but with a heavy baggage that can't be shed easily), or Swallow the blue pill, dive into deep end of hedonism pool, surround yourself with several dopamine sources, never getting too cozy with any single source. From a rational perspective, it isn't much of a choice, but neither is credit card, but you buy it too, just because happiness that is comfortably within your reach blinds you to the other options.
Ideological differences aside, marriage makes even lesser sense economically (at-least from the standpoint of men). Men buy something when it is broken and can't be fixed. They prefer functionality over aesthetics, experiences over 'things'. Give them money to burn, and they would burn it on humping hookers, eating something exotic, traveling far and wide.
Marriage wrings this tendency off men. They end up spending money on things and people that used to be immaterial or unimportant (like furniture and relatives). Expensive suits are bought to hide growing unattractiveness, status is bought to hide a growing mental vacuity (again temporary patches for a deeper problem).
4. Child-rearing:
An extension of marriage, a stepping stone that helps you graduate to mid-life crisis from quarter life crisis. Children are like ever ringing death knells, constant reminders that you are redundant and replaceable. Rearing them made a sense when your survival was uncertain, when progeny required little investment and doubled up as caretakers and cheap labour since early age. Not in a world where medicare is ubiquitous, and rearing children is costlier than ever affair. In most cases, children are a fallout of a dead end in marriage, a desperate attempt to kick a marriage out of monotony by people who don't have enough experience in judging rewards against efforts (which was why they married in first place). Once the kid is out of the box, they spend two thankless decades of their lives in rearing their child into a presentable and independent human being. Once the child attains these traits, it leaves the nest, and shows its face with ever increasing rarity and making its presence known through a phone call every now and then. A wasted investment. The whole activity is not very different from nurturing a pet that will eventually die, but atleast pets require much less care.
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