"If I ever feel better, remind me to spend some good time with you..." Thomas Mars
Pranging out
It is fairly obvious that the main purpose of life is to "have a good time", to distract ourselves until the moment of our death. It is as simple a concept as can get, however, ironically, it is one of the most difficult theory to put into practice. Why is it that, even in the middle of a celebration, the moment we find tremendous enjoyment is, simultaneously, the moment we experience the greatest sadness? What is it that spoils the fun? Why is the killjoy forever louder than the cheerleaders?
Our lives are full of distractions: from TV to the internet, from family to friends, from work to leisure, from excursions to travels. The more we move in space, the slower time goes and, consequently, the less conscious we become of our own existence. Such is the magic of relativity. And even though we would like to believe that we are saddened by the passage of time, in fact, we are happy to have been able to fill our lives with as many memorable moments as possible.
In wonderland
The first times are among the most colourful dots on the timeline of our lives. The first time you crawled, the first time you talked, the first time you walked, the first time you went to school, etc. And even when we have no memory of these events, we are happy to rely on others, close ones, to remember these for us, times and times again. That is what parents are for... until we become parents ourselves and start collecting memories for our offspring. We hang onto these to define our identity, who we are and who we want to become.
More often that not, memories are, in fact, an unsurmountable burden. We remember good times when they are gone, we hold on to memorabilia to avoid facing the daunting future, we dream of changing the past to experience something else. Some people are on a mission to keep the status quo when everything else pushes for evolution, most want to bring back the golden ages without regards for the buzzing present, others run away from what was before in an attempt to seize the future before everyone else.
In this battle of perspectives on time, it is a real challenge to have a good time. The pressure is on everyone to have the "best" moment of all their lives. And we play the game by upping our expectations of our own lives... to our own loss. First we want good grades, then we want shiny goods, later on we crave for stylish partners, we despair to get perfect children, before reverting to striving for good deeds. Topsy turvy twisted dreams that we discard as soon as they come to life, or don't.
Disorientation
So, in the end, none of this really matters. The good times, the bad times, the old and the sad, they are often as forgotten as we go on living. In reality, we would like to stop time and exist in a sort of permanent oblivious state to what surround us. When we distract ourselves, we don't do so exclusively to forget that we have to build a living, we mostly aim to reach social unconsciousness.
Forgetting that we have an identity, forgetting that we have families, forgetting that we have duties, forgetting that we are as common as humans can be.
Good times are all about embracing the vacuity and vanity that defines our time on Earth...for better or worse.
