Interpopsicle!

So, two days ago, I attended a wedding. It was a highly informal affair, with a five-minute ceremony and a lot of small children running around - which, it seems to me, is rather the best part of weddings.

One thing that struck me, though, and that brought up today's topic, was a specific piece of the vow used, in which it was said "Remember, you never get more out of a relationship than you put into it."

Now, this statement strikes me as foolish. Isn't it precisely the point to get more out of a relationship than you put into it?

At face value, of course, this is absurd, even reprehensible: relationships are not a contest, in which you try to outdo the other person and gain as much as you can for as little effort as possible. But that's not what I said, either.

See, the distinction is between two things: what you put into a relationship, and what the other person gets out of it. You should always get more out of it than you put into it, but that is because you should always get more out of it than they put into it. If the amount of sacrifice and the amount of gain were always perfectly equal, no one would ever enter into a relationship: why do so if you have nothing to gain? But they aren't. The point of being in a relationship - the entire point - is that both of you stand to gain enormously through making smaller sacrifices.

This is not, of course, to say that relationships do not require effort, nor to say that putting more effort into a relationship will not yield more gain (although there is an optimum level of effort, beyond which it begins to damage, rather than help), but simply to say that what you get out of it is, simply by definition in a healthy relationship, worth more than what you put into it.

And this conclusion leads to another, more interesting one; it reads, simply: If the benefit you are deriving from a relationship is significantly more valuable than the sacrifices you are making for it, then that is a healthy relationship. ("Benefit" here is not a selfish word: making someone else happy can count as a benefit.) Otherwise, it is not.

I'm not sure if I like that conclusion or not.

Life, the Universe, and Dinosaurs

The title of this post should be the mission statement of human existence.

A friend of mine, recently, said that he thought life was much more fun if you treated it as performance art. I can't help but agree. The thing about living in the top one percent of the world by wealth, as most, if not all, of the people able to afford the internet access required to read this blog do, is that we have removed ourselves from the struggles that really matter. Human beings are programmed to ascribe enormous importance to their everyday activities - after all, for so much of our history, not doing so could easily result in death.

And yet, adults - and, even more so, teenagers - are nevertheless wont to ascribe undue importance to the trivialities of their lives.

Though it may sound as though I am protesting the meaningless of life, and that all existence is futile, and whatever else is all too common on so-called profound internet publications, my point is precisely the opposite. We take things too seriously.

People will sometimes speak of an "inner child," the force that provides immaturity, silliness, and, I believe, the only medium through which we can achieve pure joy. Recently, we have become better at accessing it; Monty Python, for example, achieved humour simply through silliness, and the title of this post is another obvious reference.

The problem is that we refuse to admit that we are still as captivated with the cool and the silly as we were when we were six years old. Everyone loves dinosaurs. I honestly have yet to meet a person who turned down a chance to play with Lego. Oh, we try to hide it, feeling as though it is socially unacceptable to still be enamoured of giant robots or space-ships or a piece of pie. But nevertheless, everyone is.

This carries over into aspects of our daily lives, mostly through the realm of hobbies. People who can no longer play with toy soldiers take up video games, or table-top war games, or chess. People who can no longer happily spend an afternoon saving princesses and ruling kingdoms do it anyways, with dungeons and dragons. And people whose imaginations are cramped by their feelings of social intolerance can always, always, read a book. Everyone loves being silly. And it is a tragedy when people will not allow themselves to do so.

This may sound like a glorification of nerd culture, and to a certain extent it is. We did get a lot right, after all. But it's not just that kind of escapist activity that lets people channel their silliness into their lives. Whenever someone climbs a tree just because they feel like it, that's what I'm talking about. Whenever people play pickup hockey in the streets, that's what I'm talking about. And whenever anyone uses their imaginations, or goes against their inclinations, or does something just for the hell of it, that's what I'm talking about.

Also, Dinosaurs.

Inception!

It has been a fair while since I have done anything approaching writing out actual ideas, essays, and treatises, which I suspect will be the end focus of these pages, so I think I will begin by easing myself into it, with a few general observations about humanity.

One thing I have always found fascinating about people is that we like to think of there being six directions: forward, backwards, left, right, up, and down - always, interestingly, in that precise order - and yet we really only think in five of them. You see, humans, by nature, never look up; after all, evolutionarily speaking, looking up is foolish for creatures that live on wide-open plains: neither threats nor food could possibly be above us. Doubtless, our forest-dwelling ancestors would have spent a fair amount of time scanning the tree-branches above their heads, but years of savanna and grassland have beaten that awareness out of us.

It is a commonplace in the entertainment industry, for example, that audiences will happily observe what is going on below them, but will refuse to look upwards, even if their virtual lives (in the case of a video game) depend on it. The best place to ambush someone is from above, which is why the president of the united states always enters and leaves buildings under a tent: the secret service agents, however incredibly skilled and highly trained, know that they are most likely to miss an assassin above them.

What is interesting about this, however, is that it works in metaphor as well as reality. Humans must be forced and cajoled to look up, to find a higher purpose or greater ambition for their actions than just a personal one. Perhaps that is why it is said we were made in God's image. After all, for him, there isn't any up at all.