10 Overrated Things

ORGANIZED RELIGION

Where to start? Priests, rabbis, sheikhs are all middle-men in man's spiritual quest for elevation. And like all middle-men, a great deal of energy is expended justifying their presence and mobilizing the less-educated among their flock in a bid for power and status. Not a very spiritual goal, is it? While the quest to get closer to one's spiritual destiny is admirable and arguably what separates us from the animals, the way those shysters and snake-oil salesmen hijack religious ideals and use them to justify abominable acts of hatred and intolerance, for their own personal glory, causes me to regard them on equal footing with war criminals, child molestors and dentists.


THE PYRAMIDS

What's the big fucking deal? Are you seriously telling me that you find a bundle of rocks THAT fascinating? It's the emperor's new clothes all over again. What's worse is that our proclivity to hang on to our past leads me to the 800 pound gorrilla in the room that no one is talking about: [whisper] we must not have much in the present..


MONOGAMY

I've always liked the idea of monogamy and can't argue against its virtues: providing security and a stable framework for life..but how can one ignore its limitations? The sex is akin to eating a diet of ONE thing for the rest of your life and the conditions of marital success are such that neither party is allowed to change (read: grow) during the course of said marriage, lest they leave the other behind. My solution: turn it into a lease: five or ten years renewable, with a series of objectives that must be accomplished or the lease may be terminated. Oh, and how about four weeks vacation per year?


FRIENDS

Uggghh....contrived to the utmost degree, not funny, not real, not plausible, not smart..I could go on.


FRIENDSHIP

I've railed against this before and while I believe in its importance, I can't deny my belief that the complexity of modern life has turned friendship into a nebulous and ill-defined realm. For instance, friends who live in other parts of the world..I value their memory but is a mere memory enough? How about friends who fit in one setting but not in others, because you or they are "not in that circle"...can friends be a product of function? I struggle defining who my friends are not because I don't like the people in my life but because I'm unsure of what their impact is in my life and mine in theirs.

GRAND THEFT AUTO

This game is over-hyped. Lost in the controversy of a game about carjackings, cop-shootings and armed robbery is a ridiculously bad control system and a ludicrously cliched storyline. A game for morons.



THE TWO ISMS


Feminism and anti-racism are obsolete - at least, in their traditionally understood roles. Both still occur but the intellectual battle has been won and the results are there for everyone to see. What we're facing now is an apologist system that rewards people for being a certain race or a certain gender without evaluating merit. Worse we seem to have entered an era where criticizing members of that race or gender, will tag you with the label of a something-ist.



ARCADE FIRE

ARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH!!! Turn it off!!!



CAPITALISM

A system that requires something that would appear to be obvious and yet isn't prioritized or valued: compassion.


NBA Basketball

Stop travelling. Bring back the handcheck on defense. Stop expanding. Stop guaranteeing players contracts in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Stop travelling. LeBron is shit. Dial up the intensity, not the corporate friendliness. Stop travelling.