Reality-Lite

No one can take too much real­ity. If we fully knew all that was going on in life, we would be crushed. The mind can only take in so much absolute truth, so God built in some won­der­ful lit­tle lighter-side mech­a­nisms: denial, ratio­nal­iza­tion, time, imper­fect mem­ory, humor, dis­trac­tion, sub­li­ma­tion, sleep, day­dreams, cre­ative idiocy, amuse­ment, won­der, adven­ture, beauty, the erotic, and a dozens of other ways to change the sub­ject from the grim facts of life and death.

What keeps us sane is that lit­tle bit of vil­lage idiot in us all. No one in his or her right mind rides in — much less dri­ves — an auto­mo­bile. Get­ting in one of those things is noth­ing less than a mod­i­fied ver­sion of Russ­ian roulette. We sel­dom give it a sec­ond thought. Denial keeps us on the high­ways. Do you really want to know what all goes into mak­ing lunch meats? I know you don’t want to inspect the kitchens in most of the places where you eat out.

San­ity is based as much in what we do not know as much as in what we do know. Have you ever stud­ied about all of the addi­tives in your food? How much do you know about the effects of arti­fi­cial sweet­en­ers? Native Amer­i­cans intro­duced us to smok­ing (which kills a half-million of us per year) as an uncon­scious and ironic way of get­ting us back for tak­ing their lands. Talk about an effec­tive Tro­jan horse!

So far I have done all of the things I have men­tioned and more. I am blessed by lim­ited per­cep­tions. If I knew all that would hap­pen on any given day, I would not get out of bed…and nei­ther would you. Our lim­i­ta­tions keep us in happy motion. This being human thing is about as bizarre as it gets, if you think about it too much — so I don’t.

I am into reality-lite. It has half the real­iza­tions and twice the fun. I’m the kid on the roller coaster that spent his last dol­lar on the ride. I refuse to take pseudo-authorities seri­ously. I hold my full aware­ness out of their reach and watch them do cart­wheels in their futile attempts to get my full atten­tion — much less my loyalty.

Reality-lite is not only fun, but it is the best strat­egy in a world that takes itself too seriously.