Paradises.

A person's idealisation of paradise, whether on or off this world, creates a blueprint by which we evaluate our lives. Paradise itself is complex. Bits and fragments of it comes from the people around us, other bits of it are meshed together with tv shows, books, movies, and then thrown into our psychological oven to be baked by our experience. And to make it worse, paradise is like a cake that never truly gets baked. What you think of it depends on when you eat it, as much as what is inside.

As complicated as that maybe, our grasp of paradise is often less fluid. 

We have, for instance, an intuitive grip of the world around us. How we should act, and what we should do. But it is through paradise that we decide what would make us happy. For the most part, we push the idea of paradise away from our consciousness, and drown ourselves in the drunkard pleasures of being 'happy'. And our biology, limited as it is, would persuade us that this is enough. After all, what good is it to think about the rationale of what pleases us? 

But to ignore our own invented paradise is to be condemned to repeating it and we will keep repeating it because we imagine our lives to be worthless without paradise. Yet, our paradise isn't the white light garden of eden that we imagine it to be. If it resembles anything, it resembles the glittery lights of the Las Vegas strip. The bright lights draw us in and with enough intoxication, we can forget the stickiness beneath our soles and the silicon under those stripper's breasts. And we have found the way there in the same way that everyone else had, through tv shows, movies, and lonely planet. Things that lay just outside the periphery of our consciousness. Little catchphrases and 6 bit tunes that stick in our heads long after the principles of arithmetic is forgotten.

Through them, we have schemed and lied to ourselves, and imagined our discovery to be our own.
We imagine Vegas to be made just for us and us alone. 

After all, who truly wishes to be reminded that our paradise is built upon capitalism's exploitation when they are receiving a lap dance? Or the quiet erosion of family ties from the parlay with the one armed bandit? We do not love a party pooper. If anything, we wish to drown the voice of dissent out, with more lights, more noise, more clanking of our coins. 

From the semen stained seats of the stripper bar, we carelessly ask the philosopher about his gambit. Is it worth the sacrifices of mindless pleasures for a recognition of chaos? Is it better to be a socrates than a well-fed pig? 

Perhaps. Or perhaps not.

For some, the knowledge of a broken paradise serves little function when there are no alternative paradises offered in its place. Every paradise looks as plastic, and every bit of pleasure as contrived. Why then should we seek anything meaningful and not seek to find meaning in a meaningless world? Why insist on clarity when the smoky halls of Vegas can show you a different light? 

Perhaps that is true and that there is no measurable benefit one paradise offers another. But, for me, a broken vision of the world is better than a rose-tinted one, because at the very least, I can say that I have chosen my hemlock; instead of taking it in through shots of someone's belly button.