screw up brain

And so I am back from Australia. And the first thing I did was to sigh when I touched down. Moving house is so tiring and it is creating unnecessary problems.

I was reading an article published in The Sydney Morning Herald (though I didn't travel to Sydney, I bought it at a place near Gold Coast) about whether we can save ourselves from drowning in shallowness. The article mentions that we drown ourselves with pettiness, superficiality, vanity, ego, materialism and mindless distractions while wisdom, curiosity and critical thoughts took the back seat. Yet "half a century ago, humanistic thinkers were heralding a great awakening that would usher in a golden age of enlightened living. "

The social pressures of our current society is so strong that it forces you to conform to it. Vanity is so disgusting when you start to think about all the effort, the time, the money one has to put in to look pretty/handsome. I don't want to fall into that trap. Materialism is so bad that you have to buy branded goods so that you maintain your ego. With all these ugly side of our society, I think it is much better for me to starve and die with a mathematics degree than rush into the fast-paced, competitive world where everyone has to kill each other to survive and to be the rich guy to afford all the luxury goods.

Relationships seem so shallow - the normal relationship will just involve people trying to get into someone else pants, though they will defend it as trying to seek their true love. Meanwhile everyone wastes their time dressing up nicely trying to attract their next partner. The cycle repeats itself. People get into relationship and get out of it like changing underwear.

People always talk about getting our heads together to solve global issues like global warming, feeding the starving world, alleviating poverty, preventing genocides and so on. Yet as we all know these have always been all talk but no action. We will never have the political will to achieve these goals as we lack the consciousness to care. We will only care about these issues until it directly affects us like the Australians care most about the climate change as it is affecting them badly at the moment. If it doesn't affect us, it's not our problem. If only we have became the kind of people that the past humanistic thinkers think we will be, then we will pull up our socks and bang our heads together to come up with solutions to these global problems.

Oh Singapore's GDP shrank for the Q2. The global economy seems to be still suffering from the credit crunch with 2 gigantic mortgage companies with total debts exceeding 5trillion usd looking like they are going to collapse any moment. China meanwhile still grows at the rate of building a city the size of Sydney every 6 weeks. No wonder the prices of metals are so high.