Most people enjoy any excuse to get out of things they don’t want to do. Some people turn it into a lifestyle. Lately it appears the whole consumer culture has decided there is no future anyway, so we should all just laugh, spend, and be merry while we can.
It’s a traditional and natural reaction to catastrophe. During the middle of the black plague, with unburied bodies heaped high and almost everyone you knew dead or dying, it was quite rational to not care too much about next year. All disasters make us aware of the fragility of the usual situations we take for granted.
On the other hand, it takes a contradictory perversity to be cynically unconcerned for the future when one is in the middle of the best times that ever existed. Well fed, long-lived people who by all measures are the wealthiest humans who ever bestrode the planet decide to spend it all right now, do no planning for anything, and ignore all sacrifice because _ well _ things will work out on their own. Or they won’t.
Perhaps it’s the constant drumbeats of imagined doom. Perhaps it is the realization that each of us has no power among the eight billion surrounding us.
Or maybe _ most likely _ it is just a cynical excuse to let us party hearty as long as we want.
HuntingtonHarborThoughts 