Reddit reviews Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not...
Anyway, I don't think it's entirely their fault. I mean, sure, people make choices and should take personal responsibility for their choices, but most of the choices people make are uneducated choices.

Warning, I'm feeling a huge urge to type off a tsunami of a rant, which comes with plenty of complimentary tangents... it's how I cope with stress. Leave me alone if need be.

It started way back, when different cultures started encountering different cultures.

(hmm... maybe this is how I ruin friendships... I do something, then some person comes along saying they like me while saying they appreciate that something that I did. Therefore it's reinforces that behavior in me, and I do that behavior around that person again, only more exaggerated... like I started doing just now. I think.)

So, anyway, a culture is suddenly all like, "Shit guys, look how awesome this stuff is!" And they trade ideas, tools, spices, slaves, etc., and it turns into World-systems analysis as the geographically lucky Western world uses the rest of the world for profit. But the Modernist Movement --

(fuck. I'm trying to answer all world problems in a reddit post... kinda silly for someone who considers himself a post-modernist. And, yes, Guns, Germs, and Steel has lots of criticism on it's own, but it doesn't really shake my main argument regardless.)

-- really takes things over as people are obsessed with new, unique, and different art, ideas. Picasso was obsessed with African tribal masks, for example. And eventually it gets to the point where Duchamp turned a urinal into a work of art! I mean, c'mon. A century ago we were already mocking consumerism. Huxley wasn't ahead of his time for writing BNW at all; if anything he was behind his time, as Huxley simply translated the Dadaists' art into words.

This is really all human instinct that we demand porn, originality, and anything new, though. Consumerism is a byproduct of being human. I'm not ranting about these god damn kids, I'm ranting about something that's inevitable. I don't believe anything will stop it besides an environmental disaster, and even then, once we rebuild from the enviromental disaster, we'll start this consumerism all over again, heading ourselves right back into BNW. (Hmm... guess these thoughts aren't old, given that liberalism isn't old (I don't know much about liberalism from centuries ago; I haven't read any political theory besides cursory wikipedia glances) -- so this is what communism is supposed to prevent? And what if someone like Gandhi was the dictator of a communist country? Then would it work?)

But in the end, I don't completely want to shove my views onto the world. I don't want to force the world to choose what I think is the best way to live. It's personal. I'd like to live on a minimalist social commune with no Internet for my own sake.

Goddamn. I've ranted on reddit a few times now. Does anyone else do this as a vent? There's gotta be others, do they get downvoted into oblivion?

And, yes, I would love some coffee. I need to get off the fucking internet and talk to a live person. Anybody in the DC/Baltimore region?

I second your recommendation of Spent.