ANTICANT IS 80

Today I’ve been on this planet for eight decades. Survival is worth celebrating, I suppose, and a couple of years ago I didn’t think I would last this long. But I’d rather be 40 than 80, and I don’t expect to reach 90. So the question is: how best to spend the relatively brief remainder of my life?

Eric Berne, the wise ‘father’ of Transactional Analysis, once said that the most important problem every human being has is how to pass the time between being born and dying. In the wicked world we are living in, far too many people don’t have much choice in the matter, and the majority of those who can choose make what to my mind are some pretty rotten choices.

One choice I am making on this birthday is to spend less time in future on the supposedly serious blogosphere. I’m getting increasingly fed up with the ceaseless outpourings of anger, intolerance, and irrational opinion which clutter up so much blogging, and in particular the inability – or unwillingness – to follow a line of discussion through without veering off into irrelevant and intemperate rants and slanging matches. We are living through a self-tormented period when what Jung called the ‘dark shadow’ seems to have taken over the bulk of humankind, who purblindly see nothing but good in themselves and project all badness onto the supposedly demonic ‘other’.

With such almost universally one-sided views being peddled from conflicting standpoints, and so little inclination to compromise, I’ve almost given up hope of finding much constructive thinking or sensible answers on the internet [or anywhere else] to the increasingly menacing self-made plight of humanity, and reluctantly conclude that as the lunatics and thugs are well on the way to taking over the global asylum, there’s not much point in bashing my feeble brains around serious issues in the few short years I may have left to me.

Anyway, I’ve said most of what I want to say in previous posts, so anyone interested in my views can browse the Arena archive. No doubt I’ll be popping up every now and again in Anticant's Arena, but mostly I shall indulge in sheer escapism by frolicking in my Burrow, which I increasingly find a much more congenial place than the real world.