The list of priorities is different for everyone. But the fact is that anyone seeking any of the essential freedoms can find most of them here in sunny Southern California. Given what about 200 million people on this planet put up with
everyday, ours is a pretty sweet spot.
It’s easy to make peace with your lot here. The ocean air, the breezy pace, good weather, vibrant cultures and people of every stripe. If you can read and write, play reasonably well with others and have half a mind you can spend a happy lifetime here. The same attributes might get you, say six weeks in New York.
Among our many freedoms here in Freedomland is the freedom to create your own story. Up until recently it was primarily a story you told others – in meetings, in bars or in dance clubs. But over the last several years many have had the ability not only to tell their story and make their pitch but to write a movie, edit it on their laptop and post it on their website, or write a novel and publish it themselves at Kinkos. Some can even create their own TV station and distribute it online. More people watch RocketZoom, an offbeat newscast produced for about 50 dollars a show and televised from someone’s living room than watch CNN on some nights.
Given that we’ve got all the blue jeans, polo shirts, plastic clogs and ovenware we can handle, that we’ve just about consumed a quarter of the rain forest and much of what was once the wild rivers and wilderness, we now have the freedom to consume all the gossip, artifacts, moving image tidbits, entertainment and rants the internet and the thousands of global satellites can handle.
Over 168 million people worldwide are regularly combing through other people’s attics on ebay. MySpace has 40 million members and Technorati, which keeps track of blog sites, tracks 23 million blogs. Flickr, the photo sharing website, has a million users and is growing by about 30% a month. Over 10 million Craigslist users search nearly 7 million classified postings a month. And YouTube dispatches umpteen million video clips to down loaders everyday.
In the same way that Osho (nee Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) in the 1970s wanted everyone to get their fill of sex so they could get beyond it, this proliferation of media and everyone’s ability to get their fill of being a producer or a mini-superstar may ultimately bring millions of ambitious show business wonders closer to God. But like Osho’s communal sex in Oregon, I suggest it may just be a distraction and instead lead, like Osho’s experiment in over-consumption, to another place for getting stuck.
Most people over thirty and futzing around with iMovie in the hopes of creating a hit are probably on the road to nowhere. Most people, I believe, in a public place with their eyes glued to a laptop, or walking the streets wearing headsets are moving away from a nearby natural wonder.
Life for most people in a city is a social life. That social life may be no more than rubbing elbows in a coffee bar or exchanging a smile with the bagger at Ralphs but there is still that human interchange and real time flesh and blood bustle – increasingly and delightfully so in the streets of L.A. And it is this Brownian motion of countless little human interactions that creates a low simmer of energy that drives us through our day. The more that people walk around with headphones on or plugged into their laptops in a public place the less freedom we have to explore the natural world of people and our basic need for a truly affiliative life, one connected to others, indeed all living things.
Freedom of choice can be distracting. If everyone is putting their stuff out there and everyone else is downloading that stuff, or at least hitting on it, one has to wonder, does anyone have time to relate to what’s left of wildness, the natural human climate of social interactions or to travel the route of real liberation – and go inside?
Just as great art is often a function of the limitations placed on the artist, a true spiritual journey may have nothing to do with options or the time one has to take it, but with the direction one chooses to travel.
The connections that set you free probably can’t be made through a screen or a digital box.
