Castaway on the Moon

Returning home early from work last night jaded and worn, having forgone a pub crawl and having been turned down by a friend to head out for dessert, I joined Glenn in the living room - me eating my microwaved spaghetti and he watching a random foreign language movie as per his regular Friday-night routine.

The movie that was on was a Korean movie called Castaway on the Moon (You KNOW it's an Asian language film when it's got words like RAINBOW, SUN, METEOR, HEAVEN, ANGEL, GARDEN, STAR dan lain-lain similarly pretty words in its title) Anyway, back to this film. It was about this dude who was so sick of life and all its trappings he wanted to kill himself. As fate would have it, he ended up on an island just hundreds of metres away from civilization. Looking across the body of water, you could literally see the towering buildings and sparkling bright city lights at night. This island however, was deserted and largely abandoned by authorities. Having chickened out of killing himself a few times, he had an epiphany and proceeded to build himself a life of subsistence - eating mushrooms off the land, catching fish from the river (or rather, killing them with detergent), gathering bird poo to obtain black bean seeds, converting an old river boat into his shelter - things like that. Also, he chucked away his credit card, expensive suit and other items that reminded him of "regular life". (Oddly enough, he put his cellphone away for safekeeping. Hmm) The story progressed on to how he eventually meets another "social freak" and gets thrown back into regular, civilized life, much to his dismay.

I am however not interested in giving an account of the plot, but rather to muse on what our society has become. Society tells you how to act, think and behave. Generation after generation of passed-down education teaches you what you should and shouldn't do. This capitalistic world system dictates that if you do not do well and get a good job, you absolutely cannot enjoy life. It's the survival of the fittest. You either find a good job or you find a bad job and wallow in self-pity. Advertising mediums shove bright-coloured pictures in your face telling you that you're not living until you've owned the latest technology. Social media bombards you with the idea that likes and comments are substitutes for conversations, subtly suggesting that relationships are overrated.

No one ever thinks of the possibility of taking a step back into the stone age - living a life of subsistence where long, heady days soaking in the sun are possible, where food consists of gathering the crop off the land or hunting wild animals, where cooking entails gathering firewood from sustainable sources, where we don't pollute the land because we are the land and the land is us. Technological advancement and the lust for money has sadly taken over our lives. Today, you can't enjoy the finer things in life if you don't own a paper degree from a "higher education institution". (OK I have a problem with that last sentence itself, because the "finer things in life" are socially constructed per se) This essentially means you can't do well if your parents aren't rich in the first place, because education, depressingly, has become a trade-able commodity. Also, because money controls the world, you cannot do anything about injustice and violence and pain if you don't own money. It is king, without a doubt. And all we do - this paper chase, this job chase - is all to horde more money, in order to achieve what society tells us is a good life.

Life has become a veritable hamster-wheel - people chasing after things and more things - but who do we have to blame? No one else but our own human race. With what we call the advancement of technology, has also come a generation of soulless individuals with no capacity to feel. I wonder - will we ever learn from our mistakes? Will our children be so engrossed in our technological legacies that their lives become virtual rather than literal - or will they look back on what we have done to ourselves and decide that civilization isn't all that civilized after all, and then change for the better?

Will what Peter Joseph envisioned in Zeitgeist become a reality? Where technology serves us, not the other way around. Or will the Bush clan continue to produce more right-wing politicians who continue to destroy our earth in the name of religion and national security?