If you look at the last remaining bastions of commercial television, then you find that the one thing that keeps on keeping on is the endless amounts of singing competitions, cooking competitions, and other skills based competitions shows. My Kitchen Idol Block Master Voice Chef Rules, with their panel of B-list celebrity judges who are hanging on before they become C-list and D-list irrelevancies, take members of the general public who have demonstrated an above average skill level at a thing and compete for some nominal amount of money and/or the fame and ovation of the people for a fortnight.
As these contestants are members of the general public, they are not necessarily skilled in the arts of wordsmithing or word wrangling and wheel out the same tired and old clichés as though they have dropped an atomic bomb of profundity upon an easily impressed general public who are also not skilled in the arts of wordsmithing or word wrangling. One cliché that makes my brain shift gears without the clutch, is...
"I am on a journey and I have learned so much about myself".
No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.
Mamma Mia, let me go.
Apart from the obvious that I would like people to invent new clichés and turns of phrase because that is more interesting, describing life as a journey is actually problematic.
The problem with describing life as a journey, is that although we experience life as a linear chain of events, describing life as a journey implies that there is an objective final destination that people must get to. The net consequence of not reaching that implied objective final destination is that someone's life has been a failure. Experience thus far leads me to believe that the only final destination that people actually get to, is after they've travelled on the all stations train which eventually stops at Sheol, Abaddon, Gehenna and Hades. Everyone ends up being successful at arriving at the final destination. Is that really what these people want to say?
It could very well be possible that these people have gone through abject awfulness while being on their respective television shows, to the point where only the sweet release of death can salve their internal grief. Maybe they are on a journey and they realise that the only thing left is to meet Grimaldi Reaper and ask him politely to scythe through that final harvest. Death and Hades are like the monster with sharp teeth and a bottomless stomach - feeding time is all the time.
As with any of these kind of discussions, "if you think you can do better, then why don't you?" is a question worth answering. I think I can do better; so here we go.
Life is a symphony.
Think about it. A piece of music is a linear intangible object. It has various highlights and logical rules that need to be followed. Some music sounds pretty and other pieces of music sounds downright nasty and ugly. None of us are capable of playing any more than a few instruments and none of us can really play any other part than the one we happen to be playing at that particular time. You can not perform a symphony unless there are many many parts of the orchestra all playing together. Sometimes we all pause and watch as a virtuoso plays a very particular thing really well but most of the time we are all playing together in concert with everyone else.
A symphony while being a linear intangible object has no proper final destination. Unlike a journey where the objective is to get to the end, the objective of a symphony is the playing of the symphony. It is the means to itself. The point of playing a symphony is playing a symphony.
I also think that it is cruel and unfair to blame someone for playing something simply, either if that's the instrument that they have or that that is the part that they have been assigned. Unlike a competition, or a journey, or a game which is to be won, success shouldn't be measured by whether you scored more points, or arrived at the end faster, because if that was the case then if life was in fact a journey then the winner would be someone who got to the end first. The analogy of life being a journey falls to pieces in those terms because it is a silly analogy.
I think that the symphony of life works best when people play in harmony, in commonwealth, and in concert with other people. It is best to assume that unless people are playing really badly, that they are doing the best that they can, or if they are not doing the best that they can that they are trying to play along. Sometimes they just don't have a very good copy of the music sheet and are just trying to play along. Sometimes they think that they have a definitive copy of the music sheet and think that everyone else should be playing exactly as they.
Someone who is on My Kitchen Idol Block Master Voice Chef Rules is not on a journey. They are on a television competition show. They must have demonstrated an above average skill level at a thing or else they wouldn't be on the competition at all. This kind of comment, is a rather pointless kind of thing; which is purely designed to add to the manufactured drama of the story. I am afraid that I do not believe it either. You haven't come on telly to go on a personal journey of discovery. You've gone on telly to win a thing.
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