Carbon Copies

In understanding the underlying causes for my belief in a concept called “freedom,” I have re-read the books of my youth that adults had taught me would help me know the definition of freedom in literary terms, including “Brave New World,” “1984,” and “Don Quixote.” While reading these books, my thought patterns resembled many of those who had read the books before me. So, instead of individuality, I experienced sameness. No one forced me to read these books at this time although assuredly many people read the books when I did this past week. So I simultaneously held thoughts at the same time as other people. Yet, I felt I reached a personal, singular understanding of the world around me, about the consequence of mass media writing history on the fly (giving out labels to groups of people, both the written about and the written for), about the effects of those labels on my thinking, and about the amount of time I have to spend to separate fact from entertainment after being exposed to “news.” Reinventing the wheel in my mind like many others while at the same time mentally seeing myself in a snowstorm but not caring that every one of us snowflakes is different than other snowflakes cause our effect is generally the same. In other words, what I think of as freedom. Free to feel unique when at any moment I am not. Accepting the unreality of reality. Knowing that when I speak of my freedom to casually trade on the stock market, some people somewhere are reluctantly working 12- to 15-hour days, giving up personal dreams of their own while they build their company’s value, which helps make the stock price go up for free carbon copies like me.