Spending Emotion

You can't be engaged in American Culture without being infected by it to some extent.

I've used AOL for years, since some time around 1995 or 1996, I think. Lately, they have a little news banner that is shown both before you sign in and after you sign in but before you check your mail. The content is such that the usual reaction is to click on it. If you do, you wish you hadn't and you find that the content is usually inane, boring, and empty of any importance or fulfilling information. It's like reading the National Enquirer or the World Weekly News. This suspicion was really brought home one day when I had checked my email and then went to the store. While standing in line at the store, I looked at the trash mags and tabloids. The headlines were the same. AOL = Trash Journalism.

Yet we all wade through this crap every day, and even if you do not seek it out, you will be exposed. You probably do know that Britney Spears and Kevin Federline are divorced and Britney is in melt down. You probably know that Lindsay Lohan is in rehab, that Paris Hilton went to jail, and that TomKat broke up.

Why? Not only why do you know, why did they spend so much time and effort making sure you know, but why do you care?

I was talking to a friend about the latest celebrity crisis and in exasperation told him that I wasn't willing to spend any emotion on the subject. I had never thought about spending emotion like money before, but we do. You can only choose to care about so many things, there is a limit.

My fear is that we spend so much time worrying about what's not really important that we don't spend enough time caring about what's important or who is important to us.

And by worrying about wasted worries, that's what I'm spending my emotions on.