The Irony? Right here:
He's way ahead of me. I mean wayyyy ahead. Already has the wife and dogs.
Not much privacy though. If he goes off air for more than 5 minutes, 200 people start to wonder if he's answering a call of nature. Voyeurism if ever there was a thing. He can't even pick his nose without people making a point of it.
Not like the spire on O'Connell Street. I never got the point of that. A giant needle to get rid of a drug problem? Nahhhh....
Still, it's fairly natural to be a little envious of people with nicer stuff. Kinda gets religion involved.
Either way though, it could be a lot worse. If you have your life and your freedom, then count yourself lucky. The clothes on your back and the chair beneath your arse - along with everything else you have - are all gravy.
How then to supress the common greed? Satiate with ignorance perhaps? Defoe suggested the middle station, as he put it. The notorious B.I.G. advised 'mo money mo problems' (from the album life after death). So we are thus tasked to find a state where our material wealth offers us a state of simple comfort and nothing more. The man with the second house is left to fret and worry for its safety. To lessen this worry, there is insurance. Insurance costs money. Money costs time, unless you're lucky.
In the end then, you arrive where you started. Life is more than a defiant stand against senessence. Folks smarter than me have spent more time trying to pin it down for themselves. Still, I don't think a concrete definition of what life is and means will help, even if it is general enough to apply to the majority.
There will always be farmers. There will always be tools the farmers need, though they need not rely on others for this. You can tell where this is going. Farmers need tools, which needs metal, which needs metalworkers, who need miners, who mine ore, which is smelted by smelters, and they all need food. We also need scribes to keep track of things like how much food the farmer has and how much ore the miner has mined for the smelter who in turn will make metals for the metalworker. There will always be dishonesty and wickedness, so there will also always be laws and armies to defend the just. The just are fearful. The armies and laws do their best to minimise the fear by creating ever more complex weapons and legislation.
In only 8 lines, the complexity of the world has begun to spiral outside the comprehension of the ordinary man. It would be simpler if there were only miners and farmers, but the miners would eventually discover gold.
I'm sure the first original thought is written down somewhere. I just haven't read it yet.
