Hallmark-store poets and dimestore philosophers everywhere decry the "death of innocence". This, purportedly, is that fateful time in your life, sometime in your early adulthood, when you realize that - oops - you sold your soul! Moreover (the bromide goes), you realize that one needs to sell one's soul over and over in order to be an adult. Life requires "compromise", and compromise consists of being a gutless asshole who rationalizes his cowardice by claiming his weakest moments are actually his most virtuous.
Of course, when these rationalizing assholes first sold their soul, they can't have possibly understood their "virtue" so quickly. They must have taken a few years to bask in the glory of their own spinelessness. Let me rephrase that. They took a few years to build up all the lies their mind requires to view their most contemptible act as the opposite of what it is.
Here's a few lines to get you started:
- Life is complicated
- Nothing is black and white
- It's better to be a realist than an idealist
- You can't always get what you want
Those will make a good foundation. But if you've given up a dream in order to get married and suppress that bedtime anxiety (only one of the many, amazing ways you, too, can sell your soul! ), you'll need a hell of a lot more than a foundation. You'll need rationalization built upon rationalization, until your whole consciousness is a bunch of Scotch tape covering a leaky goddamn dam wall. (Or maybe it's a bunch of little blindfolds covering your mind's eye.) But once you've sold out, don't stop there. Do it again, baby. It gets easier the second or one hundred and second time around.
The great thing about the human soul is that it's recyclable. You can sell it then sell it again. If those who claimed that "life requires compromise" weren't also anti-capitalist technophobes, they could really make a killing on eBay.
