re cycle

It started with recycling. The question of whether to. He was an intelligent man, and wanted truth instead of slogan. He began the construction of large logical models, and hoped to evaluate them. In the process of this construction, he saw many of his other actions were based on slogan, not fact. So he began many parallel models; whether to drive to work, whether to eat beef, whether to have many friends or few, whether to kill. But all of these models were interlaced with assumption and they overlapped each other; or rather, each model was the same in that it attempted to incorporate the world.

As the complexity of these models increased he soon had no choice but to abandon them. Within each model was a particularly perplexing feedback loop; what people assumed he would do helped to determine the effects of what he did. Example: his expected recycling offering was a bit in someone else's model dictating the timing of the next pickup. Dwelling on such feedback, one night he had an epiphany: until the authentic mode of life is found, the pseudo-authentic life is living as one is expected to. In addition, this would make the jobs of those who managed earth all that much easier.

So this man emulated those around him. To disappear into the statistics without affecting the skew he repeated the actions of his neighbor; if his lunch-date ate meat (or agreed with it) he was apt to do the same. Repeating this process in all walks of his life he was removed from the equations of life entirely. In this removal he was free to think about how he (in complete authenticity) would prefer to act.

Then one day his mathematical isolation from the governing equations of the world had an odd consequence. This time he was physically isolated, alone in a park. For years he had surrounded himself with people, a family, a burgeoning business; but suddenly he was without company. Perhaps he had never really been alone before; perhaps for years he had never not been alone. But when faced with a decision among these trees (do I get up and leave now?) he was unable to act. He searched the periphery for a model to emulate, but saw only statues, benches, and paths made of stone. And this state of indecision became a state of unthought. Though it lasted only minutes, to the man it extended indefinitely, or not at all, unmarked in its time-passage by any recognizable events. Then he fell to the grass, and the first unencumbered smile of his life crept across his face, and he understood the only solution-set to the series of equations that others called life. In his rapture the man exhaled his breath, closed his eyes, and then unleashed his atoms from their cellular confines, and he disappeared into a swirl, a haze, a slowly settling cloud of dust.