One of the biggest changes that has occurred in recent years is in the desire to have fun.

When I was young "fun" was something you had on a weekend, with your family, usually incorporating food, and preceded by dressing up in your best clothes. It was always, always, always, accompanied a mini lecture by your mother on your expected behaviour that mention the neighbours and what they may think. At it’s wildest it incorporated a trip out with friends to the Ice cream vendor on Defence Colony bridge to watch the trains go by, or a trip to the coffee bar at a nearby hotel.

Now "fun" is a much more serious business. There are fun clothes, fun holidays, fun music, fun radio, fun drinks, fun accessories, and loads of activities that are designated fun things to do, for fun people. Now we have whole industries geared to providing "fun".

Watching television the other night I saw a group of adolescents all saying that when they got older, their ambition was to have "fun"! I thought back to when I was that age and it seemed that back then everyone wanted to a nun, a soldier, a mother, an accountant, an engineer or an AIS officer. Nobody thought having fun was a life option. 

    

 

Shocked, I mentioned it to my husband.  "It's your age dear" he said, not even looking up from the ‘fun’ section of the daily paper.  Undeterred, I got to thinking of the purpose of life.  I mean, ‘What are we here for?’ I reached for a book to read the philosophers of yesteryear.          

What a morbid fun deprived lot!  Cyril Connelly was not much help.  He wrote "Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk." What an unhappy (and lost) little chap. Mind you Connelly's getting lost may explain why Samuel Butler thought that "life is one long process of getting tired"! I was beginning to realise how he must have felt.

For long hours I pondered the meaning of existence.  What great purpose is there? None of the explanations of the past seemed relevant to the modern age, but then, they have always sought theological, philosophical answers.  Postmodern society, I thought, demanded more sociological, psychological, less esoteric explanations. I decided that I must seek a socio-economic explanation!  - Whatever that was!

Ensconced in my bedroom, (after looking up socio-economic in the dictionary), I contemplated the possibilities.  I was sure that progress was the key, and that the purpose of life was something that was embodied in actions universal within modern society.  Something that all of us did, and that we did even when there wasn't a rational compelling need or reason.

I considered that we were here simply to procreate but decided against it since increasingly in the modern world the tendency is to have fewer, or no, children.  It couldn't be simply to work, because historically fewer and fewer people work, and most of those that do, work less hard and for shorter hours then the generations that have gone before.

 

It was then that I became inspired. I realized we are not here to have fun, or to work, or have babies, or to contemplate, or to simply eat and drink.  We are here to participate in the fastest growing most universal activity of the present age.

Everywhere in our society we are exhorted to do it. Twenty-four hours a day, five or six times an hour our televisions send out messages for us to do it. Our streets are lined with messages designed to make us do it. Our newspapers and magazines owe their existence to their ability to get us to do it. Our Radios blare out how cool it is  for us to do it. Everywhere we go we find messages trying to persuade us to do it! 

All post-modern human activity is geared to this greater activity. When there is a birth we do it.  At times of marriage we do it. Every day of our lives we do it.  It is incorporated into all of our social life, and done with, or for, all our activities! We do it when we have no need to do it. We do it to make ourselves feel better when we are upset it. We do it as therapy for being in a stressful job or a bad relationship. Women do it more than men but increasingly men do it. Everyone does it ad nauseam. 

Instead of houses for our homeless we build massive buildings for it. Instead of providing building for our sick and poor, we spend billions of crores exhorting people to do it. Instead of providing education for all our children - we do it.  We buy cars, get on buses, use the metro, and travel to massive centres in far off towns and cities built specifically for it. Our children hangout watching others do it, and almost all of them think that it is a really fun thing to do.

The purpose of life as we define it by our actions is both sad and obvious.

WE ARE HERE TO SHOP.