Blog of a crazy man

Why are people today addicted to tension? I was watching TV the other day and saw a commercial for the drug Lunesta. The commercial talked about people who have trouble sleeping because their minds “replay the events of the day” when they try to sleep. The commercial recommended that those people take Lunesta to be able to sleep. If your having trouble sleeping because you’re too worried about what you have to do, then your problem is something that can’t be cured by drugs. Your problem is an addiction to tension.

Tension addicts think that they have to be constantly doing something. Constantly working and trying to make more money or advance themselves in life. If they ever find themselves in a moment where they have nothing to do, they have a panic attack. Their minds have become so obsessed with the idea that they have to be always working that they don’t ever stop to relax and enjoy life.

Worse still, tension addicts never stop to ask themselves why they need to be always working. Is it because it makes them happy? Not quite. Most tension addicts are miserable. They work 8-10 hours a day at their jobs and then come home and continue to work on job related material, or housework, or paying bills, or cooking, or planning a social outing, or…you get the idea. Tension addicts don’t realize that everything they are doing is fruitless. It may make them richer, but it doesn’t make them any happier. It doesn’t make their friends or family any happier. It might make some nameless corporate higher-up happier, but it’s not likely to.

Why do tension addicts waste their time on fruitless endeavors? Because they have been trained since the time they were little kids in kindergarten that they had to work their butts off to get ahead in life. That somehow productivity was the ultimate goal in life. And when they weren’t happy, or lost sleep because their subconscious minds were screaming out in agony at the horrible world that they had created for themselves, they were told to take this or that drug to make it all better. Take a Prosac. Take a Lunesta. It’s just a chemical imbalance in your brain.

People, it is not a chemical imbalance. You’re having trouble sleeping, and you’re depressed because this isn’t the way life was meant to be. We were not meant to struggle through some corporate hierarchy to succeed in life. We were not meant to have to spend all of our lives working for some meaningless standard of success set by faceless higher-ups. Your subconscious mind knows this. When you are depressed, or sleepless, that’s your mind warning you that something is wrong with the way you are living.

If you can’t sleep, or if you’re feeling depressed, change your lifestyle. The Bible talks about spending hours in prayer and meditation. Whether you believe in the Bible or not, that’s good advice. Spend a few hours each day just forcing yourself to do nothing but think and meditate. Don’t watch TV, listen to the radio, call friends, go to the movies, or do any thing else that would distract your mind. Just sit in a quite peaceful room and think, pray, meditate. Force your body to abandon the stress and tension of life. Most importantly carry the mentality with you that success in life isn’t about money, or things, or pleasing your boss. Success in life is about happiness. When you are truly happy, then you are successful.

As many of you know Ubuntu 6.06 was released yesterday. I downloaded it as soon as I woke up in the morning. I got it installed and running after I got back from school. That made me start thinking. It’s been almost two months since I made the switch to using Linux full time. I think it’s time for an update.

The first thing I have to say about switching from Windows to Ubuntu is this: you won’t miss Windows nearly as much as you think you will. I had the benefit of sharing the computer with two other people who are both not very knowledgeable about computers. I would like to think that I know enough about computers to not have trouble using any operating system, but the other two people who use this computer aren’t quite as knowledgeable. It was interesting to see them make the switch.

My brother took one look at it, asked me what it was, and then had me explain how to do the basics and change the appearance. He’s mostly figured everything else out on his own. I didn’t expect him to have any trouble switching over.

My mom, on the other hand, is not very good with computers. I knew she would have trouble changing. But much to my surprise, she has adjusted quite nicely. She needed some help initially to get the hang of using it, but once she got the basics down, she had no more trouble using Ubuntu than she had using Windows, which isn’t to say that she didn’t have trouble, just not any more trouble.

Personally, I’ve had no trouble adjusting to Linux. I’ve played with various distributions in the past, and I found Ubuntu to be the easiest and cleanest version out there. The one peeve I have about Ubuntu is the lack of built in support for music and video formats like MP3, WMV, etc. Of course, this is only a legal issue instead of a technical one. You can get them working with a visit to the wiki and a little work, but it is still very annoying.

In short, switching to Ubuntu is very easy. If you are interested in using Linux or just sick of Windows, I would definitely recommend using Ubuntu.

Here’s a shot of my desktop, just so you know what it looks like.