The Big Mistake

around the year 2000, i made one of the biggest mistakes of my live. this itself might not be remarkable, or rather, not interesting to others, if not almost the whole western world, plus or minus a few years, would have made the same mistake.
so what was this problem?
like many young people in the 20th century, i had chosen to pursuit a whole range of lofty ideals in my youth. anarchism, utopia, revolution, a free world, full of justice and wisdom and of adventure. and like many before me, as i grew older, this turned into disillusion and disappointment. the ideals that seemed so close - "we can have a revolution next year!" - suddenly seemed so far away, unreachable. now for most this would be the point where they said goodbye to rebellion and ideals, reject the former ideas and become conversative, or "neutral". to forget about all this.
yet i took a different path, that others went before me too, if not many, though, and that i already had read hinted at by some authors and thinkers.
i took up the question: why was i not be able to reach the ideals and societal goals, that seemed so good?
the answer, for me, was, that they were mere *thoughts*; ideals, concepts. not something of real life, of the everyday life, but philosophies, abstract, far away, "above" the actual world.
so the solution was clear to me: i must have to get rid of all the ideals; the philosophies, the abstract thoughts; of utopia; and strive to achieve the wonderful, the dangerous, the adventurous, in the real world, in real life.
now this still seems like a gargantuan task; so i tried to set my goals so, that i could still "beat the whole world" and go out to adventure, yet that they were still seemingly attainable and - sort of, or rather: for want of a better word - "limited" enough that i could reach them.
now, again, this was a way, probably countless, others had set out to walk on aswell.
i wish i had failed with this task. it would have been much more easier and less painful if i did.
not that i managed to succeed in all of this; in many ways i failed.
but i reached my dreams. or rather, i did not at all. i managed to attain the "dream"-like goals that i had set out for in real life.
and this was the complete error of my doings.
because, now that i had what i wanted, it felt pointless. it felt useless. i felt cheated and disappointed. i didn't mean so much anymore. also it felt so much different to what i had "dreamed" of (even though, basically, it was exactly that). the dreams somehow felt distorted, destroyed by reality. or rather, by being real.

so what has this do with the "rest of the world", that you hinted at at the beginning, you might ask?
because this is what everyone else seems to do this days. it is now the beginning of 2014, and i am judging from how everyone behaved in the last years. people no longer follow lofty ideals, concepts, utopias, dreams. they want material things, and they want them now. cars, money, luxury, power, success. they too make the error to think something in the "everyday" world could make them happy and fulfilled. they too are no longer interested in the abstract ideals of the visionaries - quite literally, if you play them a speech from a 60s movement thinker, or another idealist political leader, they would probably give you a painful expression on the face. they want something solid and concrete, and they want it now.

so what was the error i actually made, and the world does make. where did i go wrong, where do we go wrong?

the ideals, the utopias, the wonderful world was correct. the error was to turn these *ideas* into something tangible, of everyday world. this destroyed the ideas and the dream. these are thoughts, after all. and thoughts should stay thoughts.
ideals and beauty, visions of adventures, stay wonderful and keeps you warm - if you keep them as thoughts, and value them as thoughts and worship them as thoughts. if you try to turn them inside out by making them "conrete", "common" - to realise them, you will destry them.
a realised ideal is no longer an ideal. it is reality. and reality, as we know, is boring.

society needs to stop aspiring cars, money, power, success, luxury above everything else.
society as a whole needs to go back to valuing dreams, fantasy, ideas - utopias. to realise how important these things are, and how important it is to support them. to realise how wonderful these things are.