CHLOE’S STORY - 5

CHLOE’S STORY - 5

I figured since it was impossible to avoid being blasphemous it would be pointless to even try. Instead, I‟d just have to do what basic common sense would dictate and put all of them to the test without exception. To that end I decided the only answers I would accept had to meet three standards:

 They had to be a part of a systematic explanation. Random, stand alone insights into life weren‟t going to do me any good. I didn‟t want pieces of a recipe. I wanted the whole thing and an explanation for why each ingredient is used.

 They had to be logical. There had to be solid reasons behind each belief. I wouldn‟t believe anything that couldn‟t stand up to the most brutal test of logic.

 They had to be empirically valid (when applicable). I refused to accept any beliefs that couldn‟t be scientifically tested or contradicted established scientific theories.

I didn‟t think it‟d take more than a year at most to find the book that fit all my criteria, but to my surprise I ended up spending the next six years studying not only history‟s most hyped works of philosophy but most of the world‟s religious texts including many less reputable new age movements and pop cults. I read enough self help books to become a professional motivational speaker, and towards the end I even expanded the scope of my search to include award winning science-fiction and cosmology books/documentaries. For all the amazing and useless things I learned I never found a systematic, logical, empirically valid explanation of the meaning of life.

By this time Chloe was 12 years old, and more and more I felt like my status in her life was being relegated to a household appliance whose novelty value had worn off and you don‟t even notice when you walk by it anymore. She was spending more time with her friends than with me and her mom, and she was learning more about life from television and magazines than from us.

Obviously, it grieved me for selfish reason to lose my Godlike status in Chloe‟s eyes, but what upset me for her sake was watching how Chloe and her friends ate up the music, fashion, slang, etc. coming out of Los Angeles, New York, etc. It‟s not that I was a grumpy old man who resented the new pop culture they were being absorbed into just because it was different from what I grew up with. On the contrary, I was worried about her because I saw her doing the exact same thing I did as a teen.

When I was a kid I got caught up in my generation‟s cultural movement thinking it meant something and was going to take us somewhere when in reality it was all just a meaningless media driven marketing ploy. We were told if we had the right attitude, bought the right clothes, listened to the right music, and used the right

slang it‟d make us rebels and individuals. Then we‟d be culturally superior to our stuffy parents. So we embraced the movement and let it carry us, but after we graduated the media abandoned us and moved on to helping the next generation define themselves by purchasing clothes, music, and movies that rebelled against the culture they‟d just sold us.