TED

Been watching some of those TED things on youTube, where someone gives a fifteen-minute lecture on something.
       I've liked these in the past, but maybe it was coincidence, or my cynicism gene is going into overdrive, but the four I watched last night seemed from the lunatic fringe. The best one was some guy on the topic of Why you won't have a great career. His message was a bit conventional, "follow your passion" stuff, but his saving grace was that he was a good speaker and funny. (I have a problem with "follow your passion" - this is a very comforting mantra for middle-class, university educated persons, but the reality of life is that someone still has to do the shit work - cleaning toilets, working in Macca's . I would think that very few people have a real passion for cleaning up other people's shit, but someone has to do it). Anyway, he was tolerable.
       The next speaker was a woman whose passion was the pursuit of the Female orgasm as a spiritual path. You can meditate, do yoga, or have lots or orgasms, to fill the "hunger of the western woman for connectedness". She was an engaging speaker, but I remain unconvinced. She was so sure that she had found some new truth, when what she was describing was something that Hindu tantra practitioners have known for three thousand years.
      The third speaker was so irritating I had to turn her off. Obnoxiously perky, attractive thirty-something physician. "I had everything, the beach house, the condo in the ski resort, but I still wasn't happy. Something was missing in my life.....blah, blah, blah". After a series of challenging personal events (none of which were all that unusual, just life events like bereavement and ill health) which she interpreted as some kind of sign from the universe, she turned to practising holistic medicine, but I turned her off before she could really annoy me. 
      And there was a fourth speaker, a man, who decided that the life he and his wife and child were living was "inauthentic", so they sold all their possessions (sold, you notice, not give away) and moved to a rural backwater to pursue a more "authentic" life. If he wanted "authenticity" he could have gone to live in a gutter in Bombay, but no, they relocated to some chintzy place in Maine or Connecticut. I turned him off too.
     The underlying message of all these people was "I want it all" - a great career, fabulous orgasms, total happiness, a "real" life. It's all utter self-indulgence. Why do people with so much material wealth think they are entitled to unending happiness too? Whatever happened to altruism, thinking of how to improve the general lot of humankind? Such poverty of spirit, such woolly thinking. The most materially blessed, best educated, healthiest people in the history of the planet, and the best they can come up with is "I want to have better orgasms"? It's disappointing, it's embarrassing, it's verging on pathological.
     I don't understand.