The Curious Mind of J. P. Woodecock #2

J.P. Woodcock here. I have been pondering man’s obsession with matters of life and death.

I, as a classic materialist, understand our need to acquire survival skills that include the art of staying alive. I mean, god man, we have to pay attention each day to economics, food gathering and maintaining a dry place to sleep at night. Why the state of our society depends on people just like me, J.P. Woodcock, getting up each morning and planning to spend the entire day slogging through daily living skills.

Large cities, highways and coffee shops would come to a standstill if our culture decided to reward staring into space all day instead of activities of commerce and money changing hands.

Affirmitively, I, J.P. Woodcock am in complete favor of fixating on matters of life. We are also doubly rewarded with the pleasures life skills bring us.

The level of human comfort is raised to pleasant standards when life skills are exercised properly. Food tastes better when you have higher grade ingredients for sauces and virgin oil for cooking. Cheese tastes better when a higher quality of fat is used in making your French goat cheese even if you aren’t in France.

Soups from Tuscany taste infinitely better than Gruel.

Then there is the matter of staying dry and warm. If you have quality life skills you will enjoy your stay inside much better in a brick home rather than a log cabin with river mud used for the mortar.

However none of this explains or justifies the Centuries we, us human beings in part or in general, have spent on matters of the dead. Now ancient Pharaohs and for that matter ancient Egyptians as a whole, at least those who could read, were more interested in death and the voyage to the dead than contemplating matters of the living. But, they had extra cash and time on their hands there in the dessert and who could blame them. In fact their obsession with death created a whole industry for the living to prepare for the dead.

In fact, now that I think of it, I may change my mind entirely about being against dwelling on matters of the dead. Whole industries have evolved over the years for worrying and caring for the dead even though they do not need industries to keep them cared for because they are in fact dead. The dead do not need to be embalmed but the living need to embalm the dead as it is good for the living to embalm the dead because embalming pays the bills for the living who are doing the embalming. And of course, it makes the living, who pay for the embalming, feel less guilty about the dead because they have paid for the embalming of the dead and, also, they are relieved they are not having to arrange for embalming themselves.

What a curious thought. All of this time I have been confused why we spend so much time and effort on the dead and now I know it’s for the benefit of the living.

In times of economic crisis instead of the government trying to create jobs for the living it would be infinitely more effective to raise our standard of living by asking for volunteers to pass away. Think of it, legions of people who would pass on to the next world, or the next stop or whatever you believe in could, in the short term, volunteer to move forward with those plans and benefit the living in the long term by taking that short term leap to the next world to benefit the needs and current financial benefit of the living. By increasing the level of the dieing the living would prosper.

The stock market would rise because of this flury of consumer spending on the dead by the living. Jobs would be created for taking care of the needs of the dead even though the dead don’t have needs. The living would spend lavishly on the dead because then they would be relieved they hadn’t died and they wouldn’t feel bad for the dead because they had gotten the dead everything they would need for their journey to a place where they probably don’t have any needs and a lot more shovels would be sold.

I will have to discuss this with my famous economist cohorts and fellow mini-economists to see if I am onto something. Hopefully they are still alive so they can help me formulate these economic theories on how to keep the living prosperous taking care of the needs of the dead who really don’t seem to have needs.

Is this some sort of scheme we, as fellow human beings, have created or is this sound commercial business practice.

For now J.P. Woodcock out.