The Pseudo Living

While reading The Class by Eric Segal, I came across this --

"We took the world as given; cigarettes were twenty-several cents a pack; and gas as much per gallon. Sex came wrapped in rubber and veiled in supernatural scruples - call them chivalry..."

These verses, written by John Updike, made me wonder about the pseudo living.

I wonder, when Updike wrote these lines. Then to what made him write it and then finally to a similar sentiment I had when I was in college.

The opening phrase - "we took the world as given"
We did. We still do. TAKE THE WORLD AS GIVEN. We live as if there is no tomorrow and we brag as if there was no yesterday. We are - all of us - hedonists.

With the BPO culture in full bloom, we celebrate American Independence Day. We have a whole new plethora of holidays. We have a brand new rule book of how to party.
We slog our asses (pardon my french), just to earn that milk money.

We believe in everything that is taught to us. We doubt everything we see. We look for relationships in the virtual world but we forget to work towards them in reality. We are promiscuous in thoughts, but monogamous in action.

We say we live for someone else, I ask, are we living or existing? The fine-line difference between living and existing has been crossed. Or has it not? Are we, still, the fence-sitters?

We look for avenues to run and when we find them , we drag our feet on the road to perdition.

We measured word by word. We looked for meanings in action.

Maybe this is why Updike has said --
"Psychology was in the mind; abstract things grabbed us where we lived; the only thing worth living was the private life; and - last, worst scandal in this charaterization - we did not know we were a generation."