This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
Two more things about the DWD:
It goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
It’s only available to paid subscribers.
The Dispatches Weekly Digest is a labor of love, and I’m really proud of it, and if you want to hear it, I want you to hear it. So, if you can afford it…
And if you can’t, but you still think of yourself as one of my true fans, let me know and we’ll work something out.
Two different kinds of heaven
Back in the good old days, when most children died in infancy, and the average life expectancy was around 30 years of uninterrupted pain and suffering, people understandably envisioned heaven as a place where you would just sit around on clouds and sing and eat grapes and not be dying of dysentery.
People were assured that if they behaved themselves, they would eventually be rewarded with a paradise of comfort. We can imagine why this might be an attractive proposition to the vast majority of pitiable believers who lived in a world where comfort was in woefully scarce supply.
Things are a bit different for us, though, aren’t they? Most of us already live in a paradise of comfort. To the point that our greatest danger is “amusing ourselves to death,” as Neil Postman warned back in (get ready for this) 1985.
So if we already live in the heaven our benighted ancestors could only dream of, what else is there to look forward to?
Well, spend enough time in the paradise we’ve built, and you start to get hungry for something you can’t consume.
You start to get hungry for meaning.
Our advantage, being so comfortable it could kill us, is the opportunity to recognize that any heaven worth living in is not a paradise of comfort, but a paradise of meaning.
Even better, this kind of heaven isn’t one we have to wait for.
We already live in a paradise of meaning.
We just have to wake up to it.
Share this post