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Holiday Robots

It's almost Halloween.  I don't care about holidays.  Though predictability comforts me, I get nothing from ritual.  The list of things that I want to do is very small, likewise the lists of ways I want to do those things.  Holiday celebrations generally involve socializing, which is something I don't want to do.  And they involve what seems to me to be feigned seriousness.  

People decorate for many holidays.  The decorations are unimportant to me but they're predictable and I like that well enough.  But then people go from demonstrably ignoring whatever thing a particular holiday is supposed to be about to apparently pretending to care about that thing.  Sometimes the pretense is very transparent.  This is also predictable but I don't like it because it's disorienting.  It makes people seem mercurial.  Capricious in what they value.  I don't understand the change - or the pretense of change.  And I don't understand empty service to tradition.  Mindlessness seems dangerous.  Unpredictability can arise from it.  If care can be feigned, how do I know when care is genuine?  If it's not important to explain importance, then how do I know whether anyone really considers anything important or not?  Values might be based on nothing.  People could be vacant, their thoughts and actions guided by fashion.  

I have encountered people who behaved like robots.  They acted as commanded by an arbitrary authority and were otherwise just husks.  Robotic people make me nervous.  I can't predict them directly.  I have to predict whatever programs them.  And that is too complicated for me.  Holidays reveal in many a robotic nature that I find unsettling.  Robots might be predictable, but they might not remain that way and they might contain nothing of their own to understand.  I already have a hard enough time understanding people, and what little understanding I have achieved is, I think, based on a supposition that people are humans and not objects: machines controlled by their envoronments.  But it seems like sometimes that it isn't true and I don't know when it might not be true.  And I don't know what it means if sometimes people are thoughtless and oblivious.

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