A better world?

Yesterday I was taking a walk and thinking about how I wanted to live in a different world this year - meaning I don't want to live in the publishing world so much this year, and I don't want to live in the cyberworld. I'm enjoying my blogging, but I find that most of the time I spent on the computer is NOT productive time. And when I get on the computer with the ambition to do something productive, I end up wasting time. Then I'm too tired to do something productive so I log off having accomplished nothing.

You would think my goal would be to put my computer time to better use, but alas, my goal is really to have less computer time all together.

Don't know how that's going to work out, but I'd like 2015 to be the Year of Good Health, not the year of blankly staring at the computer wishing I could get back on the writing train and start raking in the bucks that other people are raking in.

I spent this afternoon noodling around in my gardens. Added glass mushrooms to the terrariums to combat the melting the and mold that happen with the clay and resin ones.

I then fixed up my now non-living beach terrarium, inspired by the terrarium book I got for Christmas.

The pretty little starfish I had in there disintegrated, so I put a shell over the remains and tucked some dried moss in to look like something is growing.

Then I created another bottle garden - this one using the quilled plants that I made years ago. They used to be in the faux fairy garden I made, but that's getting tossed in favor of other real plants.

Now my real question for the day was this... Which is really the better world to live in? There's a lot of strife and argument between the people who live in the present and the people who want to live in the past. My question is, which makes a better world:

The commercialized present, where holidays are about retail sales, the seasons dictate what we buy and big business strives to keep us artificially happy by constantly providing us with new things to want and to need so that we work hard to have money to spend on things, things, things - and everything is shiny and bright and new and somewhat hollow... or

The 'idealized' past, where religion rules and tells us we must look askance and things that are new and commercial, where we should be working hard not to earn money but to earn our place in 'heaven' and government and church work to keep us artificially unhappy so that we are always striving to be better and more pious so we can attain our reward in the afterlife?

Is it better to be happily rushing off to the mall to pick up the latest tablet and video game and new flavor of shampoo that will give us shiny hair, or is it better to be trudging off to church or synagogue or mosque where we will be reminded that we are sinners who are worth nothing until we atone for something that supposedly happened centuries ago?

Is it better to pretend to be happy in a world with no sustenance, or is it better to be oppressed by a system that only allows us happiness when we're dead?

I know the latter isn't a world I want to live in - and really, neither is the former, but living on the fringe of both is rather frightening. Do you fall into the commercial present and be sucked into the next Black Friday or do you continue to resist the religious past where your soul is sucked out and sold back to you through prayer and atonement?

Maybe this is why I like to live in miniature world of my own creation.