Does it Matter by Alan Watts
I can honestly say I read it and then changed the way I live my life. If very short, everyone should read it.

*Edit* Weekend sucked. Wife went in to early labour for the second time this month and I spent my weekend in a plastic chair like they had in school. Then it all stopped and we went home, 4 hours sleep and back to work. Shit.
( Peej, Mon 31 Jan 2011, 9:23, 1 reply, 15 years ago)

I've not heard of it
what's it about/its central themes?
( Citizen Cavy Admires your passion for conformity, Mon 31 Jan 2011, 9:25, Reply)

From the Amazon Product Description
This is a series of essays representing philosopher Alan Watts's most recent thinking on the astonishing problems of man's relations to his material environment. The basic theme is that civilized man confuses symbol with reality, his ways of describing and measuring the world with the world itself, and thus puts himself into the absurd situation of preferring money to wealth and eating the menu instead of the dinner.
Thus, with his attention locked upon numbers and concepts, man is increasingly unconscious of nature and of his total dependence upon air, water, plants, animals, insects, and bacteria. He has been hallucinated into the notion that the so-called "external" world is a cluster of "objects" separate from himself, that he "encounters" it, that he comes into it instead of out of it. Consequently, our species is fouling its own nest and is in imminent danger of self-obliteration.

Here, a philosopher whose works have been mainly concerned with mysticism and Oriental philosophy gets down to the "nitty-gritty" problems of economics, technology, clothing, cooking, and housing.

It was written in 1970 but is still relevant today.
( Peej, Mon 31 Jan 2011, 9:28, Reply)

sounds Baudrillardian
(I don't even know if that's a word). Might have to check to see if the library has a copy
( Citizen Cavy Admires your passion for conformity, Mon 31 Jan 2011, 9:31, Reply)

Simulacra and Simulation, yes

( Labia Majora You keep on talking but it makes no sense at all, Mon 31 Jan 2011, 9:38, Reply)

All boils down to womb envy innit.

( girlinthehole, Mon 31 Jan 2011, 9:33, Reply)

I always imagine that as soon as Big Brother started
he just sat in his chair looking smug, going "told you so..."

edit: shit, replied to the wrong thing. I'm ill, OK!
( Citizen Cavy Admires your passion for conformity, Mon 31 Jan 2011, 9:40, Reply)

Yes dear.

( Monty Boyce, My cheese game is strong, Mon 31 Jan 2011, 9:40, Reply)