Chains

If the Ghost of Christmas Past rattled his chains the way I can't help but get my groove on when this song comes on I would sign him up as percussion in my band in a heart beat.  Who needs a tambourine or maracas with that gloomy Gus keeping time rattling his bones?  Seriously though, my mind has been on the limitations and restrictions we place on ourselves, for positive and negative reasons.  Self-restraint is a useful skill that seems under-applied and there's a lot of rhetoric and BS dedicated to justifying the lack of good judgement and self-control being exercised (and promoted).  It's profitable and to say that people are brainwashed isn't an exaggeration, but when you couple mental conditioning with ambivalence and apathy you get a perpetual status quo that occasionally makes adjustments for sake or remaining ubiquitous.  Maybe that's why the passage of time sometimes seems non-existent?  The output of product continues but for certain strata of society it has no impact on their impact on their lives.  When industrialization reaches as far as it can possibly be sustained and every nation on earth advances technologically to the point where the only thing keeping them from a modernized existence is international trade relations what will be the status quo?  What will the standard of living for the majority of the world look like?  What will the typical attitude on life be?  Will people be nostalgic for the varied social strata of the past, with cultures defined by the poverty/ or isolation they emerged from?  What ideas will be bound to?  What will anchor our thinking?  What will we be chained to?  At some point will the focus return to things other than the material world, it seems that's the only thing a person can truly be chained to?