A fascinating part of being in a society is the depths of insanity we go for attention. When confronted with a moral character assessment and trying to be honest with oneself, what exactly do you do? The real answer is you argue about it. And the sillier the argument is the better.
Enter the viral shopping cart debate, where someone assessed that you are a savage animal useless to society if you can’t even be troubled to return your shopping cart to an appropriately designated spot.
Scrolling down that article you can find a meme revolving around Dumgeons & Dragons alignments. This highlights the “all in good fun” intent of the debate. Or is it all in good fun? Because when things go viral there are a lot of people that take it way too seriously. Like differing views on famous philosophy texts there’s lots of room for subjectivity in how to deal with shopping cart returns. I’d like to think the original piece chose shopping carts to be the most engaging lunacy that could be thought of just for fun. There is no real “right answer”. I have just had an exercise in my own confirmation biases.
For the record, my first thoughts went to not returning the cart to the store. I’m a diehard return it to the corral kind of guy. Weekly shopping trips have led to significant interactions with the employees whose job it is to gather the carts. And whether they’ve been coached to be polite, they are just genuinely polite, or they have a hidden agenda that they are actually not polite but sizing me up as a potential victim of their scam I do not know. But what if that’s part of their job to put in hours and get paid for it, and everyone returns carts to the store and they get laid off?
Even the meme with nine different choices places one firmly in a defined little box with no room for nuance and context. There’s no spectrum to define an objective assessment of exactly what is right and what is wrong. At best it gives armchair philosophers and theologians an excuse to keep philosophizing and theologically active. And that’s why it’s viral, because people being idiots would rather argue than find out what is right or wrong.
Conspiracy Gematria fits in nicely with the world of confirmation bias. And I propose an enhancement to the thought experiment. Don’t even give the potential scenarios of what the options are to do with the empty cart. Just do the gematria of SHOPPING CART. That’s the way to tell if the other person fits into you world or if they are to be avoided. You can get a good sense of they are truly spiritual, just think you can make predictions of sports games or the stock market, wish harm upon a marginalized group, are amazed by coincidences that aren’t really coincidental just by the reaction to the request to gematrify SHOPPING CART.
And in that case the right answer could be that you prefer not to waste your time with it and wish to Google Shopping Cart Philosophy and see what the hell all the fuss is about.
I’m certain there’s a fair number of shopping cart agnostics out there. That other than a fun little quirky meme can distract them the same way a video of a cat pushing things off the table can make them chuckle simply do not care to invest serious energy into shopping carts. Conspiracy gematria is different. Those of that ilk have a strong desire to push their views on to others. There is a rough starting equation for giving a more objective approach to your social media interactions: GEMATRIA + AGENDA = TROUBLE. Gematria as a broad group is well defined. A coefficient (adjectives) is needed. Is it sports gematria, is it cryptocurrency, is it the Rapture, is it synchronicity, or something else even weirder? The agenda part, that can often be tricky. The easiest one to uncover is money. Getting attention follows in second place. And genuinely trying to convince people it has some real significance in this day an age is almost nonexistent in the circles I travel in. You simply do not see a true believer in religious gematria popping into a the comments of a sports decoding video suggesting that what they are doing is wrong. The AGENDA also needs a coefficient adjective, where truly spiritual thoughts lower that part of the equation to near zero.
And notice that I offered no suggestions on how to approach the actual numbers part of the gematria of SHOPPING CART. That’s another weakness of gematria. People have a pretty good idea of what a shopping cart is. Nobody has a clue on a correct method to do gematria. The rules for doing the gematria are defined by the AGENDA, creating an unsolvable equation. A huge downside for a system that gets attraction because those that suck at math get a taste of success by doing some trivial math.
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