I've just appeared on Radio 4's Today Programme in order to announce National Unawareness Day. In protest at the proliferation of "awareness" days, weeks and months, we at the Idler magazine have decided instead that today we shall turn off, relax and float downstream.
There is simply too much awareness, and if we were really able to be aware of toffee, youths at work, lung cancer, novel writing, stress, veganism, and everything else that the interfering busybodies want us to be aware of today, then we should simply explode with the pressure of it all.
There is also the fact that simply being aware of something makes no practical difference to the problem whatsoever. In fact, it may exacerbate it: surely being aware of National Stress Awareness Day is itself stressful, thereby defeating the object? Better instead to forget, as Nietzsche recommended in the following passage:
To close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time; to remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle of our underworld of utility organs working with and against one another; a little quietness, a little tabula rasa of the consciousness, to make room for new things, above all, for the nobler functions and functionaries, for regulation, foresight, premeditation (for our organism is an oligarchy) that is the purpose of active forgetfulness, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver of pyschic order, repose, and etiquette: so that it will be immediately obvious how there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness.
So be unaware, my friends, lie in bed, read Keats, watch the wheels go round and round!
