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Why did we abandon our best ideas on the roadside of our lives?

Last week I drove from Colorado through Kansas to Missouri, around 700 in each direction. From time to time, I could see trucks or houses abandoned close to the highway.

In some cases, the trucks or the houses were so deteriorated that it was clear they have been abandoned for a long time and they were now totally useless. In other cases, the equipment or the facilities have been abandoned just for a short time.

Every time I see this happening, I ask myself when was the last day that, for example, a driver parked his truck never to use it again and I would like to know who the driver was with the responsibility of abandoning the truck at that particular location. Was there a mechanical problem? Perhaps another reason?

Also, did the owners of the house moved away? Were they unable to pay the mortgage? Did they die? Or did they simply build a better home and decided to abandon the old one?

Obviously, unless I ever have the time and the resources to conduct a lengthy research, I will never have answers to those questions. However, that doesn’t make the questions are less interesting to me.

Did the driver know that would be the last day he would drive his truck? Did the owner of the house know he would never again live there? Perhaps they thought it was just another day and the next day they will go home or drive their truck again, but that day never came.

The more I think about this questions the more I understand they are in fact a metaphor for what is happening every day not with trucks and houses abandoned near a highway, but with the ideas, beliefs, traditions, and thoughts we, for unknown reasons, abandon next to the road of our lives.

When I see a truck totally abandoned next to the highway, I would like to find its owner to ask him when the last time was he used it and why he abandon it. When I see the behavior of some people, I would like to ask them when the last time was they used their brain and why they abandon it.

In part, the reason is what German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger calls the “avidity for novelty” that, together with the routinization of novelty and the pre-programmed obsolescence, lead us to believe that anything new is better and that anything old is not only old but also useless and it should be abandoned.

That’s why we are always “starting all over again,” as Wile E. Coyote does in his futile attempts to trap the Road Runner. Instead of learning from his mistakes, the coyote begins again with “new” ideas. For that reason, he never learns and he never achieves his goals.

Perhaps we had left too many good ideas on the roadside of our own lives. And we are still using other things that should be abandoned and replaced, such as outdated immigration laws.

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