“Is it a crime to be different from others?”  Not really, but it may be less of a super saintly virtue than I sometimes like to think.

Gallup called and wondered whether I was going to complete the big book of surveys they had sent me. I had wondered that too, but decided at that time not to. It was unnecessary big, but what made me stop was the assumptions.

If someone was to ask you: “Have you stopped slashing your neighbor’s tires? Yes or no?” – you would not want to answer such a question.  The questions in this book are not so morally repugnant, but they are equally nonsensical. There are pages (this is literally a book) with questions regarding TV programs, which I have for the most part not heard of. I don’t have a TV, never had. That really cuts down on the relevance of these questions, but there is no “I don’t watch TV” box to tick, not for each question and certainly not to skip the whole section.

And then we come to automobile and the same thing repeats. There is a wealth of questions related in this way and that way to the car. There is no “I don’t care” box. Would it cost that much to design a thick book of surveys in such a way that one could skip irrelevant things?

Then there are vacations. My vacation, as regular readers may know, is to take November off and write 50 000 words of fiction, the National Novel Writing Month project. Needless to say, none of the questions apply to that. I would think vacations may not even be a human right, but they sure are not a human obligation!

To know truth; to love beauty; to will virtue; these are human obligations. But nobody seems interested in surveying these things.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I have my worldly interests too. Entirely too much of that really.  But even then these are too obscure to interest Gallup.  Yes, I play online games on the PC. That’s 1 ticky box. As if the kind of person who plays Age of Conan has much in common with the person who plays the ancient board game of Go at the International Go Server.

I was thinking that it would be a good thing to get the message across, that not everyone is the imaginary “common people”. But there is no way to get the message across. It is not something Gallup’s customers want to know. So I am telling it here instead.

Of course, my voluntary simplicity may come across as slightly less impressive if you had actually seen me writing this surrounded by 3 active computers,  plus a couple more computers and backup disks in reserve…