Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Q: How much money do you need to start a photography business?

A: These days, not that much. You don't have to pay for film or processing or prints. If you have the right phone, you don't even need to pay for a camera. If you have the right clients, you don't even need lights or talent. Just so we're on the same page, the right clients are recent high school graduates rushing into marriage. Get enough of them and you can start shopping at the nice mall.

All you need to start a photography business is the will to start and a couple of dollars in your pocket. Starting a philosophy business, now that's a different story.

The philosophy business has been in a bit of a downturn for about the last 80, 90 years with no end in sight. The big philosophy firms aren't hiring like they used to, most of the top philosophers have gone independent, and every year there's a whole crop of new philosophers coming out of America's liberal arts schools all ready to capture the essence of life in one simple metaphor.

Used to be a man could toss on his toga, bang out a few aphorisms or paradoxes, pocket some money and go hot the gruel house. I don't have to tell you how much it has changed. The modern public lacks a thirst for knowledge. They no longer question the great existential dilemmas of our time. What is the purpose of life? How does a man live his life? Do we make choices or are they thrust upon us by great unseen forces that live deep in the bowels of the internal combustion engine? Are there demons in my cereal?

People today don't care about these questions. Don't want the answers. You could stand in their living room all day shouting the answers to the great mysteries of life and writing theorems on the walls and, where you would once get praise and cherished looks of enlightenment and patronage and sexual favors,  now all you get is laughed at and asked to leave and shouted at and told to leave and screamed at and begged to leave and surrounded and pepper sprayed and brought to the station and questioned and told to take off your toga and admitted to the mental hospital and kept for evaluation and given pills and told to take them and told to obey and asked to remain calm and to keep back and to listen because this is your last warning and pepper sprayed again. And at the end of it all they hand you a bill.  A bill. They used to hand you offerings, burnt meat and the hearts of enemies. Now try getting the heart of an enemy after a good rhetoric. Even ask for one and they'll look at you like you're a crazy person.

It's like the whole world has gone mad.

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Ryan Callahan has written, produced, or directed shows for ABC, A&E, SHowtime, The CW, TVLand, Animal Planet and other networks even lower on your dial. When not making TV, or writing fake answers, he reads books, buys books, or buys books to read later. Follow WikiFakeAnswers on Twitter and Facebook