I grew up in a "new age" environment, attending a Rudolph Steiner school in Cape Byron from 1989 until 1994, and not even a measles outbreak in the early 90s which more than halved our class size for a week was enough to shake the anti-vaccination attitude of my parents, peers and most importantly myself.
As a child I read Richard Bach and James Redfield, and graduated naturally to Neale Donald Walsch, which distilled in my adolescent self the sort of arrogance that lead to my parents praising me as wise and my early high-school teachers not knowing how to mark my book reports.
In year 8 I wrote a fairly thoroughly (but not well) researched anti-vaccination diatribe for my persuasive writing piece. I felt that I researched both anti-vaccination and pro-vaccination arguments. I no longer have a copy of the essay I wrote - I'm glad of that. I was thrilled that my teacher didn't quite know how to react. You might think that my overwhelming smugness would have prevented me from having any friends at all but apart from that essay and a few book reports on books I wasn't old enough to understand or appreciate (but I did anyway; both understand and appreciate) I didn't really let it out that much, and I'm sure that with a different upbringing my utter lack of confidence, anxiety and introversion would have made me equally as friendless.
We were something close to enlightened, I thought. Secure in our superiority at least. Lamenting the inability of the common people to really understand.
My youth warped messages that older people found inspiring into something all consuming. I was burned from the inside out. I was in awe of my own magnificence, and the magnificence of the universe. And inside my awe was the sort of soul crushing depression which lead to notebooks full of bad poetry lamenting the certainty of my own miserable existence (as contrasted with the uncertainty of absolutely anything else).
I was anti-vaccination until I found anti-anti-vaccination websites online. Until that time I hadn't even known that there was an anti-anti-vaccination movement and it wasn't the arguments against anti-vaccination that persuaded me so much as the very existence of them. I had thought that my philosophies of life were incompatible with almost everyone I knew because I was wiser or more enlightened.
There was a sort of epiphany to realise that other people might have discarded ideas like mine not because they weren't ready for them, but because maybe they were fucking bullshit.
In 1999 I saw The Matrix in the cinema. I liked the part where they ran out of plot and started shooting stuff but while my friends declared the movie "so deep"... I didn't really care about it. At all.
I was exposed early to pulp-pseudo-philosophy and, once I recovered, I'd become immune.
Which is all a very long way of explaining why I think I miss out (but don't miss) on something other people experience watching (or reading - I haven't read the book yet) Life of Pi. It was incredibly pretty - perhaps the most visually spectacular film I've ever seen. It was thoroughly enjoyable and brought me to tears more than once. But it didn't move me. I got it, I'm sure I'm not missing anything that people who find the story deep and spiritually moving see; nevertheless, I remain unmoved.
(It's also a long way of explaining that I'm apparently still pretty smug.)
