on chaos (ruminative dissonance)

i wish i had more time to just think while at work.

have i mentioned that i really love the little tv thing we have in our elevators here at 90 park ave? they aren't actually tvs but more just a small screen that scrolls news items which are sometimes general and sometimes quirky. it's a perfect form or low-key "entertainment" for the 30 second ride to/from the 18th floor, and the brief bits of info quite often get me to thinking.
such as the one i noticed yesterday remarking that oil hit an all-time inflation-adjusted price of $103.95 per barrel. this alone as business news is of zero interest to me (perhaps it would disgust me an vague anti-capitalist way but nothing more), but the info that accompanied it--that the previous high was $38 in 1980--i found to cause great thoughtfulness.
$38 in 1980 equals $103.95 today, in 2008. that's 28 years. that's a 274% increase, or you could say a 274% decrease in the value of our dollar. again, on their own, these numbers might not be overly exciting, but put them in context and they become more and more illustrative.
I'm still fairly young and so should be immune to hang-wringing relating to how the world is going to hell and how nothing is worth a damn anymore, but i was alive in 1980. this isn't like those dumb-ass little books you can buy at bob evans or cracker barrel that are full of shit about what a gallon of milk cost in 1906, and how there were still only 46 states or whatever back in the golden days.
i was alive in 1980 for chrissakes. $38 then is the same as $104 now. or, take the somewhat arbitrary symbols away and put it a different way: 38 then is the same as 104 now.
i'll roundly admit i don't know enough about economics to get into anything remotely resembling an intelligent discussion thereof (about all i do know on this matter is that inflation of this magnitude is bad news for the u.s.), so i'll stick to the existential bits.
so what does it mean when something presumably stagnant (a number) and empirical (a value) proves dynamic over time? i should say how does this affect us?
for me--someone who fancies himself above (or below, depending on your opinion of me) the fray most of the time--i think it certainly produces a further kind of chaotic dissociation from what i've been exposed to throughout my life. how can i take seriously emphatic claims, even those seemingly backed by scientific processes, when the world proves itself to be hardly consistent?
i'd call myself a kind of skeptic, so it's in my nature to doubt, but this doesn't mean that i'm necessarily comfortable with the idea that all is anarchic, that nothing simply is what it is. on the contrary, i rather strongly need to have certain parts of my world to simply exist as themselves, to be something that i understand or at least something that i think i could understand: i need to have a general framework of sturdiness within which i may question, ponder, muse, deliberate and epiphanize.
so you can see that when oil does not equal oil and 38 is the same as 104, it can have a sky-is-falling type of effect on me. no, "effect on me" is not the right descriptor. what i'm forced to do in response to these anomalies could be called ruminative dissonance.
something ain't right and i'm not comfortable with what it is or isn't.