World, Interrupted
What do you spend the bulk of your time doing? How much of your time is spent having 1 on 1 conversations or experiences with someone you love. In other words, having a meaningful, constructive interaction with someone personally important to you, and achieving a positive outcome? I don’t know about you but I’ve been having very little.
Unfortunately, because we have a number of distractions – like television, the radio, movies and music, oh and internet too – when our interactions with people don’t go well we’re comfortable seeking comfort, solace, amusement, distraction, in some sort of media fulfillment. Using phones, or computers…but it’s not very fulfilling is it.
How much, after all, are the heart strings really soothed by someone ‘poking’ you or ‘liking’ a message you post on Facebook. How much do you achieve when you get a ‘nice’ sms?
So it’s not surprising then, if the bulk of our experience of work is firsthand – real, and the scraps go to personal relationships, that the latter [based on emails, sms and facebooking] isn’t really going to thrive. And we are the poorer for it. It’s also easier to let go of a ‘relationship’ based on emails [no real interaction] when, let’s be honest, it can’t be nourishing either party. But in our relationships we might find out truths about one another
- we’re selfish
- we don’t listen
- we don’t care about anything besides ourselves
- we’re always busy with something else
- we’re not there for each other
We might not one to hear those things, but they’re true, and we could all reap the benefits from paying attention to these things, and saying, “Heck, I’m going to be unselfish, I’m going to listen and try to care about stuff I need to care about…and get busy on the things that matter beyond work. Things like health, and fitness, and the emotional context of those around me. I’m going to be there for someone else, and encourage them to be there for me.”
Instead of saying this, we hope for a few breadcrumbs off facebook, a few nourishing quotes from the latest flick, the odd morsel of voyeurism in a book, or a soapie, or gossiping about someone elses misfortune.
So it is easy for me to imagine, against this background, how hypothetical critical issues may be. If we can’t even care about our own issues, how to start with issues of global tenure? How to even know what’s worth focusing on? Work dominates everything that we do [and if we’re honest, it’s not really the work, it’s the money we get for the work we do]. It stands to reason then that our ADD attention spans will never be fixed, never be tuned, in short we can never pay attention or respond to the issues of our time while we still have jobs to do. And hence our issues broaden in scope and intensity, since despite knowing about them, no one responds to mitigate. We’re either to depressed or habituated to ignoring what irks us, or we part of a conventional wisdom that skips like so many stones over the shallowest pools of existence. Maybe we add ‘God’ to the mix, and that gives credibility to us having ‘depth’ or ‘substance’ or being redeemed. Think so? If God walked into the room right now, he’d say, “How dare you speak on my behalf. First get real about your life, then come to me. Because I happen to live in the real world, you don’t.”
But nothing happens. People don’t change, and Nature insists on it. For some time now we have insisted on a bizarre set of circumstances. We insist on remaining car dependent. We insist on maintaining a lifestyle based on credit [buying a house and a car and other stuff with borrowed money]. Millions did this for a long time, and now that system [known as Capitalism, and the major players in this game, theoretically a ‘free market mechanism’ are known as ‘pigs’ or ‘fat cats’.
Unfortunately the worst playerz of the ponzi schemes and swindles managed to break the system [naturally in favour of themselves]. Everyone thinks we can just tighten a few screws and get the machine up and running good as new. Reheheheaaallly? No. That’s what we may want, but there’s a problem. Nature has drawn a line in the sand. When I say Nature I really mean the laws of nature, the laws of the universe. For example, gravity applies equally to you whether you believe in God, blow-up pig balloons, Yoda or the Easter Bunny. Those sort of laws are saying that the ideas people want to perpetuate – like fiat currency, and credit cards, and car loans, and property markets – those laws are now saying: quite jumping up and down. Just because you got off the ground doesn’t mean the law of gravity was suspended in that particular instance. It just means you jumped. Now you’re back on the ground. Try jumping again and pretending gravity doesn’t exist – we’ve got all day.
Ofcourse, people are very smart and think they can worm their way around the laws of nature. Technology see? But Nature says no. Even with technology you can’t make something out of nothing. Energy happens to be quite a tough nut to crack. We’re starting to get it though: that you can’t get energy out of nothing. Or you can, but we are quite far away from understanding or manipulating cold fusion, so the conventional law of the universe applies – you can’t get something out of nothing [like credit cards, property markets, oil pumped out of the ground] forever. Infinite growth is not possible. We – the average person – say, we can, and we will.
The solution to this impasse, in terms of nature, is twofold.
1. kill jobs
2. kill the unemployed
When you’re earning a salary you don’t care about forests in Brazil or swine flu or emissions. You care about getting the best holiday deal for yourself. You care about when your next paycheque comes out. Paycheques of course demand that company profits grow, and company profits depend on people’s demands growing, and growing demand implies suppliers who can supply. Cheaply. To our infinite wants. Somewhere along the line the equation has to break down. We’re now at that point on the line. Maybe you don’t think so. Well, look around.
Our response, typically, is to look at the current scenario and simply say: “When will it be over.” Nature, on the other hand, is glancing at us swarming over the countryside, going, “When will this be over?” The answer is on its way, but ‘over’ will takes several years to become clear, and we’ll only recognize it as the end of an era after it has happened, in a rear view mirror. If we’re around for the luxury of a perspective like that, that is. Even so, I feel the gut feel that we’ve over extended our credit – as a species – is beginning to sink in. As it does we will begin to cast stones of blame. Goldman Sachs? Yup, they’re to blame. But all of us have participated in the con called Capitalism and infinite growth, and getting rich, and using credit cards. The future that we’ve borrowed against has arrived. How much do you owe?
No comments:
Post a Comment