Servitude sucks!

I started a new job a month ago. I can barely get myself out of bed every morning to go. I roll in around 9:45 despite my intention to get there by 9:00. I'm just wholly unmotivated. On the weekends I bound out of bed with less sleep and no alarm, anxious to start my day.

The thing is, I don't want to work. I LIKE WORK. That's not the problem. I just don't like working for someone else and I resent the idea that I HAVE to work. How did we (humans) get ourselves to a place where WORK is what we have to do to survive on this planet? How totally backwards! How inefficient!

The worst part is that not everyone is in the same boat. The elite work on their own terms and are getting millions of dollars to our $50,000 to do it. The uber-rich don't work at all. Take Paris Hilton for example. She gets to do whatever she wants. I'm working all day so Paris Hilton can slut around town?

Why do we need hotels anyway? Sure, it's nice to be able to go out of town and stay at a hotel but think about it: Who's staying at the Hilton? Business travelers! People who WORK for a living. Hilton's making billions off of our indentured servitude.

Some friends of mine just traveled around the entire country by bicycle, over 10,000 miles so far, and didn't stay at a hotel. They camped and stayed in homes - some friends and some strangers. That's living! No car, no gas, no job, and no stinkin' hotels!

You constantly hear about how people "need" jobs and a company "gives" us jobs. Wait, hold the phone...GIVES US JOBS? Gee, thanks. You see? We're brainwashed into thinking we need to work and are grateful for the opportunity. It's sick I tell you.

I'm ready to give up this way of life. Grow my own food, make my own clothes, why not? Sure, there are some things about modern life I like - books, movies, music, travel - and I suppose organized society makes those things possible but with the time spent slaving, I don't have much time to enjoy those things.

What is the origin of work, anyway? I guarantee you it wasn't some democratic idea that people thought sounded peachy. I'm pretty sure it happened like this: Certain families, probably royalty, by force, claimed that land belonged to them. Who ever happened to be living on that land was kicked off or told they could "work" to stay. They were working anyway, tending the land, and they didn't have much choice, right?

As it turns out though, their two hours (say) of tending the land became four, six and then eight as the demands of the lord was not subsistence but accumulation. Excess. GREED. Make more product, sell it to people who aren't fortunate enough to be given the option to work, make money and use it to live better than anyone else. The elite families of the world can still trace their heritage back to those rich, ruling families from thousands of years ago.

The modern equivalent of that original land acquisition goes likes this: A corporation buys (or leases from the government) a small island, razes the fields, builds a factory and erects low-quality apartments. The displaced subsistence population is offered jobs and an opportunity to rent an apartment. Lucky people. Just think how much better their life is! How many times have you bought clothes made in...where the heck is Mauritius?



Supposedly, a working society offers the opportunity to invent technologies like building a space shuttle and exploring the universe. Granted, that's pretty cool, but most of what we spend our time inventing doesn't improve our quality of our life, it improves the quality of our work.

The anthropologist Pierre Clastres in Society Against The State writes that contrary to what we've been told, subsistence societies are actually quite efficient - "the average length of time spent working each day by adults, including all activities, barely exceeds three hours" - offering lots of time for relaxation, playing and higher thinking. He writes:

The Indians devoted relatively little time to what is called work. And even so, they did not die of hunger. The chronicles of the period are unanimous in describing the fine appearance of the adults, the good health of the many children, the abundance and variety of things to eat. Consequently, the subsistence economy in effect among the Indian tribes did not by any means imply an anxious, full-time search for food. It follows that a subsistence economy is compatible with a substantial limitation of the time given to productive activities.

I should say that there are incredible philanthropists in this world who give back as much as they've been given but doesn't it seem an awfully roundabout way to get back to (what is for most people) subsistence? At the risk of sounding like a hippie or a Marxist, there has to be a better (more magical, more interesting, more evolved) way to live.

I guess I'm not ready to completely drop out of society. I like not getting eaten by wild animals, being ravaged by disease or worrying about being killing by a warring faction in the middle of night, but I still don't like getting up for work.

The epoch of the individual

A psychologist that I met (one of two brief relationships from my foray into online dating) explained to me that the reason we, "Generation X", were so much more self-aware (or self-absorbed, depending on the person) than our parents is because we're living in "The Epoch of The Individual."

Words of analysis have become part of our culture's vernacular. People commonly diagnose themselves as a neat-freak, controlling, passive aggressive, insecure, commitment-phobic, etc. I thought it was genius and asked him to explain further.

The explanation was brief and I have not been able to find any documentation on this theory but this is how I understood it:

When humans first lived on this earth, we had very little understanding of our world. Natural disasters, disease and death were terrifying and unexplainable. They were attributed to "gods" that for whatever reason were angry at us. As a tribe, we did what we could to appease these gods through sacrifices and rituals. This was the epoch of the tribe. Whatever the tribe demanded of a person, was to be obeyed, there was no individual will. Everything was for the collective survival.

As we gained more control over our survival, by building houses and growing crops, we were liberated from the stranglehold of the tribe. When the Jews wrote the bible and proclaimed that man could speak directly to God, we entered a new level of awareness. We entered the epoch of family. We formed societies of artists and thinkers. We amassed wealth and protected our own. Our actions, worth and sense of self were now determined by our place in a family and that family's place within a society.

With the industrial revolution, masses of people now worked for someone else and bought food instead of growing it themselves. Young people moved to cities, alone, to work and live. We were no longer defined by our family. We questioned our purpose in life, went to universities to engage in higher thinking and embarked on an individual quest. Thus began the the epoch of the individual. (During the 1950's when rock and roll was introduced, the teenager was invented and further prolonged this period of self-exploration.)

We live longer than we used to, so perhaps a longer life delivers that luxury. We don't have the biological need to reproduce as soon as humanly possible. Countries with a higher death toll (from war, disease, or poverty) are not ushering in the epoch of the individual with the same voracity. By necessity, many are still deeply entrenched in their tribal and familial roles.

So what's next in this "evolution" of epochs? For one thing, we're dividing the group into smaller and smaller units. Is there anything smaller than the individual? After all, scientists keep finding smaller units of matter that increasingly defy our known reality.

I'd like to posit some wild guesses as to what epoch is next:
The epoch of the virtual self - Like "Second Life" only better. Really LIVE a virtual life. Question: Would there be an "actual" life?

The epoch of the "ideal" self - We could pinpoint the places in our life where we think we went wrong, and change them. I put ideal in quotes because who knows if life would be better or just different.

The epoch of the present self - Higher reflection would afford us the ability to come to terms with everything in our past and live only in the present.

The epoch of the soul - We become "liberated" from our animal instincts and the primitive parts of our brain and instead live entirely in an enlightened state. We may not even need food or sleep!

The epoch of the collective - With the spread of democracy, more and more people get involved in government and governing policy. In the future, we'll be defined by our contribution to the collective.

The epoch of the other - Those who have had the luxury of choosing who to love, how to live and what to do with life, will have the responsibility to help others achieve the same freedom.

The epoch of earth - The focus is completely off of humans as we become caretakers of the earth as a whole. We are only one organism living on the ball of life, it is our duty to maintain it.

The epoch of life - The sanctity of life becomes more important than anything. Eating an animal is considered as barbaric as eating a person. Wars and executions are a thing of our horrifying past.