I have been spending a lot of time trying to reconnect emotionally with my past. There was a certain point where I just locked up, time stopped, and I lost that line of identity. I’m trying to recapture that. It will make me more effective, happier, and generally useful.
Several things dawned on me this morning, though. The first was a sense that there is NO WAY to do what I will call paradigmatic work, identity work, without time. You need time, sweet time, blessed time.
How many of us have that nowadays? You run, run, run all day long, eat shit food, then tune out and numb yourself up for another day of it by watching TV, usually with some violence you can participate in vicariously so as to assuage the anger and stress and caged-in-ness that you feel (“lemmings in shiny metal boxes”).
Then it made me mad that we live like this. It is the Rockefellers, and descendants of the Morgans, and all the others who created a permanent throne for themselves in the Federal Reserve 99 years ago. THEY are the ones who make us live like this. THEY are the ones who live like kings while the rest of us work like dogs.
It is not hard nowadays to earn $50-$60-$70,000 if you have a college degree and are willing to submit to relentless stress. But to do better than that you have to be a professional or start a business. And both of those require HUGE time commitments. It is not uncommon for starting attorneys, or doctors, or architects to work 80 hour weeks. And the same goes with starting any other sort of business.
Hard work has value. It does. I have worked numerous 80 hour weeks. But it makes you mean, tired, and less willing to consider alternatives. The first thing that goes when under stress is flexibility of thinking. Everything becomes dichotomous, and mechanical. You develop a routine, a pattern of thinking, and you follow it as if your life depended on it. Only on vacation, only when relaxing, will you sometimes realize how stupid you have been.
We need more time. Civil society simply will not function when the mass of the population is either overworked, or voluntarily submitting to nearly continuous propaganda on the TV [even fucking Jeopardy seems to be on the bandwagon for Obama; I hadn’t watched it in a while, and they work questions in there that can only be called political].
Then I was thinking that “finding yourself” is a useful idea. We all need some sense of who we are relative to others. Native Americans and others would have a spirit animal, that in part differentiated them. Our problem today is we do not have any efficient, socially generalized MEANS of doing this. They are no rites of passage, outside of small cultural ghettos like the military.
Finally, I was imagining that I had been on Earth many times. How many times and places could you land where some son of a bitch was not making shit roll downhill and fucking everyone’s lives up? How often could you say “this is a just society”? I don’t think it would be often. What we face today is on a global scale, but the basic problem remains that the human race is only here because it is not sufficiently developed to be somewhere else. This NECESSARILY means that the vast bulk of people are mediocre, stupid, and unable and/or unwilling to pursue their own self interest through moral improvement. Creating change here will ALWAYS mean rolling a heavy stone uphill hard enough to get it to the other side. Then doing it again.