http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe5yFYryYLI

Enjoy, Monty H

One of the most hateful things about the current situation in the US and UK is that people are defined, and therefore define themselves, by the job that they do. Within seconds of meeting somebody they will ask 'What do you do?' and then make a judgement about you depending on what you do for a living.

Work gives people purpose, defines their place in society, gives them status, provides them with a tribe or social circle and, frankly, fills up empty days for some people. Not everybody would be content to sit around reading great books, listening to great music and improving their minds every day – for a lot of people, not having the routine and structure provided by work would be their worst nightmare, leaving them lost and purposeless.

Also, owning possessions and having money gives an individual in our society staus and power. Whether we like it or not, buying bigger and better things to improve one's status has taken the place of physical confrontation in our day to day lives as the primary means of defining superior status. The millionaire doesn't prove that he is of higher status than the beggar by fighting him, as he may have done thousands of years ago. Instead, it is the clothes that he has bought, the watch that he wears, the shoes he has acquired and the haircut he has paid for that indicates his higher societal status to others as he walks down the street.

This comment is in no way a defence of rampant consumerism, but if there is to be real change, it must be taken into account that work, even if it's not work that feeds the soul's passion, is so responsible for structuring our lives that any alternative to capitalism and wage-slavery must contain a way for people to feel needed, useful, accepted and part of the society around them or it doesn't stand a chance of getting off the ground.

I hadn't really thought about it in this much detail before but If I'm right, then perhaps consumerism is not purely caused by the western world being full of bad and greedy people, but is simply a side effect of the way our society is structured?

Finally, something that few people seem prepared to acknowledge is that in most cases people can only follow their dreams and passions if somebody else is doing the grunt work. If somebody wasn't growing food, making clothes, building houses and collecting drinking water for me, I wouldn't have time pursue my 'dream life'. Take the examples of great art, literature and music – these things may be present in all societies and cultures, but only seem to reach their highest forms in societies where the basic requirements of life are taken care of by somebody else.

Some of the most vocal opponents of capitalism and strongest advocates of 'lifestyle design' want to be life coaches or self-help tutors, but there's not much call for that in a society when your days are already filled with growing food and providing water for your family.

Whilst it may unfashionable to admit and even more unpalatable to acknowledge, it is a direct result of the inequalities and imperfections in the current world that allow us to sit around contemplating our navels and wondering how our 'passions' and 'purposes' can be discovered.

Food for thought I hope…

This is definitely intriguing. I think most of us at some point have wondered why people who have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank keep working. There are lots of common examples that are arguable meme level. Things like the lottery winner who insists on keeping their job as a janitor (or whatever).

Rather than blaming this tendency on a construct such as capitalism, I tend to think the explanation is more likely found in evolutionary psychology. After millions of years of scarcity, we developed a chunk of our brain that tells us that we need to keep gathering and gathering because the resources aren't going to be there forever and we'll need them. Basically, it' adds teeth to the "pack rat" analogy.

So here we are, only a hundred or thousand years into a society of relative abundance. Our instincts that developed over millions of years of scarcity no longer apply in the same way and we get cognitive dissonance because we see people doing things that don't make logical sense.

Now, for those who frame this in terms of levers of power such as capitalism… I'm not letting the isms off the hook. Things like capitalism tend to exploit these built-in tendencies for their own benefit. This happens on many levels.

Okay… I've been thinking about this stuff a lot lately and apparently my comment should have been it's own blog post… I'll spare you the rest of my diatribe.

Thought provoking stuff. Nice work.

Advice when you start selling stuff: throw a party and have a 'garage sale' room. Kristin and I did this and it really helped reduce the amount of 'stuff' we had sitting around, waiting to be sold before we moved from LA.