Imagining our Future.
We want to imagine how the future and how we can help shape it. How will we live in 50 years? Will we have found ways to sustain our thirst for energy? Or will we have found ways to scale back? What will we drop or reduce, what will we keep?
We imagine life will be a mixture of all of this. We will most likely occupy less room as individuals as the world population continues to increase steadily. We will live with less personal and more in common spaces. More within a community. More within a ‘we’. The thought of a communal ‘we’ got a bad reputation during the last century and after the fall of communism, or better socialistic dictatorships, it seemed for a while that capitalism had won.
New world order and new world economy
A new kind of feudalism rose to control the Western world, when corporations took over capitalism and carved out incredible freedom for themselves to produce and trade without accountability. Capitalism worked within a balance of production and demand and it was self-regulating system. The corporations stole that show and established a kind of meta system, which overrides all competition and regulation.
I guess politicians didn’t recognize the beast they were helping to create or were too busy taking hand outs, but the middle class in the US is nearly dead as a result of mergers and tax benefits for the largest entities in this country. Mom-and-pop businesses don’t exist anymore unless they franchised in the late 90’s and became national with the help of ‘angel’ investors (the upper 5%). Rarely does one find a business in the US these days, which is a small 2-5 store franchise and privately owned.
Most of the successful businesses nowadays are based on an idea going viral in a business way: getting picked up and developed with and by major investors, who have their hand in everything anyway. Most of that happens overnight, it seems, whereas in the last century it still took 1-2 generations to grow a large business, now this all seems to take 5 years or less.
The more marginalized the majority of the population is, the less it has access to power, education and the possibility of wealth. Another big scam is the University industry, which earns enormous amounts of money riding on the promise that its graduates will be able to get into better jobs with a diploma than without. This is simply not true anymore and hasn’t been true for more than a decade, and leaves most graduates at the same pay level they were on before attaining a diploma or degree, but now they have an added student loan payment to pay back every month.
Americans have not yet given up on this dream and are willing to go as far as it is needed for that house with that picket fence, even if it means to be pay 30-year-loans and at least 1/3 of it in interest, just to own that house outright at the end of their working lives. It is mind-blowing to me that this still works. It is a modern form of voluntary slavery, in which the worker is trapped in a spiral made by his own desires. These desires were instilled as a solution to the eternal fear of the future, of illness and of possible poverty. So the solution to fear becomes a life-long problem and will not be solved until the deed is paid off!
9 to 5
I am not saying that I know a better solution, but it seems to me that more than 2/3 of the world population lives well with less. They might not have the 2500 sqft house and 3 cars in the garage, but they are equally as happy or more. Per capita the US is worldwide the biggest energy consumer (India and China are the lowest) with an insatiable appetite to consume. Does buying and owning things bring lasting happiness?
A friend told me the story of a Romanian woman, who had visited relatives in the US, and although she admired all they owned (or better: owed money on), she saw that they worked 60 hour weeks and didn’t have time left to spend with family and friends. She simply recognized a simple truth most of us don’t see anymore, because we are too close to it or trapped in it. The truth that to keep our life style, we work so much, and are too exhausted to be able to experience the fruit of it.
It takes self-confidence to want to live now and make the decision to live simply.
A deceivingly basic calculations could clarify. Place on one side: How much space do I need or want? How much stuff do I need or want? And on the other side: How much or how long do I want to work for it? Is it worth to be away from my loved ones/my life/ my freedom for?
There is a definite automatism to how we live our lives (‘A Big Scheme’ link) and most of us wake up in our late 40s and evaluate, if we got out of life what we wanted or dreamed of. And by then, we might be trapped and unable to change anything about it.
It takes courage to stop now and take count. And even more to imagine a different future and change direction.