Last night, as I drove home from Taunton station, there was a play on the radio about a group of tramps, or homeless people, or call them what you will. And they talked about a high tech version of a dog whistle - one that makes people follow the consumerist model to which all the world's economies seem to aspire. And this group of tramps, they thought that perhaps they had something defective about them, because they didn't hear the whistle...
As I wander through this world, and I see everyone running hard in a particular direction, I wonder what they see as the goal in their heads? I try to think back to recapture how I thought when I had my shoulder hard to the wheel, pushing as best I could to make everything move forward. I think in my head there are two possible reasons to do this:
1. Physical things / wealth - a desire to amass things for yourself and your loved ones, perhaps not knowing exactly why, but having the idea that the more things that are in your bin, the better.
2. Career - a desire to advance in the world, and in the eyes of others. To be recognised as a success, and to enjoy what you do all those hours that you are working.
Scratch my head as I might, this is all I can think of.
So how does this work for me? Well, in so far as no.2 goes, I'm not expecting to get any further in the direction I have already travelled. And to be totally honest, I've no more desire to go any further, even if I could. I know I'm not at the top, but in Aldous Huxley's way of thinking, you could sum me up by saying I'm smarter than the gammas and don't want to be too smart like the alphas. I've seen enough of them and from what I can see, happiness doesn't live there.
And what about no.1? I've been very lucky in my life. I've been given, or acquired, the ability to earn far beyond the average salary, yet I've never been able to understand the drug that is "retail therapy". And for some reason, the world around me, and the people in it, according to the newspapers, are still measured in money. What is money? In the grand scheme of things, what money brings you is one of two things: time or choice.
We do not live in a civilisation (here in the UK) where we will be allowed to starve. There are, of course, different levels of not starving, and money is a key determinant of those levels, and that is what I mean by choice. Depending on my expectations or preferences, I can feel that I need more, or less, money to live, but that in the end is my choice.
And apart from choice in terms of what we have in this life, the other thing that money brings you is time. If you have enough money, you can have all the time that your life gives you to pursue your goals, your own agenda. If you don't have enough then you need to give over some of that time to somebody else's goals. If those goals align with your own, then great. If you are one of those people who have a real vocation and find that you can work in the field of that vocation and by doing so, earn a living sufficient for your needs and choices, then you are truly in the lucky box. You can work and achieve your own goals at the same time. I think I would tend to fall into the next category, I have spent most of my life successfully convinced that doing what I am doing is actually what I want to do, even if when I stop and think about it in reality, it isn't.
We live in a world where things that pass the time are highly valued (television, entertainment, internet, junk literature, video games) and where, conversely, time itself is also highly valued (and hence most of us don't have enough of it). It's as if we work for as long as we can in order to be able to rush home and spend our money on things that will fill up our leisure time until we go to work again.
Am I alone in thinking that is completely bonkers?
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