This is an essay of sorts I wrote...
People live to work. As we continue to industrialize and modernize, this becomes more and more true. We now live in an age where a person's career is who they are. It is thing which their entire "life" revolves around and depends on. Why is the majority of our society content with living in a 7-day cycle of modern peasantry?
Weekdays and weekends hold ultimate power over our plans for life. They're the same restrictive force in one's forties as it was in their high school days. On weekdays we go to bed and wake up early as a cardinal rule. We do not often plan events or do anything special with our friends during these days. The focus of that five day stretch is to be entirely on performance at work so that we may in return have a "good life". After our hard work we are rewarded with those two precious days. This is the time we are alloted to enjoy our good life provided by our hard work. This is the cycle we life in for the twenty-five thousand days of our lives. This is the life of the modern human.
There was a time in our history when members of a community relied on each other rather a job in today's sense of the word. Together they helped each other meet their needs. This was also a cycle, a cycle of helping. In most of these communities, things were not "bought" or "sold" with currency representing value. Notes and coins did not determine the value of anything.
Somehow between then and now humans have begun relying on each other in a different way. People have isolated themselves and no longer work for the good of their community members, but for money. People no longer survive by providing and taking care of each other. There is no more fellowship or family. We may like to think of ourselves as self-sufficient with our jobs and income, but are we really? Can we really provide ourselves with even the most basic of survival needs without purchasing them from a store? We've ceased relying on our collective human skill of helping and instead now rely on notes and coins to receive our sustenance.
The change that caused this, while drastic, was still a simple one. Today people do not see or even care about the fruits of their labor. They simply work as a means to an end, the end being money. This money determines their own personal value rather than their work and skill. The wants and needs they can "afford" are purchased. Deservedness based on basic principles of humanity do not decide what goods a person will get.
These products and services vital and largely not so vital to life are purchased from a company. A company that is almost always inextricably woven into the web of corporations, where so many companies own parts of one another that they essentially make up one giant conglomerate of "providing". Stranger yet is that the individuals purchasing from these companies almost always work for one of them and are ultimately receiving their income from the same conglomerate they purchase what they feel they need to live from. Money follows a simple path.
There are those who do not experience the harshness of this cycle. Not coincidently, these elite few often have a substantial stake in that web. Through their hard work they've managed to stop laboring but continue purchasing, and purchase they do. We see these people as free from struggle and we strive to have what they have. Some work harder and try to be more productive in hopes of becoming free of labor as well. Others stay, content or not living in an endless paycheck-to-paycheck state. Always laboring and never free. These people are necessary though. After all, if everyone were as free as those elite as they are now, who would there be to produce all the things that allow them to be that way through all of this purchasing?
Are we still living in true communities? Or are we being provided for just enough by a complex beast to deceive us into believing we are doing our part or even living a happy life so that a few may enjoy a life free of labor and struggle where is provided? If they are, it is not entirely they who are deceiving us. Our own egos deceive us when we define ourselves by our job and the social status it usually comes with. We end up defining our entire lives this way, believing it's who we are. That's what keeps us working; keeps us doing our part. However, this part we doing is only sustaining the cycle of slavery. Slavery which we have literally bought our own way into.
As the true social creatures we are, our real job is to work for the good and welfare of those humans we affect so in this way all of us will be taken care of. This is all it takes to break the cycle of manipulation by a handful of deceitful humans. All humans can be truly free and experience life the way we were meant to, experiencing it together as a species instead of isolated individuals enslaved by consumption. This ability to live as a true community is inside all of us.
thanks for reading, hope you liked it
