Hello

I finally decided that it was time to get off my ass and start recording some of the thoughts I’ve had lately about our society and culture, so here I am with a shiny new blog.  I’ll spare you any further introduction and dive right into this.  If there is anything you must know about my background or motivations feel free to post a comment.

One of the things I will undoubtedly be talking about a lot on this blog is money.  Not how to make it or save it, but what it means to us as a society and how it has become such a huge factor in all of our lives.  I would certainly argue that money is the defacto God of western culture and, thanks to globalization, perhaps the rest of the world as well.  Like traditional dieties it is intangible, but most of us spend the majority of our days in its service nonetheless.  Having a job is expected of all those who are able, and those who shun the working world tend to become outcasts in our society.  Yet almost no one takes time to think about the bigger picture we’re all creating.

What goal is it that we’re working towards as human beings when we participate in our economic system by getting a job, paying rent, and buying things?  This is a question that is rarely asked, but it is perhaps the most important issue we face as a society.  I think most people feel that we are trying to make our own lives more comfortable and rewarding, primarily by generating new information that leads to things like vaccines and inventions.  If lifestyle improvement is what we all want, though, it seems we are only achieving that in very superficial ways.

It’s true that most of us now have refridgerators, dishwashers and other modern appliances that save us time and personal energy.  Almost everyone would agree that it’s nice that we have these labor-saving devices, but what becomes of the time and energy we save through them?  More often than not the answer seems to be that that time and energy is re-invested in the world of work.  We use the extra time to work more hours at our jobs, or to do other things we need to do to survive in modern society like filling out tax forms or going to the DMV.  The remaining time we do spend on ourselves is usually spent strengthening our ties to consumer culture by consuming mass media.  Are we really better off as a society than we were 30 years ago?  50 years ago?  200 years ago?

Of course there are many people pursuing very noble and genuinely valuable things in their careers or in their leisure time, but this seems to be the exception rather than the rule.  The way our society works reminds me very much of the old ad by the Partnership for a Drug Free America that showed a man walking a circle in a small room, explaining that he uses cocaine so that he can do more work, so that he can earn more money, so that he can use more coke.  It seems to me that this is what we’re all doing collectively.  I wish that we could take a step back and really think about what it is we really want for ourselves as a species.