Morality, Labor, and more Death

In recent posts I've talked about how precious life is and how peculiar the human condition can be. We're a social creature whose thriving and sanity is essentially determined by the presence of other members of our species. Additionally, we're the only species that can envision a future in which we exist, and a future in which we don't (which is incredibly depressing). The overlap is the idea that we try to fill our short meaningless existence with moments that seem to justify our humanity. Now, you can chalk a lot of what I call "mysteries" to be simple biological responses. We socialize to reproduce, we don't like to die because we will have a harder time passing on our genes when we're dead, etc. Of course, having 12 credits of psychology under my belt, I'm fully qualified to say that our fears and desires are learned behaviors that come with a more advanced understanding of our biological and metaphysical limitations.

But I'm done with that garbage for now. We'll keep it philosophical but we'll at least try to stay grounded. As humans we strive for the good life. Again, call it a fear of death or call it a natural tendency to just want a ton of crap, who knows. For Aristotle, the good life was living in accordance with happy mediums and moving as far as possible away from extremes. This we call "virtue ethics" and is not what we're talking about today. I think the point of bringing up Aristotle is to show that we as humans have tried to define our existence and conceptualize it in a set of rules that we can choose to follow or not follow. This goes way beyond the Constitution, mind you. This is called morality (which I thought wasn't the point, but apparently it is). This morality tells us that it's not nice to be not nice to people, essentially. But another interesting facet of the human condition (which again, I didn't think was the point) is that we can be cruel to people who are not cruel to us in the first place. There's a trillion examples but I'm talking about greed and more specifically, consumerism (big leap, I know).

People want a ton of crap. I want a bigger tv and a big stereo system and a huge house with a parking garage with some fast cars. Why? I don't know. None of those things are going to benefit me in any substantive way other than knowing I've got some really cool crap. Why do billionaires want more money? Because they can theoretically buy more crap. I say they can't be too busy buying crap because if they were, they wouldn't be billionaires. Billionaires are just really concerned with theoretically being able to buy a ton of stuff. And really, that's what we're all concerned with. We want to know that if we need something, we can take care of it. We also really, really like to know that if we want something, we can be impulsive every now and then. But our ultimate dream, my friends, is that if we want to be flippant and irresponsible with our money, we can. We all want to know that a gold-plated pool full of strawberry jello with diamonds in it is going to be possible if we want it.

So we go to work.

Humans are a funny sort in that we don't do anything just to survive. Yeah, some of us do and that's really unfortunate (says the upper middle class white kid), but most of us are concerned with how much excess we're going to have. After the bills and the responsibilities and eating, we want to know that we're going to have a little extra to screw with. We also really like knowing that we'll have even more extra to put away for when we're old and tired and pissed off at the world and don't want to work anymore.

I use lions a lot as examples for some reason despite not knowing anything concrete about them... well, here's another.

Take a lion pack. I don't know any actual facts about lions, but just bear with me. The male and female lions hunt because they have to feed themselves. They also forgo a little extra from that sweet, sweet gazelle to give to their cubs. Within a few years, the cubs are hunting, helping to provide for the older lions as well as themselves. The responsibility slowly shifts downwards as the generations age. The circle of life involves work. Everyone has to work.

The thing about humans that's very similar to lions is that the responsibility shifts downwards. The younger ones eventually have to take care of the enfeebled older ones. The only difference is, lion parents don't have to wait until their cubs are 22 years old to be able to sustain themselves, much less their elders.

But kids have to go to school now. You used to be able to get a job with an elementary education. Granted not a great job, but a job nonetheless. If you could read, that was a plus too. Years later, a high school education was acceptable but not absolutely necessary and hey a GED was quite alright. Years later, if you went to college (undergrad) you were set. High school education was necessary but college wasn't at all. More people started to go to get an undergrad education but those with the master's degree we're the elites. Now you can't even earn a "livable" income without a bachelors. You could get a master's degree nowadays and still worry about being homeless. WHAT'S GOING ON?

One of my favorite sayings is, "When everyone is special, no one is special." You know why? BECAUSE ONLY A FEW PEOPLE CAN BE SPECIAL BASED ON THE DICTIONARY DEFINITION OF SPECIAL. Don't you see? Once everyone is above the bar, we have to MOVE THE BAR. Everyone dreams of being rich but NOT EVERYONE CAN BE RICH. If you and 4 friends are looking a pile of 100 1-dollar bills, you all can share it--each getting 20 dollars. But you KNOW that one person in the group is a jerk and is going to take 90% of it. Now that means that the other 4 share 10 dollars which doesn't split evenly. So someone is going to get screwed. One genius in the group comes up with an idea: let's make more money! Everyone is super excited because they all get 100 dollars but now each individual dollar means less. Welcome to inflation.

The point is not inflation, obviously. It's that we all expect to get out of college and make a ton of money which just realistically isn't possible. A bazillion students (literally) graduate college every semester and they all expect to make all this money and it's simply not possible. It doesn't make logistical sense. Such is life. So we settle into mediocrity never making as much money as we would like doing something we hate and yet we continue to do it because we want to have a place to live and feed ourselves and have a car and them maybe, just maybe, have a little extra on the side to hopefully stop doing what we hate one day or maintain a modicum of sanity by blowing our extra money at a shooting range, putting up targets of our boss.

I talked a lot in the past about doing things for our ultimate survival--but the way we work is so paradoxical it's amazing. We work to survive, but we're killing ourselves but working so much at things that we hate. So why do we do it? Just to bite off a bigger piece of the pie so we can buy a bigger TV which will hopefully provide enough pleasure to justify the hours spent at the job you hate or the fact that your life is already insignificant enough without spending 40 hours of your 168 hour doing something that makes you unhappy.

Oh wait, that's 40 hours on top of the 30 minute commute EACH WAY. So that's 45 hours plus the 8 hours of sleep you HOPEFULLY get each night (but you don't because you've got too much crap to do) but let's say for argument's sake that you do get 8. That's 56 hours you spend sleeping so 101 hours of your life are either spent working or sleeping. Then you've got 67 hours of your week left to do taxes, cut the lawn, attend soccer games, fight with your wife, discipline your kids, and maybe, just maybe you'll have a few hours left to do something you enjoy--something that makes you forget about all of the garbage you have to deal with. But in those 40 hours you hope that you'll make enough money to put aside so that one day, you can hopefully devote an extra 40 hours to making your life slightly happier than it has been. The rub is that by the time that's even remotely possible, you're not young anymore. You've got arthritis and you're sight is leaving you and your doctor said you probably shouldn't be riding rollercoasters or skipping doses of your medication and really the only thing you can do is sit on your butt for what will hopefully be a productive 20 years of life looking back on all that could have been. You finally have the time to read Freud and Aristotle and learn the piano but at the point in your life, you physically can't.

And then one day you'll find, 10 years have got behind you--no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

I think thoughts like these are originally what prompted the post on death. Maybe my primary interest is not death for death's sake, but life for death's sake. If life is the most precious thing we have, we sure don't act like it.

But what can we do? What's the alternative? With the media glorification of the rich and famous we can never just settle for good enough. It's biological to want to be the best and have the greatest display of wealth and I think we're all inherently lazy--so lazy we'll work ourselves to death in order to not have to work anymore. Of course, you could always be a drug dealer. The hours are probably flexible, the money is great, and if you can ignore the constant threat of imprisonment and death, it can provide a lovely life for you and your family.