Saturday, February 06, 2010
Lost
Sometimes I lose a sense of proportion when..
We slog so hard (in the future) for around 23 working days for around $2000-$3000..
while blowing thousands in a few days on an overseas trip.
Parents working so hard to get home the dosh...
while kids blowing around at least 3-4 months of their pay on their exchanges.
People scrimping on their basic needs like food, saving a few dollars per day...
so they can blow hundreds in one concert night, or line 3.
Is this the world we live in?
Working relentlessly hard as the society demands. Earn more money than you'll ever use for your basic needs. Find new ways to blow your cash, since you have so little time to spend them anyway. Inflate all prices in society in the process.
If you aren't able to blow your cash, let your children do it. Let them delay their time to work in society as long as possible. Give them the spending power of working adults, enjoy the luxurious goods, pretend like they are damn well-off, act snobbish in front of poorer people who are honestly earning their keep, when all these while, they have no right to be proud, since they are not exactly savouring the fruits of their own labour.
And you continue to work relentlessly hard, putting more pressure to do so by ever consuming more.
Individual does it.
Society does it.
Prices goes up. New products come. More demand for them.
More pressure to get them. How to get them? Work harder.
In the end, you are left with no choice. You are sick of working so hard. Since when you were 5 years old. You prefer the 'work less, consume less' model. But the massive inflation created by others' spending power, through their relentless hard work, forces you to work even harder, to simply maintain your spending power, a.k.a. real income.
Society becomes richer, but do we necessarily become happier?
More desires, hence work harder to chase them, resulting in tired minds, tired souls. Over-worked, and over-pushed, since too young, and til too old. Start pre-school at four, earlier and earlier. Retirement age, higher and higher.
Look at all those faces in the MRTs, in the buses. In the early mornings, and the late evenings. What are they thinking? Are they happy? Do people come together to solve their collective unhappiness, since this system is what they've collectively created?
Individual behaviour. Coordination failure. Multiple equilibria. Inferior equilibrium. Nash equilibrium. To beat the 'average', work harder and work harder. But the 'average' never ceases to increase, since this is what everyone does. So, repeat the cycle.
I'm repeating myself. I too, am a jaded soul. No matter how much I push myself, the society pushes me even harder. Keeping yourself at overdrive, performing at overcapacity. The bourgeois call it 'productivity'. The proletariat call it "slaving".
Keeping your neck above the water is hard, when the water keeps on rising. When will we, as a people, stop this global flooding? I have no answer to that.
lowtide blogged @
2:32 am
