Turn your mind around

Mexican people from the low income class tend to regard ambition as a vice. They use the term the way English speakers would use 'greed' and 'vanity'. There are a number of reasons for this, one being the very low opinion they have of Mexican rich people, mostly for very good reason. Another is the value they place on free time. The Protestant industrial European values of their northern neighbours too often misinterprets this as simple laziness. What it really is, is a preference for more free time over more money, once they have enough income to get along. They might have to spend that time on fixing up broken stuff they can't afford to replace, or doing by hand what most of us do with fancy appliances, but so what? When friends and family are with you, and you make your own choices, is it really work?

What they are expressing are the innate values that lie deep within us, that for people in the rich world are plastered over by an industrial education within an industrial culture. For modern industrial cultures to work, it is necessary for the public to value hard work and strict schedules, and accept manufactured stuff as adequate compensation. But our species evolved in lush ecosystems where all our necessities were procured with 2 to 4 hours of 'work' per day, by which we meant wandering around with our tribe to all the spots where we knew good stuff could be gotten, gathering or catching enough for the day, and then wandering back to camp and cooking it up. We'd call that camping. Such behaviour is written so deeply into our genes that to this day it is a sought-after leisure activity. During the 195,000 years or so when most all of us lived that way, the 20 to 22 hours a day when we weren't working were filled with conversation, storytelling, crafts, music, dancing, and always enough sleep. Much of our time was spent in simple observation of our environment, which was critical to understanding it sufficiently to know where to find food, how to avoid predators, and what could be used as medicine. There are now so many humans that few places remain on the planet where such a life can be had. But there are some, and there were many more as little as 100 years ago. During the 1930s, when Weston Price traveled the world studying the people of such places, this is what he found:

Price took photograph after photograph of beautiful smiles, and noted that the natives were invariably cheerful and optimistic. Such people were characterized by "splendid physical development" and an almost complete absence of disease, even those living in physical environments that were extremely harsh.

Now, i like my cellphone. I don't plan to give it up, nor many other conveniences and toys of modern life i enjoy. But i'd gladly trade the superfluous modern trimmings for as much free time as my deep cellular makeup cries out for (and yours does too). I'd rather have a garden than a home theater. I'd rather bike and use shared transport, considering car ownership costs enough money in a decade to buy a small rural lot and build a cozy green home.

Do you remember predictions that work weeks were going to get shorter as life became more automated? It may not feel like it, but in fact average weekly hours worked has been slooowly declining. Technology has also been shifting the ground under our feet, creating telecommuting and constant connection to work email. As long as we continue to organize ourselves into huge institutions where each of us works on tiny slivers of huge processes, progress like this will continue to be minimal and qualified. The unfortunate truth is that powerful people are obsessed with ever greater power and endless gigantic projects. If we leave it to them, we'll all be cogs in a machine forever. To get out, we have to not need the parceled labour they have designed everything around. Shift your mindset, and it can be done sooner. Go with the flow, and technology will eventually cause things to end up that way anyhow. It is what our deeper selves want, our actions are being steered that way by those instincts.