The White Picket Fence Mentality
What does society mean? I’m not talking about searching for a dictionary definition; I’m talking about what is this thing we call society and why is it the way it is? I feel like I was born into this system, this way of doing things in a world full of rhetoric that conflicts with my fundamental views. I am not saying that living in a free country and having access to the opportunities that I do as compared with other parts of the world is a bad thing, but there are many things about our society that I have difficulty grappling with.
The White Picket Fence Mentality
I use this term to describe how life has been laid out by society and what is expected of the average person who is part of “western” society. It means that we are born into an economy which teaches us that buying or consuming is good. We must buy things in order to do most anything in life and this buying of things is centered around a “commodity” for which we have completely made up its value; money. Thats right, money is truly just a piece of paper, or plastic these days in many new minting systems and it has no true value outside of what we imagine it to be. Can you eat it? Does it provide you shelter? Does your car run on it? The answer is no, but we use it to do these things. The reason that money is valuable is because it is “liquid” in that it is easy to convert the value of one thing into another using money. So unfortunately money is the weapon of choice in society for making the world turn.
So, we become consumers now with our money. And we go through school, a system we are told helps prepare us for life. Often when grade school is done and its influence debatable, the expectation is to continue on into a post secondary school or trade of some kind to continue making money because now we have more responsibilities than ever before with having to buy our own food, clothe and shelter ourselves. Okay, university is over and it’s time to enter that work force, so that we can fight like made against ever rising housing and cost of living prices. If we are lucky we will get to “live the dream”, buy a house, have a family with the white picket fence and the tire swing in the yard. All the while we are continuing to blow huge amounts of our time away to work to pay for all this stuff, both the house and all the things we need to continue to consume to “be happy”. Now, we are in the autumn years and still working. By this time it’s likely we will have been working almost non-stop, save for a few vacations, kids graduations and the odd birthday, for 45 years or more. Hopefully we have made some good choices with our health against the relentless onslaught of terrible choices that are forced down our throats by the advertising apocalypse thats swirling around us. It’s finally time to retire, might be lucky enough to have a few years of good health, before we get too old to care for ourselves, sell the house with the white picket fence, get shoved into a nursing home where we wait a few more years before someone digs a nice hole to burry us in.
All of this sounds like the storey that some big drama queen spins, but at its core it is the truth. Society is basically a set up where the rich people keep getting richer and the middle class, well they like us right where we are. It’s not to say that a person can’t be happy, do very well and live comfortably doing average things, but it is to say that the system is designed for us to act certain ways and achieve certain things and be part of this “machine”. Frankly, the internet hasn’t done much better either, it pushes more and more advertising and consumerism on us, so much so that all these algorithms learn about us and try and pair us with the things that we “need”. What a load of nonsense!
The Bright Side
Of course with most things, there is an alternative. We can choose not to play, we can choose to be different and go against the grain. In many ways I see people doing this all the time with how many young entrepreneurs there are. People are taking back what it means to work and deciding for themselves rather than someone else doing it for them. While we cannot escape everything, there are alternative living styles, such as the tiny house movement which offshoots into things like the skoolie community; I will talk more about this some other time. The bottom line is that while there is some doom and gloom around how broken our world is (and we don’t need to read world news for long to see that) we can be reminded about the ways we can limit our exposure to this fabricated world by going to the farmers market, unplugging from daily life and considering options that fit what we want out of life rather then what life is “demanding” of us. So get out there, explore, share, create and be the person you want to be on your own terms!
