Nursery and Nursing Home

Too few Nurseries for children and Too many elderly at Nursing homes.

芝
Jul 28, 2017 · 9 min read
Painting Credit to the Friend

Be Good

Opportunities to change one’s life were scarce in the old days. By old, I mean before the Industrial Period. Man was born in his “first order” village where “he happened to be,” spending most of his lifetime within it and doing what he was “destined” to do. The only time he felt like he became a different person was when he had to change himself in order to begin life with a “not-quite-a-stranger”- his wife (most likely she was among the people he knew from the same village) and “total strangers”-his children . Being with these strangers gave him new roles: husband and father- with new loads of responsibilities in addition to inheriting works and responsibilities from his parents.

Other than that, opportunities for man to change to a different person were not in their control, but endowed by some powerful strangers outside the village (the uppers like the Nobles, Kings or God). Whether he can have an opportunity like that or not was the matter of Fate. It was the King who could force men out of the boundary of the village and made them soldiers to serve during conflict times. It was the Noble who granted a life-changer to a beautiful girl when she was picked to become his bride. It was the Upper who recognized a man’s exceptional gift and turned him into his servant . These opportunities were so rare that often times people had to rely on their imagination about “magics” to get the attention from the powerful Strangers, like the magic stick (in Cinderella), the magic kiss (in Sleeping Beauty) to grant them an opportunity to become a different (better off) person. The only thing man could do while waiting for these rare opportunities, was to be a good man (hard-working and caring), believing that good things would be endowed to good people.

Be Efficient

Man today enjoys a lot more opportunities to change to a different person, although he still counts on Fate calls from the powerful strangers for “good things happen to good people.” “Where he is from” means much less than “what he can do” and “how efficient he is at what he does.”

Industrialization dragged him out of his village, placing him in new places with many other strangers and asking him to perform what he never did- concentrating on producing only one thing. Sometimes he doesn’t even know what he produces it for. Opportunities for man to change (for better) no longer relies on how “good-natured” he is, but how efficient he is at producing. Employers make sure to maximize his productivity by “stealing” his time away from his other roles. In exchange, he receives payment (salary, wage) to pay for services (food, clothes and others) that he no longer has time to produce for himself and his family. The more efficient he is at work, the more he can earn and the more he can buy. Man is gradually driven into that vicious circle and before he knows it, he has become a working machine, working not only from 9 to 5 but also through night shifts until he drops. But once he is no longer efficient (because of accident or old age), he would be no longer wanted and therefore wouldn’t able to make both ends meet for the family. With that fear, he works and works as hard as he could in order not to be eliminated.

He- the working machine- is no longer the village man about whom others know just about everything. What he is to others (strangers) is now reduced to only that “efficient” part of his- the part that he devotes most of time for- he as a white collar worker, he as a transporter, he as a wage laborer. He needs to concentrate only on that role and makes himself as efficient as possible at that role, hoping that the money he earns from this would compensate for the lack of time to perform other roles- he as a private man (son, husband, father). Time becomes a scarce resource. Man becomes busier and busier, trying to be an even better “good man” than his parents. But as it seems, being efficient has become the more salient role of his and being caring becomes a constraint on his way to becoming efficient.

So do other strangers around him.

Nursery and Nursing homes

Man of the old days shared time with more or less the same people in the boundary of the village, which made it easier for him to be the “good man” (hardworking and caring for loved ones). Man today finds it harder and harder to keep up with the whole of that “good man” in him because the “efficient man” in him is stealing time away from the “caring man”. The time constraint and the distance between him and loved ones after he left the village make opportunities costs (he has to forgo for taking one option) much greater when it comes to choices of how to spend his time for what and with whom. Mothers have to weigh between the option of keeping her job or that of quitting it to take care of children and housework. Fathers have to weigh between the option of better paid job at the cost of much less time for family and that of lower paid one and more time for family. Some have to weigh between keeping the stable job or quitting their job and look for part time job instead to have more time to take care of their sick parents. Choices are becoming more and more at odds with each other.

The most difficult choice man has to make is how to make sure the “caring man” isn’t in conflict with the “efficient man” when it comes to the obligation of taking care of “inefficient individuals” in his family- namely his children and old parents. Sometimes, elderly (parents) can assist in babysitting his children if they live close by. Truth is not many parents do. As many men, just like him, left their hometown for different places looking opportunities to change their life, they also left their parents behind, which in return, makes it difficult for them to take care of his parents when they get old and/or sick. The best solution is to rely on other strangers to perform the “caring man” on his behalf, to provide care towards his children and parents. By so doing, he can focus on his “efficient man”, hoping that he can earn enough to pay for the “caring” services.

That is how services of nurseries (for children) and nursing homes (elderly) came into being. In such cities where it’s crowded with “efficient men”, there are always long waiting lists for these nursing facilities.

Kids- learn to be efficient … now!

As man becomes busier, so do his children. They are busy getting ready to become “efficient men”, just like him. In the old days, to whom man was born decided what he would become. Being born to a farmer, he couldn’t escape from becoming a farmer. Likewise, blacksmith, husbandry, medicine, etc. Family profession was handed down to him from his parents. He grew up becoming one of them. He also picked up socializing skills from looking at how his parents interacted with relatives, neighbors and friends. To him, his parents was a role-model for everything.

But things have changed after he left the village. Now that he became parent, he is not sure of what and how to teach his children and not sure if his children are looking at him for any role model. He is too busy with his “efficient man” at workplace, for one thing. For another, he was trained to specialize in one specific thing, (therefore being efficient, to add) and he has little to offer to the children in order to make them fully grown. Despite that, his ambition about his children grows. He wants them to be different, meaning better than him and better than their peers. He might not be able to provide the training for his children to get there but he surely tries his best to provide the access to the services where many other (experts) like teachers, professors, mentors, trainers can provide his children with knowledge and skills. So that someday HIS children will become someone, outstandingly efficient and therefore different.

The process of training has put his children, sometimes even since the age of one, continuously in new situations where more and more strangers beyond the family walk into their life. As they move from one environment to another, they also move from one role to another: elementary school pupil, junior high pupil, high-school student, college student or vocational trainee. This has become the standard socializing process where children grow through changing to adapt given new social interactions in each environment. Family environment plays smaller and smaller role in the making of the generation of “efficient men”.

Once done with the long process of training, his children start looking for work opportunities where they can show off their efficiency through the expertise they have been trained for. Depending how efficient they are, they can be moved up or moved to a better opportunity. Or they can even start their own opportunity.

As many years of interacting the “efficient man” with many many others, before they know it, they reach the retirement age. Suddenly do they become “inefficient”. Officially.

Parents… Love your self

Once upon a time, there was a small mountainous region where villagers had the habit to abandon old people at the bottom of a distant mountain because they believed that when people turned 60, they stopped being useful. But a poor peasant decided not to do that to his old father. He proved to the village that despite the age, his father outwitted everyone else in the village when his father was the only one who can help solve many difficult tasks ordered by the village master. Finally, the father could stay on in the village.

But that is once-up-on-a-time story. The society today is so structured that there are all kind of standards to run it and as a result, there is so little room for personal exceptions. Retirement age is one of those standards. Once one reaches the age (depending on countries), he is discarded out of the system of “efficient men”, no matter how efficient he may still be. But that isn’t as bad as it may sound. He retires with pension, meaning that he still can get paid (much less though) without “being efficient”. For the first time, man becomes so free as he is now freed from all the obligations. He doesn’t need to work. He doesn’t need to care for anyone as his children are all grown up, busying themselves with the role of “efficient man” elsewhere. “The good man” is now more like the title he has earned, recognizing many years of his trying to keep up with both the “efficient man” and the “caring man,” by whatever means he might have resorted to. He now can rest, assured that the title won’t leave him.

Another reality of this less chaotic reality of his is that decrease in obligations entails decrease in number of his social interactions. Throughout his life, up to this point, his self has been the making out of numerous social interactions. There have been people that were meaningful and there are people that were damaging to that self-making. Regardless, their presence in his life has been significant in defining and redefining the meanings of his self, through which he has developed confidence in that self. For all these years, every morning he got up, worrying about how he would face and interact with others once he stepped out of the bed. One day, he gets up and realizes all those people around him suddenly disappear. Just because he is retired from the “efficient man”. For the first time, he gets up, wondering what to do with himself. Himself is a total stranger, he just realizes. He never talks to this stranger before.

He calls his children. They are at work. Their children are at schools. They say they will be have a holiday in 2 months and 17 days and they will swing by for a day. For the coming 2 months and 16 days, he will have to get used to this stranger in him. He has been the good man.. to others. But this stranger is what is left for him. He has to learn how to be good to him, really good.

芝

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Why do we as human beings behave the way we do?

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