Make Love Our New Bottom Line
We’ve been misled to believe that making more money and having a job leads to success and happiness. This is at the root of almost all of our problems today.
Creating value for others in the world and having meaningful pursuits and healthy relationships is the better path, a healthier and sustainable path.
There’s a saying that before you try to climb the ladder of success make sure you have it leaned up against the right building for you. In other words, spend the limited precious years of your life doing things that give your life meaning and that you find personally rewarding or work will grind you down.
The idea of working harder helping people make more stuff so we can all buy more stuff has not only led to the creation of a multi-billion dollar stuff storage unit industry in America and Maria Kondo tidying us up, it’s led to deadly outcomes including environmental racism like putting trash incinerators in communities primarily made up of people of color, to growing mortality rates from stress related diseases, to the corruption of our political system by selfish corporate unscrupulous interests.
Oh yeah and also climate change which the UN’s latest report reminds us will bring deadly and costly consequences to billions of us if we don’t make swift bold changes inside of the next twelve years!
Work will set you free most grievously was used as a sign above the Nazi death came of Auschwitz to try to give doomed people hope of salvation.
Now I’m not suggesting that capitalism should be conflated with Nazism and mass extermination of people but the unfettered rapacious current reality of capitalism in America is resulting in many thousands of unnecessary deaths and terrible human suffering.
Think about what our current almost total lack of upward mobility for the majority of American workers means. It means we work harder, longer and still end up more in debt from everything from college loans to credit cards. It means we can less and less afford decent housing or healthcare and have so little time we eat fast foods that harm our bodies and our environment while exploiting desperate minimum wage workers to enrich the already wealthy.
It means people have no money to set aside for savings, for emergencies like healthcare tragedies or car repairs, for improving our educations or for child or elder care services.
And America like other Western nations is getting older. Twice as many Americans will turn 60 by 2050 as we have today. This while many seniors who rapidly deplete their entire life’s savings now barely survive on $12k to $14k on Social Security and their children often cannot afford home healthcare or nursing home care for them.
Work is not setting us free. In fact it’s quite the opposite. It denies us an opportunity to engage in pursuits connected to our greatest passions and interests and in many cases our greatest talents, just so we can pay our debts and make it to the next paycheck.
If we were all getting meaningful steady pay increases that matched the increase in worker productivity over the last four decades then we would have enough time and money to live less stressful and more dignified healthy lives creating more value for our communities and our families.
But we are not. Our pay increases barely exceed inflation and they will always do so because we have no leverage anymore with the virtual elimination of private sector unions, with rising work forces in low wage nations and more specifically with the rapid gains of AI/automation. We are mostly, obsolete.
We might get increases to $15 an hour for minimum wage but the rapid increases in rent costs, housing and higher education still means most of these workers even with a spouse or roommate can barely make ends meet in most of our large cities. And perhaps worst of all these are not temporary jobs with rising paths to greater skills and greater pay. Like many of the new jobs today they are service related low skilled, low paying jobs with virtually now pay increases or paths to promotion!
Due to the entire idea that more money will set you free and make you happy the relatively small number of very wealthy people in our country who own most of the public shares in corporations demand these corporations do everything and anything necessary to increase short term earnings to boost their share value. And that anything necessary includes buying out the competition, limiting access to unions and suppressing wage growth.
We’ve all been sold a bill of goods. Working harder doesn’t only not mean making more money, it doesn’t mean being happy or free. Working more to buy more, and pay for what we borrow so we can buy and own and store more things, is making our people and our society sick.
We see the symptoms of this illness in our rising horrible rates of teen and other suicides. We see it in our rising rates of opiod drug addiction and over 70k annual overdose deaths. We see it in our over 44k annual gun deaths a year including these all to regular normalized mass gun murder sprees.
We need a new premise, a new bottom line for how we structure our society. We should put health and human dignity for all first. We should move to alleviate all human (and other) suffering with great speed and urgency including suffering from poverty, stress and despair. We need to look at the data, the science about what creates a healthier happier society and put all our legislation and public discussions through that filter!
The science is out there, the data is in. We know that healthier relationships with people in our communities leads to better health, happier and more prosperous people. Yet we now live in a society where people walk around staring at phones and for the most part ignoring our neighbors and folks we encounter. People spend approximately three times more time on social media than we do engaging with those we love in person.
We need to make love our new bottom line. We need to put the health of our people and our planet above the goal of making more money. We need to think in terms of long term success for all of us not just short term success for some of us.
