3 Great Lies of Modern Lifestyle
Lie #1
We act as if it’s ‘normal’ to ride a 2-ton, carbon-belching engine back-and-forth to work every day.
The reality is that this habit, commuting in a car, has only been routine for the last 60 years or so, and only for a small portion of the world’s billions of people. Sixty years isn’t even a visible blip on the timeline of civilization. So When we Americans get our panties in a bunch over any threat to this status quo, whether it’s “work from home” or public transportation or village life where you work in walking distance to your job. When I look at all the retail malls that are dying from the ecommerce revolution, the solution is dead obvious to me: build housing right in the malls, whether converting some of the department stores, or adding high-rise apartments. The baby boomers would love to live right near an indoor-outdoor park with lots of restaurants.
Lie #2
We act as if it’s ‘normal’ to learn how to do a job by going to a sleep-away camp (called college) for four years.
Again, this has only been a routine expectation for less than 100 years. Prior to that all jobs were learned by apprenticeship. Now of course, today’s incredibly sophisticated work often requires years of bookish training before one can touch real work. But a lot of jobs, even those where college should play a part, require apprenticeship… and always did and always will. We constantly hear the plaint that “kids come out of college today and they aren’t taught the real job skills,” and so on. That's because it was NEVER actually a complete solution; it just seemed good. It’s normal to learn a complex field at sleep-away camp; it’s not normal or successful to learn a job. We must re-embrace and foster apprenticeship in honest terms, not just free internship. Even expanding national service beyond just military would bridge the gap.
Lie #3:
We act as if it’s ‘normal’ for some among us to produce a single great thing (such as a book, song, company, or invention) and live the rest of our lives hyperwealthy and work-free from it.
Whether it’s a patent that enables an inventor to earn money for years, or an entertainer/athlete who gets the income of 10,000 people from TV and film revenue, or a CEO who gets the income of 500 people, all of this only occurs because of technology, not literally their own ‘work.’ Did they work hard? Sure, almost always. But it’s the non-stop arc of technology, with contributions from thousands before them, and sacrifices from everyone who bears the costs and risks of technology, that enables our unprecedented hyperconcentration of wealth. I think the best option here is to simply legislate “multiple caps” on CEO and probably entertainer/athlete pay… in effect forcing these sectors to raise the pay of those at the bottom. In the world of patent and copyright protection, the number of years of protection must be stratified to match the significance of the contribution to society. The worst problem caused by hyperconcentration of wealth hasn’t been the inequity per se, but the fact that it isolates the wealthy too much from the rest of society… so they don’t have any reason to help improve the infrastructure.
Modern civilization can be marked at roughly the beginning of farming. That’s about 10,000 years give or take a few thousand. All of the phenomena in my 3 lies, above, are things that arose only in the last 100 years; that’s about 1 percent of the arc of civilization, a mere blip in the timeline.
Yet we act as if driving to work is something to cherish and protect, as if it is metaphysically ‘right’… as if it was always what some grand and brilliant plan mandated. When Covid caused a precipitous drop in commuting, we suffered a severe shock to our business culture and our economies. Yes, those whose livelihoods depend on the commuter culture suffered. But many adaptations also occurred, including improvements to remote work methods, revolutionizing of restaurant services, and enhanced delivery services. And then there was the reduced pollution and carbon dumping of fossil fuels. And finally there was the quality of life improvement from working at home. There was NEVER anything normal or right or healthy about millions of people dragging a two-ton pile of steel back-and-forth to a job every day… let alone for two hours. And the same imbalance, and prospect for improvements, exists when we improve our workforce education, and level out our hyperconcentration of wealth.
