When you're little your parents more or less pay for everything. The food you eat and the clothes you wear. Even where you live is paid for by them. From a strictly financial standpoint it seems odd that people would randomly say "Hey let's add another 25 year's worth of new bills to our lives!" When we leave home we start to see just how much was covered for us. You want to eat, you need to come up with the money to pay for the food. You want to live in that small one room apartment that smells like feet, you need to gather up a month's worth of rent for the luxury of not sleeping outside. The way we've dealt with this is going out and getting a job. We provide a service, and mostly our time, and get some money for it. It sounds good and it makes us feel like we're contributing. Contributing to what though? Most of us do a job that is little more than a cog in a giant machine. That's not meant to be demeaning or anything, it's just the simple facts. I do my job so that guy can do his job so she can do her job and they can do their jobs. Our jobs have become this weird hamster wheel of disconnectedness. Each one requires the other in order to keep functioning, but they have nothing to do with each other.
While we're on the subject let's talk about as a society we're mostly just become a group of individuals, all working towards our own goals. Now I have no problem with people looking out for themselves and the people they care about. I do it. Everyone does it. Communists would like you to believe that everyone should work together for the betterment of everyone, but in most real cases it's just an elaborate way to make sure this group has more than that group. We like to believe that capitalism (what we call democracy) is the better way. The idea is that if you work hard then you'll be rewarded. If you are lazy then you'll be punished or at least less rewarded. Still most of us will never move beyond our current class standing. If you started out at middle class, then it's very likely you'll stay at middle class. Sure you may become Upper middle class, but let's face it, that's just another way of saying you're in the middle with the pack. If you're poor you'll probably stay poor and if you have money you'll probably continue to have money. Again this isn't meant at some cynical look at the world. It's just how it is most of the time. So if we're working our jobs and we're basically in it for ourselves then as a society what are we working towards?
Sometimes I like to imagine what the world would be like if we stopped focusing so much on what we could get right now and start looking at what we could get in the future if we worked together. It's hard to do because many of us are chasing that dollar. Our whole society seems to not only be built around it, but actually encourages it, sometimes to the detriment of society. A patent was originally designed to give the inventor time to recoup their expenses and make profit off their invention. A limited time. It was never meant to be a lifetime patent. A pharmaceutics company will spend millions of dollars creating that first pill. The second pill will cost them eighteen cents. The patent is a way of rewarding their effort and making it so someone else doesn't come along and start cashing in on what they spend money developing. That makes sense to me. Somewhere along the way though it became more important to make money than actually achieve anything of substance. Now I know that's not true for all companies, but it's very common for a company to worry more about making money for its shareholders than it is about contributing to the overall betterment of society. Look at what's known as intellectual property. It's now become ok to patent an idea. Not an actual invention, but just the idea of an invention. This is what happens when more and more work is being done in the computer world. Programs are running the world. Those programs were developed by people and took a lot of effort to created. Someone should be rewarded for their work. Again, for a limited time. Companies now are making it their business to keep renewing copyrights and patents in order to keep squeezing every bit of money out of them. In fact some companies make it their business to sue people who infringe on their intellectual property.
So rather than working together and building something that will make us all greater than we currently are, we work as individuals to make sure that at the very least we're going to get everything we want. I know it's a hard concept to embrace because let's face it, there is a cost to everything. Unity and contributing towards advancing society doesn't exactly pay the bills and there will always be bills (although there shouldn't be). I've talked before about how shows like Star Trek show us a world where people actually all truly contribute to society in hopes that it progresses us as a species. It's a fantastical idea and we may never achieve, but I have to hope that someday we'll look beyond our immediate gratification and see there is more out there. Until then we'll continue to be cogs in the machine, slowly earning the money we need so that we can survive long enough to come in tomorrow and keep the machine running.
