Get up go to work. Come home and spend a little time watching TV and being with family or friends for a couple of hours. Repeat Monday through Friday waiting for the weekend. Then maybe get to go camping or to the lake for a day or so if you are lucky before rushing back home to get ready for work the next day. Other weekends you are not so lucky as to get to play at all – and some people seldom if ever are to start with. Instead of lakes and camping – or any other recreational fun – it’s work and chores all weekend and maybe a little TV until Monday. Then its off to work to repeat the cycle all over again.

Of course there are the bills that have to be paid. Mortgage or rent, car payments, credit card bills, student loans and such – as well as those things that happen – new tires for the car, and repairs to the old lawn mower. Then there are the power and water bills to pay, insurance and cable bills etc. along with food clothes and all the other things that cost money every month. When its all done the bank account is pretty much empty again and anxiously waiting for the next paycheck to be deposited.

Some version of this is reality for most working people. They go off to jobs they don’t really like, doing work out of necessity instead of working on anything they choose or that they are passionate about in anyway – just to make ends meet. Others have chosen work they do enjoy and a few have struggled and managed to get a fledgling business started – but instead of gaining freedom  and making more spendable money its usually just the opposite. They work crazy hours – frequently 50, 60 or even more hours per week and when all the bills and taxes and other expenses are paid the sad reality is that they make less net money than they would have earned working a regular job for someone else. Still they do it anyway – some out of desperation to find some form of fulfillment and happiness and others just because they feel they have backed themselves into a corner and don’t have any other choice.

So I ask you, what about you?

Why are you doing what you do?

Do you really love it – are you passionate about it or is it just a means to get a paycheck and nothing more?

What would you rather be doing if you had the choice? In other words what are you passionate about?

How would it feel to have more money left at the end of the week and the month instead of the other way around for a change?

 

Just My Opinions

I believe that societal conditioning is a lifelong process that begins at birth, indoctrinates us all and trains and reinforces patterns of behavior that serve special interests and the plans of others much more so than they ever serve the needs or desires of each individual. This creates a nation of worker consumers who follow the path of normal. The path of normal leads to a life of excessive consumption which requires conformity and continuous work to produce income to cover the debts already incurred while continuously encouraging acquiring ever more through the use of additional credit and its resultant debt, all just to maintain the facade of being normal.

It is a life built on a premise of wants and fueled by credit and debt to encourage and cause living beyond ones actual means as rampant consumers and to continuously  acquire ever more things that are not needed.

This way of living becomes a lifelong circular trap of indentured servitude for most people.

Think of it Another Way

If you could choose to do anything you wanted to with your life and your time – then what would you do? Would you keep getting up and going off to your current job doing what ever you do now?

Or would you choose to do something much different that you feel more passionate about instead?

Think about all the crap you are buying right now – and have already bought. Take a few minutes to go and tour your home with eyes wide open and make a mental list of all the stuff you have. Look in your garage, your closets, yard, attic, storage shed and all throughout your home. How much of that stuff is seldom if ever used? How much of it just sits and sits never being used at all. If you are not using it and haven’t used it in months then you don’t need it – do you?

So why then do you have it? This is the result of societal conditioning which has trained and conditioned you to acquire crap you do not need – just to be a rampant consumer. Let me put it another way – all that crap owns you more than you own it.

Now you do have a choice – and whether you were ever aware of it before or not – as of this very moment your eyes are wide open, you are fully awake and aware that you do in fact have a choice. Keep living the normal life and keep being a cog in the machine or choose another path of your own choosing for a change. Keep doing what you have been doing and keep getting the same results – or try something different and get something different for a change.

I write a lot. I read a lot too. The other day I was reading a very popular blog and its author was giving advice to frustrated people who want to escape the daily grind and the rat race to get to a better way of life – one that is fulfilling and where they can be happier. His advice was to just drop out – quit doing anything basically. Now I really like this author and I agree with many of the things he says – but I do not agree with that advice in its entirety. You may feel differently.

What I believe in is getting rid of and dropping the destructive parts of society and of normal living while utilizing the rest in ways that are more advantageous to individuals and to families rather than what is currently the case. Our current normal way of living is desperation and indentured servitude. I don’t like that. I think it is good to work – but instead of working jobs we don’t like or may even hate – just for paychecks to cover debt and crazy expenses, that it is far better to reconfigure our way of thinking and our lives to serve us more than to serve a few who take advantage of the many.

Business and technology can be, and many are very good things. Incidentally I always find it amusing that people railing against technology and for profit businesses do so writing on a laptop computer and posting to blogs, and through YouTube videos while monetizing their own sites with all manner of ads and bitching and whining about the very technology they are using to do it!

I believe that technology for the most part is good, and I believe that many businesses are good. Those that provide useful products and services at fair and reasonable prices are the core of what allows our country to exist in the first place – and society itself is not all bad. What is bad is the indentured servitude part particular – and that is driven by credit, debt, and the continuous push to get people to keep spending money they don’t have yet to buy crap they don’t need.

So do I think you should “drop out” and sit on your ass and wait for a government handout of some kind to live? Hell no! I think the best course of action is to work HARDER and SMARTER at the same time while doing a major shift in your belief system about normal, credit and debt and your life in general. Stop worrying about what other people think, peer pressure, family pressure and social norms – instead reevaluate your life- figure out what the hell you really want and set about a plan of action to get up and go get it. Choose your own path.

By the way – all this is just my opinion and the way I see things now – I’m not telling you what to do or not do – I do not want you to do anything that you are uncomfortable with or haven’t researched and evaluated on your own.

What I want is to share ideas and information – for you to consider it and whether it makes any sense to you or not. Just like I think my friend the blogger’s idea of just dropping out and doing nothing is silly – so to might you think of what I say. It’s OK. Believe and do what ever you like. After all in the end it is your life, your decision and your responsibility.