Are We Better Off?
Are you better off?
Better off than what? I’ll bet your cell phone is the best one you’ve ever had. And there’s more videos than ever. And games are more realistic and engaging. And there’s more kinds of food available. And your healthcare is at least as good if not better than before. And there’s good reason to think that, in the future, you’ll have an even better phone and better videos. And better healthcare.
So, you must be better off. Right? But, perhaps you don’t quite feel that way. Why not? Something’s wrong, am I right? Let me express some thoughts:
We have moved into what some people refer to as the “Post Industrial Age.” That’s a misnomer, at least to the extent that we continue to need industry. In fact, we need it more than ever, because we are seeking more stuff than ever. So, no, there’s nothing “post” about our industrial age.
The reason that some people call this age a Post Industrial Age is because a relative few people work in actual industry. It’s not that factories and mills no longer exist, it’s that so few people work in them. Well then, how do we have all this stuff? You probably already know; far from receding, industry has developed to the point of needing fewer workers to accomplish far more production.
This is not sudden. It’s been going on for centuries. Imagine a time, several centuries ago. What would you be doing with your life in 1723? You wouldn’t be working at a keyboard, that’s for sure. You might be digging coal by hand in a coal mine. You very likely would be working in a field, or milking the cow. One of the prime occupations three centuries ago was that of farmer. Typically, the farmer did not own his land, but received some sort of allotment. From that, the farm family raised and/or produced nearly everything they consumed. And half of what they produced went to the landowner.
Sounds like fun, right? If you want clothes, then grow the flax or sheer the sheep so that you can spin thread or yarn. Take that and weave it on your loom to make cloth. Sew the cloth by hand and Voila!, you have clothes. Do you want heat this winter? No problem; just start cutting your wood in the summer so that it has enough time to dry.
There just might have been an upside to this. Everything that you have, you produced. It didn’t come from some factory, produced by people you don’t even know. It came from you; food, clothing, the home, the heat, all produced by you and your family. There’s a romantic feel to this, in spite of all the work, don’t you think? So, are you better off now than then? I’d say, it depends. There’s all that work, but are you allergic to work? Can you live without a cell phone? I know for a fact it can be done. I lived the first forty years of my life without a cell phone because they didn’t exist. I prefer having a cell phone, but the quality of my life isn’t at all better for having one. Same for computers. After all, I’m writing this, and you’re reading it, thanks to digital technology that didn’t exist forty years ago. Is my life fundamentally better for this? Not so much.
I am sneaking up on the reason why so many people are pessimistic about the future. It’s not that we don’t have much easier lives, it is, perhaps, because we do. We have become increasingly irrelevant to our own lives. We are not warm because we chopped wood last summer, we are warm because people did things that we don’t thoroughly comprehend, and heat comes out. We have clothes because thread is produced in some manner or another, made into cloth someplace, and sewn into clothes someplace else, and ends up at our store or on our doorstep. You had nothing to do with producing your clothes. And I’m guessing you didn’t build your home.
So, what is your future? Probably you will have a better cell phone. And a better computer, and more videos. 3D! Wow! You might see great breakthroughs in healthcare. At any rate, healthcare is far better than it was just a decade or two before. I’m old enough that organ transplants, artificial joints, CT scans, MRI’s and laparoscopic surgery, are new things.
But, will you be better off? It depends on how you look at it. If you want an easy, stress-free life in which you don’t pay a price for bad choices, the future might be wonderful for you. Then again, you’ll never have the satisfaction of seeing to your own and your family’s needs. Other people will do that . And, what will you do? Write essays like this? Play games on your computer? Facetime with friends? Is that a life? Or is that what people do, who don’t have a life?
So, getting back to three centuries ago….If you lived then, you probably would have had a physically demanding life, with not much to show for it. But the aristocrats who were running things would have had a stress-free, work-free life. No tilling of the fields for them. No spinning thread and weaving cloth. Then again, no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no cell phone or computer, and terrible healthcare. It was better to be rich, but not as good as being middle class today. It depends on how you look at it. Those rich people had it made. They had dances and dinners and whatnot. They had fancy clothes to prance around in. Frankly, that’s not for me. It’s for some people, but it’s not for me. Frankly, my idea of being better off is not measured by how much I have, but by how much I have done. No, I’m not living a primitive life of privation as people did centuries ago, but I get satisfaction from having restored my own home, creating and operating my own business, and building a life that is truly MY life. I don’t eagerly anticipate the next thing the government will do for me. Rather, the government is in my way. If there is a better cell phone in my future, fine. If not, it makes no difference at all to me.