Isn’t life weird? Especially when you consider how much of it is still influenced by the Industrial Revolution. We’re still following a blueprint from centuries ago.
We’re so bound by money. In a way, our lives are not our own.
We know that to survive in the world, we need money, and to earn money, we have to work in jobs that consume most of our lives. We spend more time at our job than anything else, working 5 out of 7 days, 8 hours a day. If you’re lucky, you like your job.
Before entering the workforce, we spent our entire childhood in school, where it took up a significant portion of our time, much like our jobs.
The break is a “weekend” where we get to spend two days not working (or schooling).
At the end of your work life and for the first time in your life, you get back every day, which is called “retirement”. The age at which retirement happens, or when you’re eligible to get money for not working, commonly called a “pension”, depends on where you live. In Australia, where I live, it’s 67.
If you’re lucky, you have enough money saved to start retirement earlier than what your government stipulates. And if you’re fortunate, you’re in good health to enjoy the time that is now truly yours.
It’s unfair that this time in your life comes when the body has already begun the process of degeneration. In other words, you are not at your prime in terms of health and fitness. Especially tragic if it’s mental degeneration.
It’s easy not to think too deeply about how our lives get set up in this predetermined way. We accept it and do it; we’re so accustomed to living this way.
It’s no wonder that being successful in life is so deeply conditioned in us. By “successful,” I mean superficial things, such as feeling we’ve made it when we’re in high-ranking positions, earning more than our peers, or accumulating nice material things. In other words, success is reduced to wealth and status.
We associate “freedom” with being financially independent, where you get your life back because money doesn’t control you. It feels backward. “Freedom” should be more meaningful and profound than that, such as finding inner peace and happiness in one’s life and forming deep, meaningful human connections.
We can do better. We should start by working less. Let’s move on from the schedules shaped by the Industrial Revolution, systems born hundreds of years ago, in a world very different from today.
The four-day workweek is a good start. It’s encouraging to see some companies, as well as entire countries, experimenting with it. But it’s not catching on fast enough, or at all.
Money rules everything. Companies are bound by profit like an iron fist. This is capitalism, and some say it’s the best system we have. Maybe it is. I never questioned it until I hit middle age with multiple kids, alongside my spiritual path through Buddhism.
The way we live reveals itself as suboptimal and unfair. Detrimental to one’s mental health, even. Are we in a mental health crisis because of the system we live in?
Of course, mental illness is a terrible and severe problem; I talk from experience. A lot of people have mental illnesses from sources unrelated to the pressures of modern life.
Yet feeling overworked and burnt out while feeling you’re not getting ahead financially. The worry of living paycheck to paycheck. Feeling like you don’t have enough time to enjoy life, resorting to living for the “weekends” and “holidays”.
It’s no wonder there’s so much mental suffering.
It’s interesting to see the younger generation, Gen Z, catching on and rejecting traditional ways of working, such as management trajectories. Instead of climbing the corporate ladder, they’re prioritising autonomy, purpose, and wellbeing, a trend called “conscious unbossing”. “Quiet cracking” is another trend, where employees are stressed out and generally suffering yet staying silent.
But it will change dramatically with AI; we’re on the precipice of the most significant change, some say, in all of humankind.
There will be huge job misplacements; how can there not? AI’s scope dwarfs that of the Industrial Revolution and is moving at tremendous speed. The Industrial Revolution mechanised physical labour; AI handles cognition, something unique to humans, now replicated in machines, with physical automation tagging behind.
Will we adopt a Universal Basic Income as humans are no longer required to hold jobs? What will our lives look like then, when we’re no longer spending all our time working?
Will this shift be the wholesale change we need, one that derives meaning and purpose from more substantial things? I hope so, but I’m not very optimistic, considering AI is in the hands of private corporations whose focus isn’t on the welfare of humans, but on beating their competitors and maximising profits.
All that power in the hands of a few tech giants and their CEOs 😬.