The Century of the Self

"Who are you?"

Let's start by looking back into the middle ages for a bit. We all know that was the dark age of civilization, when terrible things could happen, and when reason was greatly shadowed by primal instincts, mostly fear. Or was it that dark?

In the middle age, when common peasants were slaves of the elevated nobility, the usual (let's call them) "working days" were around 100 days per year or less. So they had 256 days to do... well whatever it was that they were doing when they were not working the fields. Probably drink wine and tell stories by the fire. Who knows? History books don't tell us what common people were doing in their free time and how that changed. But I bet that would be an interesting subject to study.

Anyway, how many days do you, the modern man/woman have to work to pay your dept to the modern nobles (some may call it dept to "society")? Well if I would start counting I would say around 300. Indeed 3 times more than the middle age peasant slave.

As you have probably guessed by now, my count includes Saturdays also. Well it is true that many people work on Saturdays but this is not the reason. I included it because on Saturday usually people work for themselves. You do your laundry, you clean your apartment, maybe you cook something, iron some shirts, do some shopping for the next week so on. So you spend at least 5 days a week to slave for society (aka work) and then 1 day for yourself and you are left with 1 day.

Oh well, this makes me think from time to time that the peasant from some years ago must have been more human than I was. I mean, he had time to do all these things that make us humans, like I don't know: dance?, sing and not be an MTV star but just for the fun of it?, tell stories about witches?, hope in a divine entity?, build a house?, plant a tree?, raise 7 kids?, cook some simple and natural and organic and bio dish with ingredients right from the garden in the back of the house?, hear the grass grow?, and stuff like that.

You know, if there is something I consider myself talented in, that is logic or finding the relationships between cause and effect. This combined with curiosity is a real recipe for disaster, stress and depression. So let us use logic to investigate a bit this modern form of slavery.

So why do people work and work like slaves? Well they want to be able to afford a certain life standard. But when do they get to actually live at that standard? Mostly on Sundays. But what do they do on Sundays? They usually sleep and rest because of all the fatigue incurred in the previous years.

OK, so modern slaves work that much to try to afford an ideal. I say ideal as everybody knows ideals cannot be materialized or reached. But a better life is not the only ideal, another common one that people get educated to believe in is: you have to make your contribution to the society.

Now let's take a look at the society: 90% of the entires world wealth is owned by 2% of the global population. Well I don't know how one could say that his personal contribution is for the society in general since statistically speaking 90% of the fruits of your work are owned by these select few and only about 10% divided to 98% of the world's population comes back to you.

I will just let your imagination run wild about how the 2% contribute to society. They must do something with all their free time. You might get some clues from the documentaries at the end of this post on what they entertain themselves with.

Now let me come back to the other 98%. So this other 98% pays health insurance and pension plans and who knows what. Right? And what happens when you actually need the health insurance? Well, you usually end up paying yourself anyway or die. And what if you die? Well if you die then the pension plan was paid for nothing. So business would be better for both health insurance companies and pension plans that you just die. Or?

And that is the key: business. Your health is a business, your pension is a business, and business is not meant to help you personally, it is meant to make money. And business does not make money for you or the general individual, it makes money for the 2% I was talking above.

Who said turning health into a business would be a good deal? Well it was definitively not me, I don't have enough time in my hands to think about stuff like that. But definitely someone did, and they also realized that very few people would go cheap on their health, therefore there is a huge potential for business here. People can't live without this business, what could be better?

So back to "Who are you?"
Is that the right thing to ask in these days of mine? I wonder... I wonder if we had not reached a point where one can safely ask "What are you?" when addressing to "persons". And they should say: Software Engineer Junior II, Nurse Senior III, Mechanical Engineer etc. Most of the time we don't really care about people's names, we just care about what they do so that we know how they can help us do what we do.

A human being is not born into a person, with identity and elevation of thought. A human is educated into a person, is taught how to be a "who" and not a "what". You can say a human child is taught how to think. But whose interest is to to educate other self aware individuals?









UPDATE

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Some people may find some links between my thoughts on the social health system and the newly released documentary Sicko. This post was written before the documentary was introduced to the public, so I guess it only means that two rational minds reached the same conclusion on their different reasoning path. Which should make the argumentation even stronger.

Stand-Up Tragedy?

We are living in an interesting world I guess. A world where sophisticated civilized people die unhappy of stress induced health diseases completely ignorant to the poor and uncivilized (so they say) world.

People these days live and die without even knowing what happened to them. There is nothing wrong with that, but if you think about resources and want to be efficient, you might say they are wasting air, water and the rest of the ingredients this planet has to offer to sustain life.

In the same line of thought, enjoy something that in the US passes as stand-up comedy:



Wasn't that a good laugh? :)

Ce se mai petrece?

Păi am fost la concert Dolores O'Riordan (aka The Cranberries). A fost chiar fain, deşi m-am simţit moş rău pe lângă tinerii de liceu care erau acolo în faţa scenei dând din mâini :-) Aş fi vrut şi eu cu ei!

Dolores a lansat un album solo, mai rock decât tot ce a cântat Cranberries până acum. E destul de bun, dar cred ca tot oldies but goldies de la Cranberries îmi plac mai mult. Şi oricum mi-am cumpărat albumele lor, cum am decis eu că nu mă mai chinui cu muzică adusă de pe net, pentru că oricum e de proastă calitate (encoding). Mai bine cumpăr CD şi îmi encodez eu cum îmi place.

Apoi am luat bilete de avion către casă, cu două ocazii. Uite aşa o să fim acasă în august o săptămână: 28 aug - 4 sep. Sper să apuc să mă văd cu mulţi, mulţi dintre voi. Ar fi super mişto dacă v-aţi lua şi voi o zi două libere în perioada aia şi să mergem pe undeva/pierdem vremea împreună. Poate fi ăsta cadoul de ziua mea? :)

Dap, anul ăsta cred că e primul an de când îs, când de ziua mea nu voi fi acasă şi nici nu mi-am luat concediu/zi liberă.

Apoi o să stau ceva mai mult de sărbători, care iarăşi este un fel de record, în sfârşit după destui ani, sunt acasă de sărbătorile de iarnă, şi nu în Olanda, sau Franţa, sau State, sau Elveţia :) Vin pe 20 dec şi stau până după anul nou, adică vreo 3 săptămâni. Facem planuri?

Apocalypto

And a Man sat alone, drenched deep in sadness.
And all the animals drew near to him and said,
"We do not like to see you so sad.
Ask us for whatever you wish and you shall have it."

The Man said, "I want to have good sight."
The vulture replied, "You shall have mine."
The Man said, "I want to be strong."
The jaguar said, "You shall be strong like me."
Then the Man said, "I long to know the secrets of the earth."
The serpent replied, "I will show them to you."
And so it went with all the animals.
And when the Man had all the gifts that they could give, he left.

Then the owl said to the other animals, "Now the Man knows much,
he'll be able to do many things. Suddenly I am afraid."
The deer said, "The Man has all that he needs.
Now his sadness will stop."

But the owl replied,
"No. I saw a hole in the Man, deep like a hunger he will never fill.
It is what makes him sad and what makes him want.
He will go on taking and taking, until one day the World will say,
'I am no more and I have nothing left to give.'"