Connection, again

You will have to all bear with me as I read though Radical Homemakers and drag all of you along with me. Despite it having been published in 2010, I don't think things have improved for US society, and in fact, I think there are some important dots to connect as we live through the fall of our democracy. 

This first part has to do with busyness. Forgive me for cherry picking quotes, because I really dislike doing so, but if I don't, I will essentially be typing out the entire chapter for you. You don't want that, I don't want that, and the copywrite lawyers certainly don't want that. 

To begin:

" Indeed, the woes of work have plagued Western society since the industrial revolution imposed clock time upon us. Despite labor regulations, the number of hours we toil today is more than the medieval peasants endured during the feudal period." (p. 88 - Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture by Shannon Hayes)

I don't know about you, but in my experience, the medieval peasant has always been held up as one of the most down-trodden, over-worked populations in history. I think this is why I found this statement so surprising, thus I share it with you so you can be surprised as well. But onward... after a page or so outlining exactly how as a society we are overworked comes:

"Mandatory off-the-clock work is also becoming a common phenomenon in the workplace. This can happen in subtle ways, such as when employees devotedly carry their Blackberries [remember, we're back in 2010 here], cell phones and laptops along on vacation to tend to business matters during their time away. It can also happen through not-so-subtle, patently illegal routes, such as when supervisors require employees to punch out, then return to work. A 2004 report in The New York Times about the increase in off-the-clock work stated that it was happening because middle managers faced greater pressure to lower labor costs, and their bonuses could be tied to such cost-cutting measures. Eileen Appelbaum, director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University, explained that employees comply with those illicit mandates in order to protect their jobs. 

Despite all these intrusions upon our personal lives, most Americans are willing to look the other way. Our culture has placed a high value on the willingness to clock hours for an employer, and to protest is almost shameful." (p. 90) 

Hold on the idea of looking the other way while I continue a bit more.

"The surprising irony is that all of this overwork has not increased our collective bottom line one whit." (p. 81)

All that happens when we work more hours is that we have less time, so we need to buy more things because we don't have the time to make or fix them ourselves. 

[As an aside, I want to add that we are so immersed in busyness that it is the ocean in which we swim and are unaware of it. I have lost track of the number of times I have had a client here to work with the horses and I will instruct them just to find a place in the pasture where they feel good and to stand there. I let them stand there for more than a few minutes. More often than not, when I approach the client, I will find them in tears because they realized that this was the first time they have been still in they couldn't remember how long. We don't realize what we are not aware of.]

"There is a paradox in Americans' ... eagerness to rely upon this market-and-spend system, and to measure our quality of life by what we can afford -- especially when most of us worry that we will not be able to meet our basic needs for health care, child care, education, housing, or retirement. In order to allay these enduring fears, we have tended to identify increased income as the only solution. But often the objective of seeking ever growing income ultimately exacerbates this insecurity, rather than resolves it. Beyond side effects of material affluence -- time poverty, more dependence on products, greater ecological impact, etc. -- the contentment it can deliver is elusive, even illusory. Consider the fundamental evidence in the happiness research -- as our incomes have grown, we have become no happier." (p. 97)

The very short version? We have been sold a bill of goods in that we have been told that stuff will make us happy. And in order to buy the stuff, we need to work longer hours. To buy the stuff... to work more... to buy the stuff... etc., etc. It's just how the world works, right? No, the statistics in the book make it clear that other countries have chosen different paths, opting for less working hours, but ending up with more productivity and more personal time. 

Right now, the corporations, or rather, the men who run the mega-corporations are trying not only to rule our lives, but also our country as well. Because we looked the other way when the first steps off the slippery slope happened years and years ago. And who benefitted? Not the average person, that's for sure. It doesn't take an economics degree to point to the multi-billionaires as the only people who benefitted from the overwork and spend culture they created. 

I'll spare you my rather outside the box ideas that in order to regain our country, we will need to absolutely tank our own economy, and instead I'll focus on what actually makes people happy. If you've been reading here for a while, it's not going to come as a surprise to you, because the first thing that makes people feel happy and fulfilled is...

Connection

"Individualism and the unknitting of community have led to a breakdown in our ability to work effectively with our community's resources. ...

When local relationships are intact, and the cultural norm is to make use of them, our individualistic behavior slips away, our connections expand and our life satisfaction increases. We learn that no man is an island, and that it is asinine to aspire to such a thing.  ...

Strongly interdependent local relationships generate stronger local economies that typically make more efficient use of resources and offer greater economic return to the community members. In fact, every dollar that is spent locally has three times the economic impact of one that is given to an absentee retailer whose headquarters are located far away from the community. Thus, letting go of our overly individualistic habits of not knowing our neighbors, not talking to our family members, of entertaining ourselves in isolation can open us up to far greater things. Our family lives can be healthier, our local ecology will be restored, and our local economics can begin to recover." (pp. 102 - 103)

And I'll add, when we meet our neighbors and interact with them and see them as human, it is far, far more difficult to see them as the enemy. Cooperation and connection makes someone less scary. Or another way of putting it, perfect love casts out fear.