Pete’s blog

Firstly the background to tonight’s insight into the social condition. I am currently working as a contractor for a large financial services company in South Africa, earning an hourly rate. It began in November last year as a short three month contract – they needed someone to fill in while they found someone permanent and I had a some time on my hands, having just written my honours exams and was waiting for results. The contract work is pure accounting stuff and is not the direction I want to go with my career – I want to rather move into international relations (which I have just finished studying). The plan was to do the three months work, get some extra cash, and then spend some quality time trying to find the ideal job (quality time meaning not working and looking full time). It is now the end of February and I have just agreed to stay till the end of April now – a 3 month contract is now a 6 month contract. They are even paying me more money now. I am extremely annoyed about this whole affair, I should have been unemployed a month ago! I don’t need the money, I have more than enough saved!

Ok, quick question – how many of you are thinking, “That Pete, he has always been a bit of a strange one! Why is he always so keen to be unemployed? I don’t understand him. How does he manage to survive? What does he do with himself if he is not working?” Hopefully since you lot are slightly more intelligent and independent than the average person, I am hoping that at least one of two of you won’t be thinking that, but then I know that the majority are still thinking that. I am actually getting sick and tired of having to explain to people that I do actually want to be unemployed for a bit, and that I can afford it, and that there are plenty of jobs out there and I am not going to be unemployed for the rest of my life. Last year when I was studying full-time, I also got tired of explaining that I actually have stuff I do at home, that I don’t have to be working an 8 hour day at a company to have stuff to occupy my time. Personally I was really expecting a lot more understanding from people, instead I started feeling like a freak, that maybe I am doing the wrong thing.

Luckily I am stubborn and arrogant (yay Leos), and so I was able to convince myself that I am doing the right thing and that it is society that is the basket-case {grin} And so my insight into work and the meaning of life.

Society appears to have centred itself completely around employment and consumption. The only meaning of existence is to work and to spend money on stuff you don’t really need. Your worth is determined by your work, if you do not work you are worthless and lazy. Periods of unemployment on a cv are treated with suspicion and count against you. The unemployed are scorned and told “get a job you lazy bum”. But there is a fundamental flaw in this that is slowly destroying the very meaning of life. If your very worth is determined by your work, then what if your job has no meaning? Labour has been so divided that there are millions of people that move bits of paper and numbers around with no understanding of why and who will never be in a position to see the bigger picture. I am an accountant, I know all about moving numbers around and how thoroughly meaningless it can sometimes feel. This has two effects, it both reinforces the system and forces people to try and find meaning to their lives elsewhere. It reinforces the system, because you can feel better about your meaningless job by deriding the people without jobs (maybe a bit of jealously at work here too), and also by working harder in order to get promoted into a more meaningful position.

But where do people find meaning to their lives? Consumption. We see a thousand adverts a day telling us how we can be better people if we buy this product, and so we buy their product and hope everyone notices and thinks “Hey that person looks like they are making a success of their life”. This also reinforces itself, our purpose in life is to consume, in order to consume we work to get money to spend, our work has no meaning, so we try to find meaning by consuming… If our entire purpose in life is to consume, then we must consume as much as possible as soon as possible, so we borrow money in order to maximise our consumption. Now we also have to work to pay off our debts. People have no purpose in life, the world has no purpose… What is humanity’s reason for being? Once upon a time it was to go forth and multiply – except there is no longer anywhere else to go, and people are telling us to please stop multiplying. Another reason might have been to ensure the survival of our species, except we have been so successful at surviving it might just kill us. Maybe it is to be the stewards and guardians of life on our planet – whoops, stuffed that one up. The only thing that appears to drive us at the moment is consumption and increasing production so we can increase our consumption.

People will only save for the future if they have a plan for the future, but so few people actually have a goal in life – other than work and consume. Give a person ten million dollars, which in theory should remove their reason for working, and they will consume it all and have nothing left to show for it. Up someone’s salary and they up their consumption. Because your purpose is to consume, and you really need that Ferrari (which will probably never see a racetrack and may never reach its full performance capability), and you really need that 10 bedroom house (even though you are a bachelor), and you really need that beachside villa (which you will only use one week out of the year)…

And so I am a freak, doing the wrong thing according to society. I found a purpose in my life – to make the world a better place, to find ways of ending poverty in Africa, to change the economic system so that people can once again find true meaning in their lives. And since I have a purpose, I have no need to work, I have no need to consume, I think about my future and I have saved a fair amount of money. Give me $10 million and I will never work again – unless you consider changing the world work… I like to think of it more of as a passion than a job

Well I hope you all feel really bad about your meaningless lives and sign up to be UN volunteers tomorrow. And if anyone has $10 million dollars to spare, I have this really great idea involving World Bank debt and establishing bond markets in Africa.