Too Busy to Live

If there is one saying that encapsulates life in the twenty-first century I think it would have to be the one that I hear most often from friends, neighbors and family alike; That is: I'm too busy. I know of no one who does not consider himself to be too busy. The other saying that goes with being too busy usually has something to do with stress. Thus we constantly hear people saying things like, “I was just too busy to get that done.” or “I was so stressed out I just had to get away for a few hours.” or “I'd really like to do that some day when I'm not so busy.” My question is: What exactly does 'busy' or 'stressed out' mean and what is it that people are busy and stressed out about? 

 

When you say 'busy' I think of homework. Some people call it 'busywork', some call it schoolwork, but regardless of the name, the result is the same: namely, you work long and hard at something obviously and honestly unimportant and relatively meaningless. I always balked at the hours and hours of time I spent answering redundant and sometimes demeaning questions at the end of every chapter I read in school. I agonized over the whole concept of keeping my mind occupied with useless 'busywork' while real life was passing me by. When people say they are 'too busy' to do something that they really want to do, I have to wonder how important that 'busy-ness' really is. 

So, let's say for instance that you have a job. In that job, you are required to move pile A to pile B all day long. Eventually, no matter how much money you are making, your mind is going to end up screaming at you that the job itself is pointless and redundant. Of course, then you have the other side of that coin where the bills have to be paid and the food has to be procured for the coming week. So you busily go about your meaningless job, making money so you can survive. On top of that, the job of moving pile A to pile B doesn't pay very well, so you have to work many more hours than you would like so that when you finally get home, you are either too tired, too stressed out or have been 'too busy' to do any real living. 

I think it's a crying shame that this is the way most people live. Are these people too busy surviving to live a productive, happy life wherein they do the things they really love to do? I believe that happiness comes from doing what you love to do and having enough to live on as a result. Ideally, everyone would do what he does best and loves to do, living productively until the day he died and helping others to live better by producing something of value to his neighbors. I believe that we don't have to have mega-factories where thousands of people live out their busy and stress-filled lives trying to get ahead in a never-ending battle for survival. I think that people can work together, doing what they do best, in an atmosphere of cooperation and on a small scale. Anciently, small villages worked this way to a certain extent. However, there always seemed to be someone who wanted to take control of large groups of villages, states and even nations. These actions always lead to disaster, tyranny and oppression. Everything in our society can be improved, I believe, by bringing it home to a small town level and allowing people to govern themselves. 

If I could make any changes in this world, it would be changes toward independent living, small scale cooperation among neighbors and an absence of centralized control of everything. There are thousands of people in this world, if not millions, who have spent their entire lives working for a company doing busy work and never knowing the joy of doing what they love for someone who appreciates and needs that work. They are the people who are too busy to live. It sounds to me like 'too busy to live' is really 'too ready to die'. You would think that in the twenty-first century we could come up with something better than that!

The Next Target

Beauty, symmetry and order surround us in nature. Everything natural proceeds in its measured pace, perfectly in rhythm with itself and its environment. In fact, nature teaches us to be orderly. From the smallest atomic particles to the movements of galaxies, the natural world moves in tune to strict patterns and invariable mathematical structures. It's like being part of a grand machine whose parts are all in sync one with another. People have bodies that function upon certain principles in a practically invariable manner until things are introduced into the body that do not belong in the system and so cause malfunction.

 Horse whisperers have taught us that working with and not against this natural order of things has the effect of empowering people to heal and help where there has been serious malfunction in a horse's behavior. There are people who are attempting to accomplish similar things with people using natural laws and understanding the principles of how the body and mind work. To me, this is a great advance in knowledge, if we can use it to benefit people and our world directly.

However, on the other side of this coin, there are those who would use these kinds of knowledge in order to control and destroy instead of to help. According to some, next to the desire for wealth, the desire for power is the most captivating human frailty. For some reason, people like to have the ability to manipulate people and circumstances for their own ends. For this reason, I think it is wise to beware, especially today, of those who have control over the things that provide ideas. This control (ie. Power) can be a dangerous thing.

The headlines say,  "The Jews are our Misfortune." Germany, 1936.

I recently saw an interview with a man who had been present at a speech given by Adolf Hitler at the beginning of his rise to power. He happened to be a man who was not a German and certainly not a follower of Hitler at any time. However, he confessed that after hearing Hitler speak, he was carried away by a sort of mesmerizing quality that leader seemed to possess and was surprised to find himself caught up in the feeling of it, to the extent that he began to believe in what was being said. The perspective of this man gives us an interesting insight into the use of certain little-known knowledge and practices which were only beginning to be used in the early twentieth century. Today, I believe we witness daily the full-scale, widespread use of those same techniques, perfected by long and diligent use on an unknowing population of avid listeners and viewers.

The question arises: Why would anyone want to control or influence the way people think? What possible end could it achieve? In my opinion, the only end that could be of any value would be to gain more wealth and more power.

To take a current example: The massive smear campaign against a certain race/culture, obviously promoting fear and hatred against these people. If someone is my enemy, I will find it out myself by what they do to me. But, when someone undertakes to try to persuade me to fear and hate someone, in the absence of my own evidence, I think it behooves me to find out the truth for myself. If all I have is hearsay, circumstantial evidence and vicious gossip I should be wary of the perpetrator of such misinformation and I should be very cautious of any judgment I make based on this obviously biased information. It is apparent to me that someone wants me to hate a group of people to accomplish some end for themselves while disguising their actions as “protecting” me. Interestingly, and coincidentally, these are the same tactics used by a certain leader over fifty years ago on a certain group of people within his country, to get his own people to hate them so that he could justify his mistreatment and finally annihilation of them.

So, I say again, beware of anyone who controls the things that can change the way people think. Instead of just being grateful that the target is not you, it makes sense to realize that the next target might be.