The Human and the Day Job

The theme of today is the examination of the phenomenon of the day job.  When viewing this blog, the reader must step outside his/her own human skin and view the human race as it really is.  We are simply smart animals.  We sometimes forget this in all of our glory.  We do not transcend our own biology.

To understand the human in the present, we must see how we came to be how we are. 

Rewind about 40,000 years.  The Earth was fairly similar to how it is now.  The human however was much different.  We existed in small migrating packs.  We were concerned with hunting and gathering our food and possibly creating fire to stay warm.  It was not until the dawn of agriculture that the human started living in the same location year round.  Before farming, the human would wake, and if there was bounty, would feast on berries or meat.  The human was not concerned with much accept the basics, similar to other mammals of today.  This was the human's day job.  Worrying about staying warm and keeping fed.  Should all of these conditions be met, the human would reproduce.

This older way of life is more similar to ours now than we would like to believe.  Society has progressed and we live in a different world, but essentially our lives are a more efficient version of this one. I wake, eat and try to stay warm.  My methods for doing this are much more efficient and developed compared to the humans 40,000 years ago, but my goals are similar.  The name of the game is creature comforts.  We have all heard this word thrown around.  We use it as a term to describe things that make our lives more comfortable and easy.  A car, for example, is a creature comfort because it allows me to travel without me having to walk.  There is obviously more to the human life than creature comforts, and the expression itself has undertones to it. "Creature comforts" has connotations that view the human as an animal.  The humans solely concerned with creature comforts are seen by the rest of us as not really getting the bigger picture.   Nevertheless, we work every day for money, which in turn buys these things.  

We wake, eat, go to work, come home, eat, watch TV, sleep and have sex.  This is just a more developed version of the human existence compared to the one described earlier about the primitive human.  There obviously is more to us that this, but let us acknowledge that these are the most basic  of our needs and goals.

Somewhere along the line we decided that it was better to work everyday for 8 hours that wonder around looking for food freely.  Why?

I think that we do this for security.  We know that we will have food tomorrow.  There is no chance of the berry bushes being berryless.  This is the driving force for man's love of the day job.  Is it worth the cost?  It is a hefty price to pay in order to have a day job.  You are essentially giving your time on Earth for the ability to eat. 

The primitive human would have loved the idea of having a constant supply of food every day. An employee that loves their job seems to be likely candidate to be hired.  Why then would non of us never hire a primitive human besides the fact that he is uneducated and probably smelly? It is the notion that the primitive human would be an unreliable employee because he isn't conditioned as a youth to go somewhere every day and focus on what a superior says he should focus on.  I think that the primitive human would love the idea of food security, but hate the idea of a day job.  If you got to wander around and do as you pleased all day for your whole life, how could you submit to the horrors of a day job?  

Was man's existence before agriculture better or worst?  This question has been explored in the past.  Could it be that all this progress has been regress?  But what about all the wonderful things that we have introduced because of our advancements?  What about candy, and movies?  What about flushing toilets, and showers? What about drugs and alcohol?  What about laptops and high definition TVs?

These were all of my arguments before I realized that the typical human does not have any of these pleasures.  The typical human works in a rice field all day and still can barely eat enough to get by.  It was not until I started to realize that all of these pleasantries are possible because my culture has all the money.  I started to understand that my culture has all the money because of the hard work of humans from all the other cultures.  The equation does not make sense if I were to say that my culture could be this lavish without these other cultures working so hard. This was the way it was before mechanized agriculture.  One thing they do not properly teach in grade school is the truth about the history of colonization.  Where do you think the Europeans got the money to build all those factories at the beginning of the industrial era?  It was a direct result of the sugar/slave trade.  The wealth generated from this trade route may have funded the industrial revolution.  If you do not understand the implications of this, then you should read into it, because the industrial revolution was a turning point in human history.  If you do not understand why this matters, then you have not thought very much about your existence, and just how crazy the world you live in is.  I try to think about it every time I flush the toilet or turn on a light switch.  I try to appreciate the little thing that makes my life easier.

These things are all great, but they come at the highest of costs.  It costs half of my waking hours.  It costs half of your free time.  Half of our lives.  Growing up, my father always told me that the secret to happiness is loving what you do.  When this is the case, you are enjoying these 8 hours a day that you give in exchange for these creature comforts.  The vast majority of humans do not enjoy what they do.  I wish it were the case, but we are very similar to each other and many humans want the same jobs.  The unpopular jobs need employees and some humans must settle to put food on the table.  The majority of the jobs are the unpopular ones.

I am not bashing on the day job and I see how important it is for a functional society.  The thing that bothers me is not the fact that people work, it is the fact that people don't have a choice. What if I wanted to revert to being a hunter and gatherer instead of working?  What if I wanted to do what I had evolved to do?  What if I wanted to be a hunter and gatherer?  

After watching countless zombie takeover movies I have imagined what would happened should society collapse.  I was thinking that it would be a good idea to train myself to be able to survive should this happen.  This means reverting to hunting and gathering.  How can I train?  The answer is that I can't.  Not only is it frowned upon, it is illegal.  I am not allowed to kill an animal and eat it unless I give money to the government and they give me a hunting permit, or I could save money my whole life and buy land and hunt within my rectangle.  Either way, it seems that my existence has been taken from me hasn't it?  Comparatively to the rest of our species, there is a handful of privileged people that get to do what they want and have creature comforts at the same time.  The rest of us must work our whole lives to give our offspring a shot at being one of these privileged few.  There is something very wrong with this isn't there?  

It is hard to imagine, but what if behind your house there was just a forest that nobody owned and was free to be expanded into.  Every direction I look, there is land, but I am not allowed on it unless I pay.  In other words, I need to give hours of my life to go to places I want.  This system is fantastic for those who have the land and money.  Not only do they get to go where they want, but other annoying humans can't come too unless they are permitted.  Our existence has radically changed. Our predecessors could not have imagined a world where there was no more room to expand.  This is the reality we live in today. America is called the land of the free, and this term was coined when there was still space for expansion.  This day has ended.  As I write this I imagine humans in the future studying the time period when all of the Earth was bought, and there was no more room.  This too is a turning point in human history.  We have not completely reached this point, but it is safe to say that the space left to expand on Earth has never been smaller.

Our problem stems from overpopulation, and lack of environmental checks and balances. Nothing keeps humans in check with their environment.  We don't realize it, but the sweetest part of the human history seems to be fading out of memory.  The time when the world wasn't all mapped out.  

We are confined to this planet as of now, and it is finite and we are reaching the point were there is no more room.  As space on this planet runs out, so will our freedoms.  Freedom and space for expansion go hand in hand.  Our addiction to these fantastical developed creature comforts has blinded us from what really matters.  The sweet part of human history is over and now we must take responsibility for our overpopulation.  Nobody around me seems to see the problem that I do.  To help you understand, picture yourself standing somewhere in your town, on the sidewalk. Do you feel like you can walk in any direction?  Other animals certainly can, but we can't can we? We can walk in two directions, up the road, and down the road.  Do you see? There is something fundamentally wrong isn't there?

Why? Again, the problem is overpopulation.  Other humans that we do not know are annoying to us because there is a possibility that they might mean us harm.  Also, other humans outside of our pack are just annoying to us period because we constantly must concern ourselves with whether this new human likes us or not.  I picture myself owning land. I would absolutely not want a random human hanging around on my land that I have given so much of my life for.  It matters so much to me because I have given the most valuable thing that I have for the land.  I have given part of my life for the land.  I have given my time for the land. I will be damned if I see another human destroy what I have given so much for.  This is why that other human has only two directions to walk.  Up the road and down the road.  Should he stray from these two directions, I have the right to call the police and have him arrested for trespassing.  I have the right to take part of his existence away from him because he wandered on to my land. There is something wrong with that isn't there?  If I were a duck, I could go any direction that I pleased because the human understands that I am a duck and don't know any better.  

Do you see how this problem stems from overpopulation?  We have gone to extremes to keep other humans that we don't know away from us because there is so many of us. 

The day job is a means to have my land, and my food.  If I work hard I can have more land and better food.  These are the ends of the day job.  There is something wrong with this isn't there. Before agriculture, I had all the land on Earth to wander, and I had all the food I could find myself.  The food might make me sick, and I might not be able to find the food, but that was life. We give half of our waking hours everyday for our food and land.  When humans were scarce, these things were plentiful.  Now we must work much harder for them.  There is a problem with this. Are we headed in the right direction?

This problem has been identified before.  Karl Marx felt the same way as I do but he identified the problem as something else.  He believed that these problems existed because of the institution of private property.  Although private property is the reason I cannot wander anywhere I want, it is only the surface of the problem.  He failed to look deeper into the problem. As an American, I love the idea of private property.  Especially because there are so many annoying humans that I do not want to share with.  He failed to see that private property was simply a technique developed to deal with overpopulation.  We all like to share with our loved ones, but we do not want to share with people that we do not know.  There is nothing wrong with this.  There are too many lazy humans that we should not be responsible for.  Universal love and communist ideals are a long ways away from where the human is now.  Private property is a quick fix to the overarching problem of overpopulation.  Overpopulation is the single biggest threat to the happiness of the human.

How do you deal with overpopulation?  This is a very difficult question to answer.  At this point in history, there have been two ways of dealing with this.  The first, and more common way to deal with this is through human extermination and genocide.  The second is being done by China today.  Limiting the number of children people are allowed to have.  The second solution is much better than the first, but being denied the right to reproduce is almost as bad as denying the right to live.  But it is better isn't it?

As our health care technologies take off with the drug revolution, and the budding nanotechnology revolution still to come, our lifespans will increase dramatically.  We need to face the facts.  There is not enough room for everyone.  This is something that all educated people understand.  There are three solutions to this problem as of right now.  The first is extermination, the second is capping the human race, and the third and best option is to open up the possibility for human expansion yet again.  The third option is the only one that adheres to our standards for human rights.

I always start my posts with some topic, and end up on a radically different one.  At the end of the post I try to tie things all together.  The day job is a unique idea that has sprouted out of the human existence.  Being human, we see it as a normal necessity for us to have a day job.  What I often encourage my readers to do is to view the human race from outside of it.  This is a very difficult task, however we are the only creatures capable of this that we have encountered thus far.  The fruits of this ability are still not fully understood, but the great minds of human history (Aristotle, Socrates, etc..)  were all very good at this and the fruits of their labor have had a rippling effect, and still live on.  View the day job as a phenomenon of the human species, and then think about how it came into existence.  Now try to understand the implications of the pervasiveness of the day job.  In other words, try to understand how widespread and necessary the day job is, and next try to understand what that means underneath the hood.  This post is simply me sharing with you my thoughts about this phenomenon.  I believe that we have lost sight of something somewhere.  That we have given up something more valuable that we as a species cannot seem to grasp yet.  The day job has brought us to where we are today, but is it part of our future?  What if everyone did what they wanted to do?  Instead of doing what they had to do to feed themselves.  What would the world be like?  Would it be a world full of lazy, fat, drug addicted alcoholics?  Or could it the next step on the path of the human?  If we all did what we wanted to do all the time, with technology taking care of our creature comforts, possibly this is the human flurishing on a whole new level.

Karma - It Exists, but What Form Does It Take?

We all like to believe that there is some sort of order to our existence, and that what goes around comes around.  Why we like to believe this could be several reasons.  I like to think that it is in our nature to create order and make sense of things, and the thought that our existence is really based on random events makes the world seem colder.

From a scientific standpoint, we have come to be what we are based on hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary trial and error.  Although fascinating, the origins of man seems to be a let down for all of us humans doesn't it?  It just isn't enough although it makes perfect sense.  We have a need for everything to fit nicely together, like a mathematical equation.  This idea that the forces that govern our lives are random and chaotic rather than perfectly designed is usually rejected by the human.  Take religion for example.  The Catholic church still believes that the Earth is only around 600,000 years old.  We have proven this to be false with math, the undisputed debate champion.  How?  We have mathematically proven carbon dating to be accurate, and as a corollary we have also carbon dated dinosaur bones from 250 million years ago.

What I am trying to get at is that the human's need for his/her existence to be ordered and meaningful overwhelms his/her logical reasoning, and this has been a common theme in human history and still is causing countless deaths through religious wars.

How does this relate to Karma?  The idea of Karma is similar to the idea of fate, and destiny.  I chose the word Karma, however, because it is slightly different.  It is more intertwined with the idea that what goes around comes around.  

As we accept the idea that we are not governed by a higher order, the actions of humans become more and more selfish and reckless.  The idea of heaven and hell is not only a deterrent for wrong doers to abstain, but more importantly it is a means to settle the conscious of the good people who get taken advantage of by the wrong doer.  The idea that he will suffer in hell makes the good person feel better about the evil that the wrong doer has inflicted in his life.  This is the overlooked, and very profound, utility of heaven and hell.  As we start to believe less and less that heaven and hell exist as a culture, the good people get fed up with the idea that they are finishing last and eventually snap and become wrong doers.

This is what seems to be what would happen, but it has been a long time since Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and people still behave nicely to one another, don't they?  The fall of religion has come, for the most part, and we are all still civil to each other aren't we?  There is more to this random chaotic existence isn't there?  

When studying fractals and chaotic mathematics, the scholar soon realizes that our existence is highly ordered.  We maintain balance and order through chaos.  In other words we exist because of the stable environment, which has been created by chaotic order. This term "chaotic order" is an oxymoron isn't it?  This goes to show you that there is much more to this idea of "randomness" than the human originally thought when creating these words.

Although our evolution, is driven by chaotic randomness, and should seem unordered and cold, why did it somehow produce the human?  If you have never thought outside yourself than this wont make much sense to you, but the majority of us have questioned our existence, whether by taking psicodellic drugs or sitting in biology class a little too long.  Isn't our existence weird? everything about it is pretty weird isn't it?  Especially sex. 

Although the universe is ordered through randomness, it has produced the human.  Now if we take this idea of ordered randomness and apply it to the human social network, we see that although human actions are in some sense unpredictable and random, and a human could do anything at any given time if he/she wanted, our human network is highly ordered and even predictable, similar to the universe around us.  Humans do things for reasons don't we.  Even the idea of doing something to be random and unpredictable was done for the purpose of being funny most of the time, because unpredictability can be very funny.  

Do things that go around come back around? Absolutely, but it is not as complicated as people make it out to be.  Karma is a force in the universe, however it exists not how we typically perceive it.   There is not a godlike creature behind some piece of equipment that looks like the control panel for the Death Star's death beam.  Karma exists in the human mind network.  It exists in the minds of the humans that your actions effect.  What goes around comes around because people constantly underestimate the perceptiveness of other people.  

We think that nobody notices selfish acts that we do because nobody brings it to our attention. We are all the same species.  We understand each other more than we give each other credit for.  

Your common sense tells you that you shouldn't steal your friends car because he will know it was you.  These selfish acts we know will come around.  But when I am faced with the decision of whether or not to take one of my friend's cans of soda, it is different.  I think to myself, he wont notice because he isn't keeping count of how many he has left in his 12 pack. I think to myself, there will be no consequences because no one will ever know, and if the universe does get me back for this, then it is unrelated to the human mind network (in other words, my friend getting me back because he knew it was me), and must be some godlike creature controlling everything.  Later that day my friend comes home and notices that there aren't as many cans of soda in his 12 pack as he thought there was, even though he wasn't keeping count, and goes into my room and sees the empty soda can in my trash that I left there because I never thought he would suspect me enough to go into my room.  He never confronts me about the soda, but he does tell people that I stole his soda and my image in the human mind network has declined slightly. I never know why it declined slightly either, but I sense that it has and I think to myself "there must be some kind of mysterious force governing the universe".  This force does exist but it isn't so mysterious.

This is karma.  This is how it works.  Karma exists because people constantly underestimate the perceptiveness of other people.  Next time someone is telling you a story of something that someone did, be it good or bad, remember that this is karma.  It is simple and makes sense. We all know that people love to talk about other people and specifically about other people's actions. This is how karma exists in our universe.  It is a force and it exists, but not through some mystical Godlike being, but rather through the consciousness of the human beings involved with your actions.  If there is a godlike being, it is the human mind network itself.

What Makes Humans Feel Superior to Others? (Headphones)

Wearing and not wearing headphones is another aspect of our daily lives that is a subtle, dynamic variable that goes into determining placement on the human social hierarchy.  This one will ring true to your common sense, but nonetheless it is interesting to explore the reasons why to gain a better understanding of the human being.

Picture a group of humans, one of which is wearing headphones.  Because the human with headphones is not as tightly integrated into the rest of the group, he is placed lower on the hierarchy than the rest.  In other words, he is not "up to date" on the current events of the group, because he is in his own world and cannot hear what the rest of the group is doing.

Now that two particular cases of social hierarchy idiosyncrasies have been observed, I will now try to draw some generalities out of the two.

It seems that in both cases, the driving force for the hierarchy placement is found in the difference of knowledge between the two humans.  In the first example, the sleeping human feels inferior to the human that is awake mainly because the human that is awake is more closely integrated into the human network at that point in time.  He is more knowledgeable about the daily events and therefor is in a better position to be the leader of the two humans because any decisions that are made regarding something that has occurred that day should be up to him.   This doesn't mean that if a leader wakes up second, the first human is the new leader, because leadership is based off of thousands of interactions between the two.  Still, the human who wakes first does get leadership points for being the most informed about the events that day.

In the second example, the human wearing headphones is missing out on information that is being created as the group of humans passes the time.  It is a sense of being "out of the loop" that lowers social status.

So why is it that we all tend to hate the people that are the most deeply integrated and obsessed with this idea of the "human network", or the knowledge that was being talked about in earlier paragraphs?  According to the conclusions just reached above, wouldn't these people be the beloved leaders?  

Absolutely not.  Leadership quality is not simply a measurement of the level of immersion into the human knowledge network, but rather is based on charisma and the ability to inspire and act.  The power of a leader comes from the people that follow him/her, whether it be the citizens of a government, or the loyalty of the military to a tyrant.   Some tyrants in the past have been known to be very disconnected from what is going with their people.  The great and beloved leaders in human history, however, have certainly been very entrenched in the human knowledge network. 

What makes a great leader?  I believe that, excluding the leadership qualities mentioned earlier which they must possess, it is the ability to understand the problems of their people, the ability to come up with effective solutions to these problems, the ability to communicate these problems and solutions to the public, and lastly and most importantly, the ability to deliver on the solutions.  In order for this to be possible, the leader must either himself be deeply involved in the human knowledge network (to be able to identify and solve the problems), or have a handful of advisers how do the job for him/her.

There is no doubt however that the people most disconnected from the human knowledge network are not taken seriously.  For example, in the film Shaun of the dead, the main character portrayed by Simon Pegg, does not realize that he is in the midst of zombie holocaust even though it is all over the news and even literally right in front of his eyes at some points.  We find this humorous and some of us identify with this character and see his being disconnected as a reflection of our own disconnectedness from worldly events.  Shaun, however hilarious, does not place very high on the human hierarchy because of this disconnectedness.

What Makes Humans Feel Superior to Others? (Sleeping In)

One thing that has always fascinated me is the workings of the human social hierarchy.  Many variables go into what makes a human more valuable that another.  Many of these variables are obvious and ingrained into our understanding of the world such as how much money we make, how attractive we are, etc..  However, there are more subtle and dynamic variables that come into play on a daily basis, and understanding these can give you a much better understanding of the human being. 

My interest in this all started when I was sleeping late in my dorm room, as I often do, and my snide floor mate barged in as he often did.  Being a human and having a fine tuned sense of what is going on in other humans heads, I detected a feeling of superiority in his mind.  I was ticked off because not only was my sleep abruptly interrupted, but because of the patronizing manner in which he treated me every day.  I thought to myself, why does he think he is better than me.

The answer came.  People in general feel superior to other people when they have been awake earlier  that day.  This is dynamic however and starts over every day.  People are habitual with the time that they wake up and it is this that makes this superiority complex seem static.

For example, if Jeff wakes up earlier than Fred, Jeff feels like he is a more worth while human being than Fred because he feels like he has the discipline to wake up earlier than him, this in turn makes him a more valuable human being.  Fred, who wakes up hours later, feels inferior to Jeff because Jeff is more oriented and knowledgeable about the events that have occurred so far that day.  

This was also the case in the situation explained earlier about me and my floor mate.  He felt superior to me because he was fully dressed, and I was in the "just woke up" mindset, and he used his advantage to put me down and thus climb the social hierarchy with respect to me and him.