Last week I walked into the office of my storage unit building. It was a rainy day. I walked into an old feeling that hit me like a ton of bricks. The energy of it was thick. A worker sat there completely alone at a big long desk facing a computer that faced away from me. I knew exactly what I was walking into. The employee had a thick energy of utter boredom. And I had interrupted him trying to occupy himself on the work pc. He scrambled to gather himself out of his complete bored, complacent stupor into awake and professional mode.
I keep thinking about that employee. How many of my own hours were spent in that exact way.
I just read an article about the Loneliness Epidemic in the US. I picture that employee in that office. How many hours had he been in that desperate and complete boredom, and how many days passed exactly like that? How would he be spending his time if he weren’t locked up in submission to that storage unit office?
Yesterday maintenance came and mowed my lawn as well as the lawns of every lot in the mobile home park where I live. It took two people a day and a half to perform this task. They do this task once a week. After completing our lawns, they must move on to mow another park’s lawn. They sit alone on these big machines cutting this arbitrary grass.
What do these two stories have to do with each other? If our system wasn’t a system relying on every single person needing to monetize some kind of work, would we need to have storage units? Or grass lawns? How about umpteen clothing brands which overproduce so much clothing that literal mountains of unwanted clothing are stacked in Peru to rot over a long time?
Now let’s go back to this Loneliness Epidemic. What does your city or town look like? I’m lucky to live in one that has lots of lovely parks and greenways. But the majority of my city is strip malls which house people’s jobs like fast food restaurants, home goods stores containing wreaths and plates and glasses which no on on this continent would actually need to produce for several decades, realtor offices for realtors to create jobs to help people who have unnecessary companies that need buildings for the unnecessary companies, lawyers offices for the unnecessary companies that need defending against miscellaneous legal issues with other unnecessary companies and the individuals who they hurt, and every restaurant imaginable.
What if… what if we got together and decided that every single person on this planet simply by virtue of being born on it has an inherent right to be a part of this land that we all share and that since that has already been taken and chains put around those things by people who created this arbitrary concept of money and lay down rules for what we must do in order to get that money that you need for food, clothing, land, shelter, and the ability to live… what if we decided to create a currency (since we can do that and that’s what people did with the currency we currently use) and distribute a specified amount of that currency to every single person born on this planet to ensure their security and need for food, clothes, and shelter?
If you can free your mind from the constraints of the way things are now and allow your mind to imagine, just imagine what would very quickly begin to happen to this world. Would the storage unit employee choose to go to the storage unit office every day? Would I even need a storage unit? (The answer is no.) What then, might that person do with the hours and hours he used to sit and sit and sit at that lonely desk in that desperate and sad office? What might he create? What problems might he solve? After taking a year or maybe even two to decompress and do some self exploration, what might his life and everyone else’s be like? Do you think we would shut ourselves up in our homes and scroll tik tok? Or do you think our cities and towns might become vibrant, living places again bustling with life and people on skateboards, fishing, building things, out talking to one another?
What about the mail?? What about internet and electricty and building the buildings that we do need? How lovely for people to have the capability to make more money than they need to survive by performing tasks that truly need to be performed. The entire power dynamic and structure of our society would change completely. People would take ownership and pride in their work. Extraneous rules on their behavior would be eliminated. Power dynamics would shift from “boss” to employee as the boss is not entitled to the time, energy, and labor of another person.
What is more valuable on this plane of existence than time? It is the one thing that we can never have an infinite supply of. Each of us has an extremely precious allotment of it. Let’s ensure that each human has dominion over their own time, energy, and output.
Let’s be human again.