Dealing

Life in a city is full of all sorts of complications. Having to go to school, having to work, driving, parking, finding places to live, paying bills, buying groceries, and all this other stuff that is part of modern survival and it all sucks. Historically, or more prehistorically, all any living thing ever did was find food so that it could live to find more food. That was the whole point of life, to keep living. Now getting some grub is relatively easy (compared to prehistoric times), but that isn't considered really living anymore.

When people live in today's world what they mean is being able to enjoy all of these new and strangely intriguing opportunities. We want to be able to try new things and learn about different things that interest us. The value of food is still there. People love food. But people love movies, games, music, art, sports, technology, they love all kinds of other things. What these things do is eat up time which also happens to eat up money. So we need to work to trade time for money, and then trade this money for time.

Time can be spent on all sorts of things like a nice dinner for example. What we are really paying for at this point is not having to cook, not having to clean, being served, and time to sit and eat with whoever it is you are with, including yourself. The time we have with those we love is really valuable. I always love a good date.

We also buy time in physical packages like clothing or technology. We buy the time that people took to design those things, and we also get time to use the things we bought. We buy experiences too, like outings or vacations.

With all of these amazing things we can do with our time it can be hard getting the money we need to buy all the time we want. The more stuff we buy the more we have to work to pay for them, and also the less time you get to spend using the stuff you already bought. Dealing with something like this is hard. We work so hard to pay for simple things like food and shelter that there is little left for fun stuff. So we work harder or change jobs to get more money, and in the mean time we indulge in little things along the way. A little junk food here, some booze there, maybe some smokes, or any vice of your choice.

The honest truth, though, is that the desire to have more than what you have is constant. We are biologically wired to stuff ourselves because food used to be hard to find. When you get some you better stock up or else you won't have enough for the next hunt. We will always want more. That is something we can't get away from. What I think can change instead is what we want more of.

People all want something that is of high value. When houses provide high status people want better houses. Certain brands are considered highly valuable so people hunt those down. Even the high class set various levels of value on certain types of lifestyles. Mostly the value is set on physical stuff. But there is a movement going on right here on the internet. People are starting to value their voice and sense of self-expression. They like making content and sharing it with others. At the least they like contributing a vote for or against something. If things continue to progress this way the value of creating and simply participating in culture may take up much of the consumer space. We will want to partake in online communities more than we want to have physical stuff. Of course sometimes participating means having physical stuff, but a lot of the time it doesn't. We just need to speak or type.

We always want more and dealing with that pressure is hard. I don't think we should change. Wanting more has gotten us to where we are now. We should want even more. We should want to learn more, talk more, create more, engage more, and express more. This is what will make dealing with things easier.