A Big Scheme.
I cannot help but wonder if everything we have been taught about a successful life is nothing but a big scheme. It seems that only a few and, most often, other people profit from it not us. The perfect life, money and success is dangled in front of our noses and we make decisions to achieve this goal. We follow this scheme not knowing that a goal like this is never achievable because, you’ve guessed it, at the end of any achievement is yet a bigger carrot and a higher goal. At this new level the view might be grander and the life more comfortable but also the wants, needs, toys, responsibilities, chains are bigger. Some of realize this spiral and halt at a certain point, not willing to go further. The understand that it will get worse and that they might not be able to handle more. Bigger means more stress. Some feel stress more than others, some break down under stress, get sick from stress. Others thrive on stress and love its adrenalin rush. Again others go on not to disappoint.
Everyone wants to be the good kid, the one everyone loves and looks up to, the one telling stories of success. We want the approval and do much for it. This goes on and on, until we run out of time, get sick, or until we wake up. Waking up from a pre-set life, we find ourselves in a hamster wheel, trapped, rent and bills keep us moving, round and round, without an end in sight.
I have met very wealthy people who all craved simplicity. This might have been an act designed for me, their landscape designer, but their eyes always lit up when I suggested re-creating their childhood gardens. None of them wanted a success garden; they wanted plants reminding them of their grandmothers, home countries or other childhood memories. It seems that once we have arrived and amassed all this money we thought we need, what makes us feel whole and happy is a memory of emotional safety. Rich people always need more and dream of the next big gain. More seems never enough. ‘Money Can’t Buy Happiness’ is true in so far as happiness is born from self-confidence and emotional security and not from financial security.
Yesterday we returned to Playa Santispac and met Carlos again, the owner of a restaurant on the beach, who told us about illness in the family and the money troubles that had put him in, and a moment later he was singing to himself while sweeping his restaurant and watering plants.
How much do we need? How much money is enough? What will make us feel secure? When will we feel complete? If you ask banks and businesses it’s never enough. The world economy is based on constant growth and growing need. Any signs of a slow down can tip the balance and can lead to a crisis. If consumers feel insecure about their future they start saving and slow down spending, and that hurts the economy, which is dependent on growing demand.
In capitalism, markets are not regulated and consumers are trained to want more. In socialism with its controlled markets, economists try to calculate consumer needs in five-year plans and notoriously fall short. The fall of the Eastern Block and its socialist countries created growth for two decades. Capitalism had won the race and gained millions of new consumers. The world population grows steadily and with it grows demand. Industrialized agriculture aims to feed the growing world population, but renders soils infertile, and without heavy fertilization and pesticide use crops would dwindle. Industries supply food and goods to the consumers, which are produced far away and are shipped around the world at a high cost to our living environment and the planet.
Where will all this end, I am asking myself? Will it help to reduce now and find an economic model, which will actually be valid in the future? A model which will give us a future? Can we imagine a future without growth or maybe with a different kind of growth?
Sweden burns all its trash, harvests the created heat and uses it for heating. The ‘Blue Economy’ (link here to an interview of it’s inventor Gunter Pauli and a Telsa World talk about ‘Blue Economy link here) is a model, in which every single product is either reused or recycled and byproducts or trash of one manufacturing factory are used in another one close by. Currently, Products (conventional or environmentally sound ones alike) are produced far away from where they are being consumed. The rules of the game are profitability and monetary gain for the producers and this is what needs to be changed.
Like in our lives, profits and gains are not everything and the most important human needs like human rights and environmental safety are not part of the current profit calculations. What if we would include in that profit calculation: governmental subsidies, carbon foot print of the materials of a product, trash produced to make the product and the pollution of its production, how far a product travels, labor law violations and so on. What I am suggesting is that a product can harm people not only by harmful ingredients or how it’s made, it can harm the worker, the environment, the consumer. If we are honest this is all embodied in the products we buy and should be part of profit calculations.
Bhutan recently decided, as the first country in the world, that the happiness of its citizens is more valuable than the country’s GDP. The government sent surveyors out around the country to talk to the citizens about their needs and wants. They found out that people want sanitary homes, healthy food, good education, a meaningful job and a strong community. I wonder, if this result only reflects Bhutan, Third World Countries or the entire world. Would we be able to be happy with that or did the ‘Big Scheme’ get to us? Many of us feel empty, hollow really, because of the ‘Big Scheme’. We feel in our bones that something is not right and it all doesn’t make sense. We know that the way we live, produce and consume could invigorate us and our planet instead of depleting us and it.
Just because we invented this kind of production some hundred-fifty years ago doesn’t mean its right and that we have continue on this path. We are constantly reinventing, perfecting and throwing flawed things out. Why not reinvent the rules of the game of economies?
I understand resistance to change because change does not necessarily brings progress. If we accept the fact that we outmaneuvered ourselves, backed ourselves in a corner with this ‘constant growth economy’, we might be able to imagine, innovate and improve this model and come up with an economy that is sustainable and just. Native peoples all over the planet lived for thousands of years without harming their environment.
We could too if we would have the heart to be brave enough.
pix: The headline photo was taken near Stuttgart in Baden Würtenberg, where the Staufer clan ruled the lands of Germany all the way south to Sicily during the Middle Ages from this cone hill topped castle called ‘Hohenstaufen’. Three members of the Staufer dynasty were crowned Holy Roman Emperors.