Then the years passed and the plan proved to be flawed, there were not enough money being taken out of one person's paycheck in order to provide for that person's retirement, and people were living longer than government thought they would live. Now, Social Security is not solvent and my generation will probably not get to ever use it. Whose fault is that though?
Partly is our fault, our society is bred to be spenders. We live off the idea that we can always get a new credit card, charge what we want and pay it later. We believe that eventually we are going to make more money and then when we make more money we spend more money. As I was sitting here thinking why in the hell do we do that? And all I could come up was because we are unhappy.
It is a human condition to get rewarded for things we don't want to do, we go on a diet and after one week of eating only herbs we say: "Well I have been good this week, let me buy me an ice cream." It is something that comes from many many generations ago, we clean our rooms because our parents promise that we will get something in return, the reward for stopping what we were doing (having fun) and doing something we do not like.
And then as we grow older we are marked by our parents telling us how we have to make a living. A child comes with a dream they have, they want to be an artist and the parent will feed that dream until the child reaches a certain age and then the parent will say: "You are too old for that, you need to think about how you are going to make a living. You cannot make a living by being an artist." This gets repeated so much that eventually the child ends up going to college (something they did not want to do) and studying something they did not want to study, and then getting a job they did not want to get.
The child, now an adult, was conditioned to go and work at a job they will never enjoy but that "pays well." So they go to work every day, they are miserable because they don't enjoy what they do, at the end of the work day or the work week they go home in all their misery to find something that will make them feel better. Video games, alcohol, drugs, shopping, food... Anything that will reward them for doing something they did not like to do.
And so there goes the money they make, they believe that they deserve to buy the video games, the alcohol, the drugs, the food, because they did something that was draining and that they did not enjoy. Every few months they have to take a break from their jobs because "they deserve it", "they've earned it", they have worked so hard for so many months that now it is time to spend money on a vacation. But wait! They are still paying off the last vacation that they took, and then what? Well the credit card is almost paid off so we can use it again right now. Then we will get back to our miserable jobs and complain about having to pay them off.
After this I was thinking: "what if the reason we have so many depressed people and angry people wanting to kill others all the time was that we are all so miserable because we are conditioned to do things that we completely dislike?"
Could you imagine a world where the child is never told that they should just make sure they go work at something that will pay them enough to live and instead we tell them to go follow their passion and put focus on that. Tell them that yes it will be hard work but that it is something they can do. Teach them that hard work is not despised when it is something we love to do.
Then probably we would have less alcoholics, less drug addicts, less angry, depressed, and violent people around. Because they would be focus on doing something they love to do and not something they have to do in order to survive and then maybe all these different things they spend money on would never be an issue, that extra money could be put away for retirement. It could be put away to pay off a house so you do not have to worry about paying rent when you are no longer able to work. It could be invested and made more rather than just spent. People could even help each other more rather than compete with each other so much.
Maybe if we learned how to be and remain happy and full of joy then we would not cry and cling for the help of the very people who thrive and advance their lives by making sure we continue to have the same problems.
