The Real Update
Wow! That hit home! Yes, we are! If you don’t believe me, read this post or just consider quitting your job. We are not truly free if we cannot survive when we quit earning money! My money-anxiety is simply a symptom of that society. Moving from working for someone else doing who knows what (I still don’t know what I exactly did in my last corporate job…) to working for myself does not change the underlying system: I am still enslaved by money. Doing something that doesn’t earn money (or lead me closer to it) is still considered a waste of time.
It’s such a screwed up system because it prevents us from using our time for what really nourishes us: Connection and collaboration with other people. We don’t even know anymore how to live this way because it’s been so long since we’ve lived in tribes. Instead, we apply bandaids, live solutions within the system, rather than stepping out of the system. Because we don’t know how to step out of the system. Plus, we cannot do that alone. The very idea of collaboration cannot be lived unless it is in collaboration!
Right now I have the luxury of being able to step out of this culture, at least somewhat, and so I see all this – and feel a bit like an alien because of it. I also feel so much sadness because we are hurting ourselves so much by subscribing to this sick culture. And we’re destroying our habitat while we’re at it. All of this, then, turns into despair because I don’t know how to turn the insights into action, which seems to be a theme in my life right now: I know I want something else, I just don’t know what or how to get it.
So, I do what everybody else seems to do: Ignore the doubt, the awareness, and pretend like building my own business is the answer. When I really would like to just give it away for free. What if those of us who take the entrepreneurial route as a compromise solution would put our heads together and came up with a real solution? A system that works for all, not just the few (if our current system even works for the few…)? Or put differently: Where’s my tribe, people longing to live in a different way and ready to collaborate on trying to figure out how to do that or at least ready to figure out how to get ready, for I am not sure I am ready?
And I am really not looking for people telling me where to go look for my tribe. I’d prefer having people I already know raise their hands: “Yes, let’s do this together!”
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A suggestion: why not incorporate this search into the program of the workshops you offer? Maybe a beginning of developing true collaboration can be a goal there.
After all, most people are on the same search you describe, even if it mostly has been repressed, or even denied. They may just welcome the invitation to work begin to collaborate in your course, on these universal issues…….
I’ve been pondering this recently, too. It keeps on leading me to the earliest human societies, who seem to have been the closest to the form of tribal collaboration you describe. Those tribes were independent from any global society, though with full interdependence within the tribe. Within those ‘globally isolated’ tribes, the members do everything together and for the benefit of the whole closely knit group.
Yet, that eventually evolved into what we have today: pretty much its total opposite: a global community of ‘strangers’, broken families, abolished tribes, and obsession with total control of all…….or war and destruction.
I ask myself why the more humane social structure of long ago was abandoned for what we suffer in now? The answer is very difficult and complex, yet it seems like a basic drive pushing human evolution was survival in harsh natural conditions.
That’s a sad possibility to deal with, maybe saying that we are not the uniquely adaptable species we thought we were; instead, we’re driven by fear more than love and communion. (Maybe that’s what sparked domineering religions to develop, too…)
In short, it seems like one of those unanswerable questions, too complex to resolve by us as humans. Maybe, just as past circumstances seem to have driven us to where we are now, future environments will drive us back to more natural living in upcoming generations.