I listened to an interesting interview on NPR yesterday, where the interviewee had been studying happiness and it's causes/ issues and he reported that earning around 70k per year was the threshold for happiness. Earning more does not (on average) make you any happier, whereas earning less does affect your levels of happiness. Quite interesting...
I've been to a few small towns in my time. Mainly in India, the United States and Malaysia. I've also been to and lived in quite a few major cities during my life. What I've noticed is that the people who live in towns and villages that are relatively self-sufficient (i.e, do not need to rely on out-of-town companies employing their residents or supplying their goods) tend to be much, much happier than people in cities. They're friendlier, more welcoming and more supportive of each other. They create tight-knit communities, and achieve a sense of worth within those communities. To the outside world, an Indian basket-weaver in a village is just that: a basket weaver in a village, far removed from what we term 'success'. Same goes for the local carpenter, or the local wood-cutter. But within these communities, these people are important in their own way. The basket weaver makes something important for his community, and they respect him for it. The carpenter provides an important service for his town, and everyone knows him because of it. They build relationships through their services, and feel appreciated. They are important members of the local community, and they feel wanted. They participate in local politics, social gatherings and common pursuits, and are well-rounded, happy individuals, even if they're not the wealthiest of communities.
Somewhere along the line, we lost the plot. The more we gathered into larger groups, the less we mattered as individuals. The less we mattered, the more easily we could be replaced. The more easily we could be replaced, the more we felt we weren't needed or wanted. The more we feel unwanted, the more suicides start happening among us.
There are so many songs, movies, and books about the 'de-humanizing' effects of big city life. No one matters in the city, unless you're in the top percentile of earners and power-brokers. So life is one unending struggle to get there, and most of us fail to do so. The things that are most important in life; simple happiness, love, friendship, empathy, health, a sense of satisfaction with your endeavors...all that is gone, replaced with a desire to see money and power as the supreme form of satisfaction.
In this race to crown 'ambition' as king, we've let so many people fall away and leave this earthly realm with their last thoughts being that nobody wanted them, needed them or loved them. That's what modern life does to you, and that's what modern life is. Big city life. Ambition, greed, and crass materialism. A grind. A grind to make that deadline, earn that buck, buy that phone, laugh at that reality show contestant as he or she cries on set. We've lost our sense of self-worth, so we try to redeem ourselves with more work, more money, more things.....and with the knowledge that 'hey, at least we're better than THAT guy'. That guy who broke down on a show designed to humiliate people for our amusement, that guy who dropped something important and is getting yelled at in the street, that guy who misses the goal from half a yard out. We laugh at failure because it makes us look better by comparison. Our empathy, the one thing Jean Jacques Rousseau said all animals possessed and that primitive humans lived by....our empathy is nearly dead.
Maybe it isn`t because of modernity, scientific or economic advancement. Maybe it`s because we`ve outgrown what we can cope with as a society. We've built truly massive communities. But maybe these communities are too large to sustain, depriving us of the very thing we thought we were gaining by moving into them: security.
We can't change that instantly. No one can. This process started when we started farming and settling land permanently, 10,000 years ago. It isn't going to stop now, or in the near future; it's just that deeply engrained into human thought, and will take a long time to modify. But we don't have to let our natural empathy die the slow death it is currently dying in conjunction with our sense of self-worth. Self-interest is the prime motivator of capitalism, which is the dominant thought process of our age. And capitalism, by extension, wants us to care less about others and focus on ourselves, our needs and our wants, which it will provide to us. But it doesn't have to be that way. Nothing ever has to be the way it is; we just assume it can't be changed, whereas the entirety of human history is basically us changing our own surroundings and creations to better suit us.
We need to get people feeling important, feeling like they matter. They are hollow words to utter in a world where your weight in money is worth infinitely more than your worth as a human being, but we can at least make people feel like they`re not unwanted, and try to make them feel that they're not refuse, not unneeded or more trouble than they're worth. That's a start. And no matter what you may have done in your lives, the fact that you can still feel empathy for other people, however deep down that may be.....that's a beautiful thing. It is perhaps the best part of you. And never downplay that, or imply that you`re not worthy of it when you do something that doesn't agree with it. You can feel it. That's half the battle. The other half is expressing it.
Show people you care, and that they matter. I don't intend on moralizing, or on preaching from some constructed pulpit, but these things can't be put in different terms. Show people you care. That is the best thing you can do.
Thank you, all of you, from the bottom of my heart, for helping restore my faith in humanity.
