If This Is Civilization, I Want My Money Back

I've been thinking about the way we live and how we've come to believe that it's normal. Back when I was a kid the adults around me would often refer to Native Americans as living on "Indian time". Basically what was meant by this was that they didn't live their lives according to the clock or the calendar but just lived life at their own pace. This way of living pissed the white people off because people who lived on Indian Time were never on time for anything. Things happened when they happened. Things took as long as they took. As I get older, I start to think that Indian Time is a better way to do things.

In modern times we live according to a clock. We micromanage our time down to the minute. We've gotten so used to it that we take it for granted that this is how it has always been. It isn't. Until around the Industrial Revolution there weren't that many clocks. Most people didn't have one in their house until clocks became reliable enough and mass-production made them cheap enough. Before that there were sundials and hourglasses, and later most people relied on the church bells and later on the clocks which came to be on the church towers. The majority of the time people weren't within sight of the clock face itself. Clock-watching wasn't really a thing. Only the rich had watches, and they were really more of a fashion accessory than a reliable timepiece. Days were broken up into morning, noon, afternoon and night. Monasteries and convents kept more precise time in order to keep the rotation of prayers on time. Everyone else lived on what amounts to Indian Time. The church kept the calendar too, for purposes of keeping track of holy days. Nobody else bothered because the church was doing it and anyway, nobody else could read or tell time.

Church Bells

During the Enlightenment there were a lot of ships from Europe going all over the world to the colonies and conducting trade. In order to navigate better, they needed a better, more reliable chronometer. The better to pillage the world with. In 1714 they got it. After that everybody wanted a clock, and everybody was trying to improve it. During Victorian times they became obsessed with timekeeping and punctuality. Clockwork so fascinated them that they wanted to apply that precision to people too. We got alarm clocks in 1847. The first time-clock for workers to punch in was invented in 1888 by a New York jeweler. Ever since then we've become more and more slaves to the clock and our daily schedules have become ever tighter. Now even little kids are on a tight schedule. We start our children young with this routine. The result is that not much of our time is ever self-directed. We don't know how to do that, so when we get time to ourselves we say we're bored and find something passive to do. What it means is that we don't know what to do with free time anymore.

Marine Chronometer

Max Weber noticed the suicide trend after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and we're seeing a similar trend now. It even has a seasonal aspect. 100 years ago DST was introduced and the clock went back an hour in the fall and forward again in the spring of the year. Every year, twice a year, the suicide and accident rates go up when the clock changes. We're finally talking about scrapping that practice. It's just a symptom though. The strict time-keeping overall might contribute greatly to the stress that is killing us fast and slow. Maybe another part of that stress is the idea that time is money.

Does anybody ever get to have fun anymore? Not really. The Protestant work ethic doesn't allow for it. Besides, having fun is a suspect activity. It means you're not working. It means you might have time to have a sex life or just a life. You should be at home sleeping when you're not working, and according to the people who think time is money, you shouldn't even be sleeping because you're not getting paid for it. Besides, there's a clock in the bedroom with you for you to wake up and look at every couple of hours while you can't sleep. Instead of having fun we spend money on things that are substitutes for fun, like consumer products. We eat processed food and watch television instead of going out because we haven't got the time or energy to have hobbies. On top of it we have bills to pay, another thing capitalism brought with it along with consumer debt. Employers don't want to pay us, but they also want us to buy things. The compromise was consumer credit.

The result of all of this is that we neither have the time nor the money to enjoy our lives. Our time is eaten up by either running on the hamster wheel or worrying that you'll starve because you haven't run on it long enough. And modern life has made us sick too. We get diseases caused by stress and poor diet and lack of physical activity because we're sitting in a cubical and we might get our pay docked if we go over break time or get up to go to the bathroom. Employers won't let people work from home because they want them where they can keep an eye on them. The result of that is traffic and yet more of the meager pay they give their employees being eaten up on getting to work. Time that they do not get paid for. It might add another two hours to someone's day or more. And all the while they're burning fuel and pumping the exhaust fumes into the air.

Because time is money, we prize convenience and cheapness. It's how we got all of that plastic garbage floating around in the ocean. Mass production had a part too. Durable goods don't make a profit. Disposable goods do, because they're getting used and thrown away after one use. We get to live in an environment that is being poisoned by the byproducts of our overproduction. It brought us factories that literally produce pollution at both ends. First with the waste products and then with the actual products of manufacture themselves which get used once and then thrown away.

And it kills the relationships in our lives too. How could it not when everything is centered around money and work? Either this prevents us from ever having friends or families in the first place or it prevents us from spending time with them. There are plenty of stories out there about kids who never saw their dads because they were working or latchkey kids who take care of themselves after school because modern life makes it impossible to work and afford daycare for a lot of people. It undermines our ability to form attachment. It undermines families in general. It puts people in a precarious position they can't easily get themselves out of. It's a poverty trap, one of the many pitfalls built into the system. And in place of the real social contact we used to have with each other we substitute social media so we don't have to do it in person anymore. Then that got weaponized against us, first to invade the privacy we had left and then to subvert the political process.

Then there's the modern miracle of chemistry. It brought us things like plastic and petroleum refining and mustard gas. Now we have stronger drugs to forget our sorrows. We also have an opiate epidemic raging out of control and before that we had people manufacturing methamphetamine at home. The factories overseas that produce our consumer crap have polluted their own rivers and land and some of them even accept our garbage back because we ran out of places to put it. Thankfully, however, we banned leaded fuel because until about 40 years ago car exhaust fumes were pumping lead into the air too. Lead, in the air. Aren't we clever? We found a way to make a heavy metal into an aerosol and pumped it directly into the air we breathed for a generation. We put it in originally because it kept engines from knocking. Our cars were making a sound we didn't like, so...SMH. I can't decide if we're too clever for our own good or not clever enough. The jury's probably always going to be out on that one.

We douse ourselves in products  to make us prettier and better smelling and take medication upon medication and then we take supplements of questionable provenance on top of that. We have thousands and thousands of products that we use to deodorize our homes and our cars and make everything shiny. We've gone to such lengths to kill germs that we both reduce our own resistance to disease and then breed superbugs because they have developed resistance. I read recently that about 80% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy. I'm sure that has nothing to do with the additives in all of our food and the high-fructose corn syrup that's in practically everything. All of these miracles of modern life seem to be making us sicker instead of healthier. And then we come up with anti-vaxxer crap and diseases we'd actually driven nearly to the point of extinction have started having outbreaks again. And the way we produce our meat means that we're giving the pigs and chickens and cows antibiotics preemptively and they're helping to create more superbugs - except this time in our food.

Modern industrialized agriculture was touted as the way forward, the way to feed all of us cheaply and efficiently. Chemical fertilizers would boost yields and chemical herbicides and pesticides would keep the weeds from taking over and the bugs from eating the crops. Except the unfixed nitrogen from the fertilizer got washed into the water system and caused algal overgrowth that now threatens to suffocate everything in the rivers and lakes. Except that the pesticides weren't very selective about what they killed, and then we genetically engineered herbicide-resistant crops and their genetically engineered crop was the only thing the herbicide didn't kill. Surrounding non-genetically engineered crops and plants be damned. There are just 12 species we rely on for our food, and with the way we've affected the climate there's a chance those could be threatened through things like desertification or saltwater contamination and loss of arable land or water.

Our water supply is at risk because we're using it up faster than it can recharge and municipal water in American cities has lead in it more often than not. Food and drug safety is a joke, both in terms of additives and adulteration and in terms of basic food safety. Food recalls are becoming routine, and in America they're nationwide because these products are distributed nationwide. Upton Sinclair must be spinning in his grave.

It seems like everything we do now is unhealthy. We've created a completely artificial, disposable lifestyle and started drowning in our own garbage. Worse, the rest of life on earth seems to be drowning in it too. And we're absolutely miserable, probably because we've forgotten what it means to be content. Capitalism and consumer societies don't want us to ever be content. How would they sell all that crap to us if we ever thought what we had and who we were was good enough? We've forgotten about peace and quiet, and privacy and we've put up lights everywhere so we can't even look up at the stars anymore. No wonder we're so unhappy. It seems like almost every single problem we said we were fixing has only gotten worse. I'm not saying we should scrap the whole thing and go back to living in the trees, but maybe the whole capitalism thing and industrialization have created so many more problems than they've solved. Maybe it's time to say the party's over, and that the people who trashed the place should be the ones to clean it up.