Reimagining Affluence

At some point in our past, humans lived in smaller communities without the benefit (and the disadvantages) of agriculture.    We clustered in hunter-gatherer communities, and collectively benefited from the labor and resources of our individuality.    Now - if we're lucky - we live in subdivided communities in boxy homes with garages, and we often don't even know the names of our nearest neighbors.  In the world where we live now, this is called affluence - having more than enough of everything money can buy.   But our definition of affluence may not be appropriate anymore. 

The Industrial Revolution failed in its attempt to elevate our lives to a utopian dream.   Instead, it robbed us of sleep and health.   Our technology has failed to provide us with the life of leisure we have dreamed of, too.  In spite of all our developments, we remain completely dependent upon large-scale systems of delivery for basic living mechanisms such as food and water, and in today's climate many of these systems are burgeoning with overuse and are now struggling to keep up. 

It's evident that something's amiss, of course. That's not news.  Our decline is measurable and documented, even as it continues to spiral infinitely downward.  Our pursuit of having it all will be our demise, it seems. Unless something is done. And whatever it is, it must be done now. 

It seems trite and almost inconsiderate, then, to speak of something as simple as imagination at a time like this.  Wouldn't we be best served through activism and sign-holding? Hadn't we better get busy with more legislation on climate change?  Shouldn't we start legal proceedings against the culprits whose corporate wastefulness has helped foster our demise?  No, we already know that more law isn't the answer.  What we need instead is to learn to see the world - and even our definition of it - very differently.  Consuming more resources only to get more stuff isn't likely to lead us anywhere differently from where its already led us, is it? 

Let's start with affluence, then.  What does it really mean to be affluent?   If we judge affluence on economic virtues such as money, then it makes sense to pursue money as a virtue, as the means for affluence.   If affluence is truly defined by how much stuff and money one has, then a significant portion of the world is impoverished and not likely to ever be affluent.   

But what if affluence has nothing to do with an abundance of money?  What if, instead, it has to do with an abundance of time?  In fact, with if affluence is measured in the complete dissociation of oneself with time at all?   In such a mode of living, the immediate needs of food and shelter become paramount, and all other needs fade into oblivion, so want and lack become things unrecognized.  In our world, we never seem to have enough of it - we are perpetually rushed off to some other "tomorrow" thing, forever delaying the happiness we desperately seek.    Our hunter-gatherer ancestors likely had it right all along, and we screwed it up with the advent of notable things like agriculture. 

Let's re-imagine affluence now. Let's set our goal for time, not money. Our future as humans depends on our reinvention of what makes us happy, what we need to live, and how we go about getting it.    This is the heart of native medicine.