December 3, 2008
- Just because you can make money selling something -
it doesn’t mean that it’s wrong (or stupid) to give it away…
Which sounds obvious , but I seem to have a hard time remembering it. Happiness still comes so easily at the realization of “Oh, I bet somebody could make money off of that!”.
Now, as an art school graduate with a creative writing degree, I may not be the best candidate for being that particular somebody, but the idea that there might be money to be made still causes a little jump of excitement in me.
This excitement is, I think, a deeply buried part of our shared American culture. It’s the foundation of the American Dream, after all, and of capitalism. And it’s not a bad thing, because without the realization that future benefit could come from present efforts, we really wouldn’t have gotten very far at all. It’s our faith in those future benefits that keeps the economy going, and it’s (at least partially) the lack of that same faith that’s causing everything to crash so sharply now.
So I say it’s time we retooled the American Dream. Instead of the idea of money-making leading to personal success and accomplishment, we should instead find a way to support focusing our energies on things that bring benefit to the entire society. Not in a non-individualistic, communist way, but in a way that beneficial to both the individual and the community.
We need some new myths, examples of some new cultural figures who succeed in this way, a Hortio Alger for the 21st century. After all, look who came in to power right around the time he was popular. Our lives are shaped by the stories we tell ourselves, more so than is immediately obvious, and I think some new stories are waiting to be told. Or lived…
Welcome back! This deserves comment… a couple of things spring to mind:
1. Heroes. Only with hidsight have I ever been aware of the role models I’ve had through the years. The unlikely underdog who’s been rewarded for doing the right thing. [If you can keep your head while all around you...] The beautiful freak. We’re not always aware of them, but they do their work.
2. Before FROH was taken down I commented there about how the role of education has changed over the years from my perspective. There was a simple elegance at school: everyone was good at something, and if everyone did what they were good at, everyone’d be happy. Money never came into the equation. The purpose of school was simply to find out what everyone was good at. (Not saying it worked, but it remains a noble aim). The more I think about this the more I like it. It all kind of dissolved at university in the early 90′s.
Comment by speedbird — December 8, 2008 @ 3:59 am
Thanks speedbird, it is good to be back (and actually working this time)!
I think our heroes can be seen as embodiments of the stories we tell ourselves (be they literary or real-life), and that we can learn a lot about ourselves by examining who we idealize. And at the same time, there’s the whole “if you meet the buddha on the road, kill the buddha”, in that if we hold up someone as having achieving our ideals, we also sort of stop going further with them ourselves.
As for education, I know my own college experience (1999-2003) felt a lot emptier than what you’re describing, and I’m surprised to hear it was so recently different. Myself, and, I think, most of my friends at the time, had a much more depressed feeling, in that we (or at least I) felt that doing what we were good at wasn’t going to really get us anywhere.
Of course, I was a creative writing major at an art school, so perhaps the difference lies more in the context. But I see a lot of people my age who feel completely lost as to what to do with themselves after college. We’ve called it the quarter life crisis. And the people who I’ve seen excel the most are those who dropped what they went to school for and came up with a new dream, one born from their real world experience. College seems to have become another hoop to jump through, another part of the system to be shaken free of to find what’s important.
Comment by Ian — December 8, 2008 @ 12:26 pm
> if we hold up someone as having achieving our ideals, we also sort of stop going further with them ourselves.
Cool. In that sense, I guess being unconscious of our heroes until later on is a good thing.
As for school – well, I guess I led a fairly sheltered existence in a highly regarded school in something of a rural backwater, but yes, I had a kind of culture shock when I entered the cosmopolitan world of University and found heaps of talented people who began to say they wanted to be accountants ‘because it paid well’. Personally I put the tipping point around 1990 but I’m sure that’s a view partially clouded by teenage angst/notalgia. [I talk to older people and they insist everything's been downhill since the early seventies...] There are significant forces here to do with recession and the growth of new technologies. But I go on friendsreunited and yes, the girls in our year who wanted to be singers are, it seems, singers now for a living. Which is cool.
I have a saying about the 80′s: everything /may/ have been crap, but people really /cared/ about the crap, and I miss that a lot.
Comment by speedbird — December 9, 2008 @ 4:23 am
Well, maybe it’s that we don’t truly recognize which of our heroes is the one that is most determining our current path until we’re already well along that path and the others have all fallen away.
I agree that people as a whole don’t seem to care very much about anything at the moment, but hey, if it changed that much since the 80′s, there’s a good chance it’ll change that much or more just as quickly. We need to start finding new things that deserve to be cared about, I think.
As for ‘because it paid well’, I’ve had the same thing. I recently took up Zen Buddhist meditation, and my friends have been asking me why. I (only half-jokingly, I suppose) tell them that I want to become enlightened. They just look at me funny, or say ‘I’d rather be rich than enlightened.’ I have a lot of GREAT people as friends (in my humble opinion), but that response does make me a little sad. But hey, everyone’s entitled to their opinion, yeah? That’s what makes our subjectivity so damn great.
Comment by Ian — December 9, 2008 @ 3:16 pm
> until we’re already well along that path and the others have all fallen away.
Well that’s Quantum Mechanics right there ;-D
A personal anecdote: we’re at home watching a DVD of an 80′s TV series which I liked at the time, and which has worn quite well. My spouse points at the screen and says, ‘That’s you!’. And suddenly I realise it is.
> if it changed that much since the 80’s
It certainly feels real to me, though I can find people who disagree.
> We need to start finding new things that deserve to be cared about, I think.
Yes!… Or to rediscover the hidden things.
Comment by speedbird — December 10, 2008 @ 4:43 am