El rincon de Mamá

Our society of creature comforts earned in hours of work, has not brought solace to the worst blight: loneliness. In this day of collective work (“team” is a more politically correct term), why do we feel alone? What kinks our minds make “social networks”, dating organizations, and chats necessary to seek company? Why can’t we relate to the people next door? Often, we don’t even know the people next door although we chat amicably with someone living in Japan.

Our work is often sedentary and solitary although performed in rooms full of people. When the workday is over should we not be presumably tired and in need of rest and solitude? What makes us dash out to the gym or ikebana class? Why do we take up ceramics or basket weaving? And why are we seeking new activities, and nearly always collective ones?

Today most of us work doing just a fraction almost anything, be it an assembly line, engineering drawings, or even booking flights or hotel accommodations. We work in teams, these are not “company”. They merely define the group involved on a single finished product. The members of the team are easily replaceable in their functions, which accentuates the bereft feeling of the human component, no matter how well worded the company policy might be.

These teams might be physically separated, and the work carried on in different locations, even in different cities or countries, and I think this only makes us feel lonelier since we lack the sense of accomplishment, the pride of seeing our finished work.

There is a clear difference between a friend and the person next to you in the trenches. Workmates, war buddies or fellow girl scouts need not be kindred spirits. When people are thrown together, either because the company seated them next to each other, or a flash flood caught them in the same ravine, find a manner to work together. Some even end up being best friends, others will be forever someone they shared an experience with, and nothing more.

Perhaps we seek other activities because we need a time to be with the people we choose. Unless we are of the lucky few working on what would otherwise be a hobby, we might just want to talk about something that is not work with someone we, and not the company, choose. Still, for this, we join groups and become part of another cell.

What is missing in our lives, in our society, when we do not listen to who is sitting next to us because we are calling someone in another town? What is missing, or what are we losing, in our lives when we are trying to race time arranging the future by phone while awaiting the train? Where are we when we walk down the street with our mind and attention on whatever is coming out of the phone? What compels us to take pictures practically of places we will not even see until we down-load them into our computer.

Have we lost the here and now? Is that what makes us forever walk the edge between the individual “I” and collective “we”? Is it all because we cannot decide, or have not the courage to make a stance and choose willingly and face the consequences of our choice? Is it because we don’t want to lose other opportunities and never seem to be able to let go of whatever we have in hand? Is it that we refuse to take the responsibility for our choices and our lives? Is this why we choose to live collectively while developing such concepts as “personal space”in order to insure we remain utterly alone?

We have walked into a trap of our own making. We live in a contradiction: a society of loners, and of unwilling and unhappy ones at that.

I read once, and since then have heard it said on radio and television, that people (including a study on gorilas, which are not people but close kin), from the stone-age tribes onward through Egyptians, and medieval Europeans spent an average 6 hours a day looking for and obtaining food and shelter and “clothes” (included under shelter). That includes travelling to and from food gathering or hunting areas and erecting and repairing shelters.

That means 25% of a 24-hour day and something like 75% of the useful, daylight (sunlight) time. The remainder they spent socializing and resting. Lately I have heard that that figure continues to be true. That modern man spends 75% of his income (corresponding to the time available for work – ruled now by working hour regulations rather than daylight) on food, shelter (mortgage or rent) and clothing. That, at first sight would mean that we are not much better off now than the gorilas or the stone-age tribes were.

The figures stack up well, the statement seems to hold, but we all know that it’s not true, at least, not wholly correct. To extrapolate those figures to our day, we would have to throw in two-day weekends, bank holidays and paid vacations – which probably would wake us up with a start with the realization that we are much better off. But our feeling is that people might have lived harder lives physically, but were living in less hostile environments psychologically speaking.

How we love to gripe! Little thought is given to psychology or hostile environments when hunger looms, or when physical exhaustion dispels qualms only available to us living in comfort, if not affluence. My father used to say that there was a minimum of material wealth or comfort – roughly translating into food and shelter – under which people did not function as beings capable of creative thought, under which the only consideration was to obtain food and shelter. In my father’s view, only once this was assured could man take time to consider good and bad, the convenience or not, what could be rash or suitable, and to braid sense and sensibility into the fabric of his life.

Still, this “packing life full” sometimes brings us to such things as this: A good friend who gave up smoking once confided: “Before giving up smoking I was a reasonably bright man who, when asked a difficult question, lit a cigarette and produced a more or less intelligent answer. Now I am a poor devil who, when asked a difficult question, stands there with his mouth hanging open for thirty seconds while frantically trying to gather his thoughts into an acceptable reply.” Nobody questioned the thirty seconds spent lighting a cigarette, but now, when he has “nothing to do” (lighting the cigarette) those thirty seconds seem symptomatic of lack of wit.

Why? Maybe as a throw-back on the days when there was no time to lose, many things to do, many chores to attend to. The old “the devil finds work for idle hands”? No matter that our great-grandparents, used to physical work, would probably consider most of our lives as “idle”.

Maybe because we are now used to television and films where all hesitations are erased and people react instantly and in a suitable manner. Again, we are set up against fiction, and reality takes a beating.

Today our extra-curricular activities and hobbies allow us to project that part of ourselves that is constrained at work and exercise our taste and fancy – otherwise called “creativity” – in a manner which is pleasing to us and not disruptive for general run of organised work.

Is it only another way of not being alone with our thoughts? Is this sane? I have smy doubts.

Is this why childhood is no longer the happy and protective land I remember? The world indeed has changed, and while I have never been Polyanna I am shocked this change has made everything that was sweet become bitter. All the landmarks upside down.

Just as an example, let me mention that when I was a child the circus was considered a world in which the actors and artists were happy to work as acrobats and trapeze artists or clowns. Then the circus became a difficult world in which hard feelings, envies and hatreds ran freely while the artists strove not only to be great in their specialty, but cruel antagonists intent in their survival. The countryside was beautiful, sunny, the farmers led healthy lives. Now the emphasis is on its difficulties, the long hours of labour, the high costs, the mean rewards. And these are only two examples. It seems what was taken positively before, now is considered negatively. Neither is completely right.

It is not that I think all was sugar and roses and now it isn’t. I think things were pretty much as they are now, but the emphasis, of those living in those worlds, and especially of those looking into those worlds was totally different.

Is this applicable to childhood now? When I read interviews with young people of many walks of life, I often think young people are intent in giving themselves a traumatic childhood. It must mean an extra point or two when trying to call attention to themselves if they can plea psychological hardship, or whatever.

Still, thinking about the lives they live, maybe they have been cheated out of their childhood, the type of childhood that grants the personal resources needed to lead happy and fruitful lives. Maybe they are right in saying they have suffered traumatic childhoods, although the trauma and the drama is not what they claim. The trauma might be just that they have not had a childhood they can recognise as such.

No wonder people do not feel quite happy or satisfied. How can be anyone be happy in a place in which, one way or another, they are not wholly present. Maybe it is a question of the parallel universes science fiction has evoked more than once.

Still, if frustration is here and now… can modifying the where and when help mitigate it?

My son once said that people are unhappy because they try to fix their past by mortgaging their future, and lose their present in the doing. His view, which makes sense to me, is that the present is the only real thing we have. The past is gone and little can be done to fix whatever we think we did wrong or wronged us. The future does not exist yet; but by ignoring the present, today, we can effectively spoil, not only the present but the future as well.

How can we enjoy the world we are so prone to ignore? How can we pretend to protect it? Is its protection just another gambit to gain control? Nothing can be protected if it is not controlled. Think of it: a canary is under full protection, and fully controlled, jailed, at mercy of when we choose to feed it or to take it out into the breeze. A baby is fully protected, and fully controlled. A child escapes our control and protection at times. Wild animals, if free, are beyond our control and protection. And we want to protect – control – the world?

Is it because we have been taught that adult behaviour means doing what is suitable and convenient? Is it because we have to be “reasonable” and nobody has bothered to define “reasonable”. How can we seek happiness in a world in which we don’t stop long enough to enjoy? Is it because we can’t stop because stopping is related to wasting time? Are we trying to postpone gratification as sensible thing to do?

We have deceived ourselves into thinking that an over-stuffed life, full of activities that do not really interest us, a radio tuned in all day, a television playing, the internet spewing keeps us abreast with the world and in the world… and all it really does is to make us feel lonelier, sadder and more helpless when we take stock of our lives.

This happens in all walks of life. A child’s day today is appalling. They have schedules that would ground top executives in any great firm. School is prolonged into extracurricular activities which go from sports to foreign language, music, art, karate and theatre… but that no longer are “enjoyable” because they become competitive and exacting.

The children today move in such a tight grid they can barely allow themselves to sneeze and blow their nose except when it is allowed, or they might miss their following connection. A rat race in every way worked out for the child’s future benefit. Surely his future will be better if he speaks English, French and/or Chinese, plays basket ball or is adept at roller skating, plays the violin or the piano. His future will surely be great… if he manages to get there. But he will have lost out on childhood. The funny (or sad) part is that the future is only reached through today.