This American Life - not the one by NPR

Why is it that nearly everyone I work with seems content to work 50 hours a week in a cube, making good money that they're happy to blow on kids, daycare, Walmart, processed "food," and all things suburban? Why is it they seem satisfied, if not happy, to trade most of their waking hours for corporate meetings, and pepper their vocabularies with acronyms and buzz words?

Virtually everyone I work with on a regular basis has kids, and that's all the hell they talk about. Little Johnny's soccer game, or the big mass birthday party that 30 screaming kids and their suburban parents are going to attend at that giant corporate pizza warehouse where they serve toxic junk food and lure kids and parents with video games and some high school kid dressed as a giant mouse. Little Susie's baby photos are plastered all over the cube and the screensaver, and always evokes the the same "awwwww" from anyone who happens by. I don't have a problem with kids. In fact I love kids and I love families. What I don't like is that phony, predictable, wholly artificial suburban routine that kids get plugged into from conception. Everyone I work with are like cookie-cutter people, just like the suburban tract houses they live in. They aren't bad people, not at all. I just feel like such a misfit. In my eyes they look like puppets, just cogs in the artificial urban machine.

Why do most of my co-workers get so freakishly excited about HTML 5? Or Python scripting? Or getting on the cover of Wired Magazine? How can anyone really give a f-? What do any of these things really mean in the grand scheme of things? We're born, we have a short time to do something in this world, and then we die. How does suburbia and obsession with technology enhance this formula? Technology is just fashion; what's hot today is forgotten tomorrow. We're a society that's never happy with what we have, and I have to admit I'm a victim too. We're always in pursuit of bigger, better, more, and of course it's never ever enough.

Today I went to the Boulder County Fair alone. I had the best time just hanging out with the livestock and watching the people. Dairy cattle. Sheep and goats. Pigs. Chickens, geese, turkeys, ducks. I loved the dusty air, the bits of hay that stick to everything, the smell of livestock, the sounds of pigs grunting, goats bleating, cows mooing, and chickens cackling. I loved all the young kids fussing over their show animals, the cowboys on their horses, and the farmers carting around their prize-winning vegetables. I loved the atmosphere of the Fair. It had an air of excitement, but moved at a human pace. It was so earthy, so gritty, so genuine. It was so unlike cubeland with its padded walls, florescent lights, sterile environment and retina-frying computers. I'm not a machine, dammit. I can't function by a clock, by pretend deadlines and by someone else's control issues. At the office, an "emergency" is when the Director decides ten minutes before his flight to DC, which happens to be at 5PM on a Friday, that he wants a dozen maps whipped up and arranged in a nice electronic PowerPoint and delivered to him before he boards so he can review it during the flight. At the Fair, an emergency is when Bessie the prize-winning milk cow casually walks out of her stall and saunters into the craft barn, knocking over a few tables. Maybe that's not a fair comparison. I realize every job has its ups and downs and that no job is all smiles. Farmers and cowboys certainly have their share of hardships. But the point I'm trying to make is that it's hard for me to get real concerned when the Director waits until the last minute to throw his weight around, but when Bessie throws hers around, well, that's another matter entirely.

I petted all of the animals at the Fair. The cows were smooth and gentle and had sweet dispositions. They always wanted a bite of hay. The pigs were coarse and hairy, and even when they were asleep, legs sprawled like they didn't have a care in the world, they grunted and jiggled continually. Sometimes they'd wake up and come over to nuzzle me, and they loved being scratched. The goats wanted to jump up and look at me with their alien eyes. The rabbits were soft and timid. The chickens were curious and endlessly entertaining. I walked through pee and poop and mud and all sorts of things as I made my rounds, and it was all fine. It was better than fine. It was wonderful to feel something under my feet, which are usually numb from the flat, unchanging landscape of office carpeting. I found myself smiling for no reason at all, overjoyed I suppose from the rush to my senses. At the office the temperature is always the same. The smell is always the same. The lighting, the texture of synthetic surfaces, even those horrid, ubiquitous ivy plants in the office environment never seem to change. Even the people are part of the furniture. Morning and night, day after day, year after year, nothing changes. Unless you have a window, there is no sense of time at all in the office, no sense of life actually happening. No sunrise. No seasons. No rising and falling temperatures, no thunder, nothing. There is only the incessant virtual ticking of the clock, counting down the moments until the next presentation, the next mind-numbing meeting, the next artificial deadline, time to eat, time to go home. It's always "time" for something. The whole system chips away at my soul, like some cold, unstoppable mining contraption slowly boring into the heart of a mountain.

Who ever thought it would be a good idea to teach or share information by projecting slides on a board in front of a room full of people? What happened to the days when people learned by doing? By getting their hands dirty? I've yet to go to a single conference or presentation where I actually learned anything. Sure, I can pick up a few facts, buzzwords or tidbits of something else useless, but that's not learning. Imagine trying to learn how to butcher a pig while sitting with 300 people in an air conditioned conference room sipping your Starbucks and watching some dork in a suit flash a PowerPoint presentation in front of you with "key concepts" highlighted in cutesy graphics and using words like "proactive," "commoditize," "bottomline," "deliverables," and "enabling." Think you'd be able to do it yourself after that? Of course not. You learn to butcher a pig by getting your hands dirty, by following the lead of someone who knows what he's doing.

I realize not everyone wants to learn how to butcher a pig. But by the same token, not everyone wants to waste hours of his life in an utterly meaningless conference either. Knowing how to butcher a pig, at least, would be a real skill. How to look good attending a conference is not.

I may have told this story before, but one of my most vivid memories from my youth was sitting at Memaw's house. It was summer. It was hot. I was a kid of maybe 10 or 12 years, and we were in the living room with the television on. The Golden Girls was on, Memaw was crocheting, and the clock above her television was tick-tocking as it always did. Out of nowhere I was struck by a horrible thought that scarred me for life: I'm wasting the precious moments of my life in front of a sit-com, and that vile clock is just rubbing it in my face with every swing of the pendulum! To this day this is why I don't own a clock or wear a watch. But I have to say, office life gives me that same terrified feeling. I don't want to live my life by some artificial timeline in some artificial environment. Dawn and dusk, the cycle of the moon and the changing of the seasons are all I want and need.

It seems such a tragedy to me that all I want is to have a life a little more like people have always had up until a couple of generations ago, but I can't because I'm trapped in the modern urban machine. To own some land, to grow and hunt my own food, to MAKE my own living is what I want. What I want is the classic American dream - a modest but comfortable country home, wholesome food, clean air and water, to laugh with loved ones. I don't want or need anything Made in China, or piles of electronic junk, or stacks and stacks of material things filling my closets and choking the space in my home. I want to get exercise chopping firewood, skinning deer, butchering a hog, tending a garden, mending a fence, building a barn, grooming my horse, and NOT by setting aside one hour a day to "work out" in an expensive gym with bad music and neon lights and a bunch of gym bunnies parading themselves around and wearing their insecurity on their sleeve.

I just think that we were given all we would ever need in life, but that we've somehow set in motion this culture of always trying to one-up the last generation. I know life wasn't a walk in the park 100 years ago or 500 years ago, but it is really that much better today? Maybe 500 years ago you could get trampled by a bison when you were out trying to get dinner. Last year 34,000 Americans were killed when they were "trampled" in their car by someone else's car. Today we live longer but the last few decades are lived with prescription medications and doctor visits. Today old people are no longer revered for their wisdom, but thrown out as obsolete like last year's computer. We're cutting down the world's forests, polluting the oceans, choking rivers, wiping out plant and animal species, filling the skies with smog, filling our food with mercury and a thousand other toxins. Sick or injured people are left to rot on life support for years. Corporations run the world, and nations are still declaring war on each other; only now we have the technology to cause truly global devastation. Have we really advanced that much? When we consider all we're sacrificing for our big screen televisions, or medications and our overabundance of food, are we really coming out ahead? And perhaps the saddest of all is that the vast majority of the world's population still lives in abject poverty. Only the privileged few get the big screen tv's and SUV's, but the whole world is becoming uninhabitable as ecosystems collapse and resources are depleted. We're like a virus consuming our host like there is no tomorrow - and at the rate we're going, there really won't be.

Okay, I'm tired so I'm off my soap box.