Americans are supposed to worry that many people from Asia work 12 hours a day and send their kids to school and study for even longer. This is supposed to scare us into changing our ways like the Sputnik satellite did in the 1950’s.

How can we compete with them globally? moan the angst-mongers.

Their obvious answer—obviously stupid—is that we need to send our kids to school six days a week, 250 days a year, and that we need to get used to 10 hour work days at the very least.

Without any consciously racist intentions, I say to hell with those “Asian” lifestyles! We do not need to live like them—ever! Humankind did not invent tools and wheels and technological wonders in order to force himself to work twelve hours a day. If that’s where technological society is headed—running ever faster on the gerbil-wheel of work and study—then it’s time to chew our way out of this plastic terrarium.

Hard work is fine, but extra hard work is cheating. It’s the exact same thing as product-dumping, where a county temporarily exports goods at an unsustainably low price just to eliminate the competing sellers from other nations.

People that work or study 12 hours day know that that’s not a sustainable lifestyle. Many will admit that they just do this for their kids, so that they will not have to work as hard or as often as they have—which is an admission that theirs is no way to live!

Unsustainability is not the only similarity between extra hard work & study and product-dumping. There is also the issue of deception and false outcomes. That cheap Chinese product isn’t really that inexpensive—it’s a deception. And we pay for that deception later when the honest competitors are eliminated.

A similar deception occurs in our education system. Studying hard allows students with no cultivatable aptitude for a particular subject to excel and “outperform” (in grades, never in classroom discussion) the student with a natural aptitude and love for a subject, but who only studies that knowledge on the whims of his/her love for it.

The economic deception of extra hard work is even worse than the educational deception of studying extra hard. The promised reward of extra drudgery is a deferred “good life” for the children. And yet, prior to age 14, what really makes kids’ lives better is leisure time shared with enthusiastic parents, not stuff purchased through hard work away from the home, especially work which leaves the parents in an unenthusiastic mood when they are briefly home.

(True, after age 14, the kids just want your money and wish you were at work more often, but that’s a digression…)

Enough human product dumping! When you sell your work you’re selling your life, so if you’re willing to work extra hard for less you are literally cheapening the value of human life, like a murderer.

Children should not be allowed to study more than two hours a day after school. Any child caught studying (or needing to study) more than two hours will be expelled into a remedial program designed to instill a genuine love and understanding of knowledge such that rote learning is not necessary at all. Oh wait, that’s what education is supposed to be! Well then, consider it extra intensive education or just a change of teachers…

The point is that the students who DON’T need that “extra education” (inadvertently paraphrasing Pink Floyd here!) are not penalized by the education system as they are now.

In the workplace, everyone should bust their ass for thirty-five hours and only thirty-five hours per week—it was good enough for President Reagan, so case closed. Anything after thirty-five hours better be overtime with a damn good excuse from the boss for keeping me home from my real life.

No more deferring lives for fictitious future good lives—given our levels of technology and productivity, the good life is either here and now or it simply cannot exist. Our parents and grandparents busted their ass and risked their necks so that we, their descendants, could enjoy the good life.

We owe it to them to show that their efforts were not in vain. We owe it to them to stop working extra hard.

(c) 2011, Alan Brech

Today I tried to rent a bicycle but couldn’t because the Christmas season had been so good, all the used bikes they normally rent had been sold.      

Damn this recovery! 

I miss the recession.  Recessions are underrated. Nay, recessions are awesome!

Back in the good old days, roads and stores were empty and merchants were even more fake-friendly.  During the Golden Age of 2007 when gas prices went near five dollars per gallon, I owned I-95 and I-75! They were mine. Like that Irish guy in Braveheart —they were my highways! (insane grin)

And so much less life-threatening.  When you factor in what’s called “safety” (i.e., a nice way of denoting the absence of blood and guts… this time) and factor in the luxury of a highway all to yourself, five dollars per gallon is a great deal if you don’t drive much. Some of those roads are actually pretty without people like us driving on them.

 Of course, nothing is more beautiful than a utilitarian object no longer in use. Nothing except flowers and sunsets and animals and happy people and astronomical phenomena and art and music and good stories—but that’s a digression, the point is, old farm equipment can look gorgeous as long as there’s not a farm there anymore.

More depressing than the traffic of an economic recovery is what people actually do with the “extra” money they earn—they chew up land and wilderness for schlocky housing. They burn up gas and oil for taller and taller cars so that they can see over everyone else’s Tall-mobile.

Remember when the recession started and we all got 500 bucks in the mail from the government? I could use another 500 right about now, not for any particular reason, but just because I like 500 dollars. It’s hard to feel bad with 500 dollars.

But I would never spend it on an SUV or anything else that supposedly helps the economy. I just want it to buy enough time to explore the woods that almost got chewed up during the last economic bubble-boom.

And drive home on nearly empty roads past quaint abandoned businesses:

Garrison Surf-Boards?  What were they thinking?

(c) 2011 Alan Brech