Low hanging fruit on offer

Now, while I don't care that much about this particular case, I think that the attitude of leaving value on the table is endemic, something I have written about from various perspectives often enough over the years. So many complain about their current life conditions, yet spend their time doing things that don't improve them - like Netflix.

I see this as a type of victimhood, where people feel that they are oppressed by conditions, but are unwilling to take responsibility and action for themselves - even when there is low hanging fruit for the picking. A large subset of people holding onto all the things they can't do, without picking up anything they can. In many ways it is similar to the rebellion against the "get a job" tagline, with the job being anything of practical value.

This isn't just about gainful employment alone though, it covers all kinds of things, where people complain about not having things like time, energy or loving relationships. Pretty much, while we feel and acknowledge that there is a list of things that are or should be important to us, we spend our time avoiding acting upon that list by satisfying our more immediate and quick-fix desires.

Perhaps it s through this instant gratification habit where everything is delivered on-demand, that we now expect everything to be the same - Overnight health, overnight wealth, overnight love. There should be a pill for everything, right? Well, at least an app where you can swipe to your perfect weight, income and partner. Wouldn't it be nice to achieve perfection of life, without having to do any work for it whatsoever?

I think that a large part of the problem is that because people insist on avoiding even the lowest hanging fruit, they never start along the path of building skillsets. Skills take time to develop and the harder a skill is to obtain, the more valuable it is due to scarcity. One of the scarcest skills in the workplace today is work ethic.

The problem with not developing skills is that there is nothing to trade to generate value, but there are still needs to be satisfied. This creates an economy of extractive reliance that will increase the wealth gap to the top, as fewer participants are able to compete. When there are too many people extracting, the system becomes untenable, which is why the employment rate is so important to a country's economic planning.

A tribe could happily sit and tell stories, but eventually they will starve where they sit. Things need to be done and while not everyone can or should be doing the same thing, a goal of individual value adding allows for individual protection also. The tribal elder build tribe collateral as a hunter or gather in youth and keeps adding value through the dissemination of experience. Even though they can no longer hunt for food, food is provided.

But what happens in an economy where people feel that they no longer have to build any collateral into the community from which they extract value? Is that where we are headed as more people make the decision to Netflix over work?

While in the early days of the change, this might be somewhat sustainable, as that wealth gap increases, technology advances and skill level drops, the consumer capabilities of the unskilled lesson to the point that they become a cost to the producers, which makes them very much disposable. And like most electronics today, it is cheaper to throw away than repair.

Economies are complex things that take a lot of time to fundamentally change when considered from the life of a person, not to mention the time it will take to significantly improve what we have built when there is every incentive for those it works for to keep it the same. However, complaining about it doesn't help, unless there is some action toward changing it. While most individuals believe that they have no power over the system therefore support the status quo, the irony is that if a majority of individuals shifted their behavior toward improvement, things would change and increase in velocity as activity compounds.

Yet, people are so disillusioned by conditions that they sit in place satisfying their immediate needs and actively ignoring the things that not only bring them a greater sense of quality of life, but also are roads to building collateral in the community. As I have said before, one of the biggest issues of the current economic environment, is a lack of ownership of the environment itself. We are renters and the owners are continually looking to increase the rent to the the point that they can evict us and extend their gains. When we as the community have significant ownership of the community, eviction is near impossible.

What I think is going on is that there is a fight on many fronts for relevance in this world, where even if people have not yet recognized or understood it, many feel irrelevant and disposable. This demotivates to try and change the conditions and instead, encourages them to sit down an avoid the best they can. the problem here though is that "the best they can" is going to be a diminishing return, as the passivity will decrease their abilities to build the various forms of capital and therefore, reduce their ability to both satisfy their own needs, or draw upon it from the shared resource pool.

I wonder, while fruit picking may be hard work, would a group of friends with nothing better to do striking out on an adventure into the bush be a bad experience? I wonder what they would discover about themselves and the world along the way and I wonder if after a few months away from their habits, they would want to go back to where they were and pick up where they left off.

There are so many low-hanging points of opportunity that we don't have to work very hard to improve our lives a little. Once there, it isn't a far reach to the next branch. Then the next. It doesn't take much for any of us to change the world, but it does take many of us to make it happen.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]

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