Some
Of My Thoughts
When I lived in a developing country in Asia
many years ago, I looked towards the developed West and was wrapped in envy and
a sense of inadequacy.
Middle class westerners had plenty of material
goods, excellent physical infrastructure, plentiful jobs, rules of conduct that
were respected, guaranteed incomes, predictable lifestyles, excellent
healthcare and a sense of entitlement that the world and their governments owed
them a good quality of life. I felt shafted. In my part of the world we had
import bans, shortages of most goods, local industry not worth talking about,
corrupt governments, patchy healthcare, crumbling colonial infrastructure, and
wars to unsettle us.
What I hadn’t counted on was that the West was
aging and the East was young, vibrant and bound to burst out of its fetters
soon.
What I also did not realize was that the
fortress walls that had cloaked the advanced West from the backward East (aka
barriers to trade) were about to fall off their artificial foundations.
So I came west with a lot of optimism, and
after a honeymoon period, I saw the tide begin to turn. Now I live in the West
and over here there is crumbling infrastructure, governments mired in debt,
high unemployment, healthcare and pensions under siege, industry shrinking and
going east, no guarantee of incomes or of employment.
The
only affluent middle class here will soon be retired public service employees
on indexed pensions, who got out early and have only declining healthcare
services to contend with. I still feel shafted. And one can never go back.
The lesson from this radical shift is that
there is no free lunch. I wrote down my learnings:
1) Walls erected artificially will come down.
2) Inflated benefits will convert into piles of debts – phone any western
government!
3) The rich will exploit the poor, always. One can only be rich if someone
else is poor. It’s a relative thing. It happened in the Middle Ages, it
happened in Dickensian times, it is happening now. It will happen whenever
vigilance and resistance is dropped.
4) Standards only apply if there is energy and discipline to uphold them.
5) We will work until we die. “Man will earn his living by the sweat of
his brow,” still holds true today, instead of “Man shall retire to a beach at
65 and stare into the sunset with a margarita, while money collects in his bank
account.” Maybe this latter mantra works for a privileged few who will die of
boredom, but not for the majority of us. Professor Emeritus on full pay has
gone out of fashion; temporary worker on minimum wage is in.
6) Our children will be worse off than us because we did not teach them
survival. A well fed stomach does not make one lean and mean. A survivor is
lean and mean. And as the world lurches over the 7billion mark heading towards
10billion in the next 50 years, only the lean and mean will survive
7) There are no guarantees in life: guaranteed, employment, guaranteed
government largess, guaranteed lifestyle – all myths that we created for
ourselves in a post war boom when happiness was at a low base.
Having fortified myself with these seven
pillars of wisdom, I realized that it really does not matter where you live
these days. Each place brings its own set of challenges; each challenge
enriches the soul.
The pursuit of happiness is a myth. Ours will
be the pursuit of experience.
Now, I finally get it. But I did I have to
travel all the way from east to west to find out?
Shane Joseph
NorthumberlandView.ca
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