Step Away From The Machine, Man…

I just came in from a surf session. It was one of those rare, great sessions when you find clean takeoffs on tricky waves, you read the waves properly, make all your cutbacks, and ride clean lines for long, smooth rides. Today, the waves were sporadic, with a lot of time between good sets, so leaving plenty of time to sit outside and think.

I have been thinking a lot lately about productivity (or, more specifically my own lack of productivity).

When we left in January, we had just finished almost five years of remodel and ER work non-stop, which was by far the most productive period of my life so far. Every moment of our days was filled with either helping people in the ER or building something physical, so when we left the US it was a bit like wandering off a cliff into some weird void. It felt strange to have no demands or requirements on our time.

I know we both struggled with this, trying to keep moving, to keep up the pace we had maintained for the last five years. It was so uncomfortable (excruciating at times) trying to relax, to be comfortable, just to slow down and enjoy the time we had created for ourselves.

And, oh shit, the guilt…

So strange to feel guilt for living the reward that you have worked forty years towards.

But I did feel the weight of that guilt. Excessively.

What right did I have to punch out of the machine at fifty-five years old? How could I justify being so selfish as to leave my work behind and live some meager, nonproductive life abroad, away from the people and country that had provided me with so much?

It has taken me eight months to really grasp how fundamental a hold the societal brainwashing of the “American Dream” has on us (has had on us). I had to step away from it, to see it from a different outside perspective, before I could clearly see the whole picture. We live in a society that promises our entrance into Nirvana. Just as long as we buy a house, start a family and career, work our fingers to the bone until age sixty-seven when we can retire with the gold watch, the pension, our social insecurity benefit, and a forty-foot diesel pusher motorhome that invariably ends up rotting next to the garage.

But, it really doesn’t work that way. They made the promise of the “American Dream” (of the grand Nirvana of retirement), and it was there, like a carrot on a fast-growing stick, unattainable, to control us. It is, every generation, becoming a harder and harder carrot to catch.

It starts at a very early age, with Saturday morning cartoons and the commercials for all the cheap plastic crap we are propagandized into believing we need in order to be happy children. Our competitive “keeping up with the Jones’s” starts here, and is reinforced throughout our lives by advertising, purchasing, and our dopamine rewards system providing us with pleasant, numbing little squirts of happiness. So we need to find a career. Then we do, and we are informed that we will work “this many” hours, for “this many days”, months, years, etc… until, with our health failing and our back bent, we are “allowed” to collect what we have been saving for all those years.

We have finally attained the carrot, but it seems wooden and hard to chew by now.

And we focused on chasing the carrot for so long, that we failed to spot the propaganda we have been feasting on along the way:

America wants us to believe that we have the best healthcare in the world. Yes, it is modern, and our medical professionals are well-trained, but we rate very poorly in the world for our healthcare system and our personal health. As individuals, we pay more than any other country for a healthcare system who’s quality and accesibility is consistently ranked in the bottom third of the world.

We are led (by the nose) to believe that we have the best quality of life, what with all our freedoms and access to all our cheap plastic crap to parade around in front of the Jones’s, but we never rate in the top twenty countries for quality of life anymore.

They hope to sell us on the idea that America is a safe place, but that outside the map of our country there be monsters. By all means use your ten days of vacation to load up the family truckster and travel to Niagara Falls (only the US side, though), but do not cross our borders. Its a big dangerous world out there. We no longer rate above the top twenty-five countries for safety, and our incidence of gun violence is greater than the next country by nearly a factor of three (we are number one on this one).

Who is the dangerous one?

We are fed the idea that we have access to all the best quality and freshest foods, but that is not what Americans are eating. We are in the top two countries for caloric intake, and the highest consumer of prepackaged and “fast” foods, placing us securely in the top ten of the worlds unhealthiest countries.

And, all this “quality of life” we are expected to swallow, added to the fact that the US is the country that gives the second-least amount of vacation in the (entire) world, leads us to be one of the most depressed countries, with the worst mental health ratings in the world.

It is no wonder why this is, when we are being propagandized on a continuous basis: We have corporations competing for our dollar by selling us everything we could never need, on credit, just to get our fix.

Keep us hooked on sugar, fat, and salt, to keep us going to the doctor, to keep us needing the health insurance, to keep us hooked on the paycheck, to keep us “healthy”. Keep us scared, to keep us docile, to keep us from looking around for better. Keep us consuming, to keep us staring at our new devices, to keep us distracted, to not notice they are keeping us under control.

The government and the media provide a constant barrage of fearful impressions of the world, so the workers will stay home, and keep the cogs of this giant American machine grinding away.

We are pushed to the limit just to live, not to mention get ahead. We live in an efficient machine that creates a self-perpetuating cycle: Want something – get it – squish of dopamine – feel good – want more – get less – work harder – give up more – less dopamine – be depressed – give up on individual presence – keep plodding along – retire – fall over on the couch in exhaustion – die. But we all get lost in the rumblings and movement of the great human-powered machine that is America: The superpower and big brother to the world.

The killer of presence.

We just don’t know that we are lost, because the machine is fucking fantastic at distracting us from the truth, with the media, and our gadgets to stare at, and our cozy little blankets of security safe from the hellish and threatening world outside our machine.

The “American Dream” is perpetuated, nurtured, and cultivated as we grow older, until the weight of the entirety of it is unrecognizable on our bent and overloaded backs

(So said the camel as they were loading straw).

Well, we punched out. And I refuse to feel guilty about it.

In twenty-five years, Tam and I have visited twenty-six countries, and we have seen so much (not all good, but mostly). What we have seen was different people, with different ways of living, with varying degrees of presence, calm, and satisfaction with the path that their footsteps trace on the world. One common observation I can’t refuse is this: The more developed a country (or region, or people), the more they tend to slip into this pattern like we do in the US. But, the simpler the existence – the closer life is lived to the basics of being human – the more present and lighthearted people seem. The more present and lighthearted the people are, the healthier, safer, more family and community-oriented the whole becomes.

There are very few places not permeated to some degree by American culture, but the places where it is least pervasive seem to contain the happiest and most present people.

I am deeply grateful that I have punched out now. The guilt still sneaks in over lazy morning coffee sometimes, but it gets easier every time to send it skulking away, back to America where it lives. I meditate much more regularly now (still could do a lot more), I engage in physical activities that clear the mind, I am getting back in better physical condition again, and I am being present. I am more present with Tam lately, and our love is growing again (every day, she becomes ever more my Princess Buttercup).

We walked for an hour last night, down the beach, to get dinner at the far end of town. We talked the whole way about how time seems to have slowed down for us both. As I said in a previous post “The Difficulty of Presence”, one of my favorite quotes comes in here:

“A lifetime can last a moment, or a moment can last a lifetime. It is a question of presence”.

I feel now that by punching out, by walking away from the “American Dream”, and finally recognizing the propaganda for the control that it was, I can say my days are longer, fuller, and full of so much more presence, awareness, and gratitude for this life.

I noticed, with no surprise, that the machine has not stopped running. Pulling this particular piece out of the works didn’t bring it to a screeching halt. I don’t believe that it even made the slightest pause or misfire. It will go on without me as it always has:

I am growing again, and time is slowing. My moments are starting to last closer to a lifetime than slipping by unnoticed and wasted. I realize that I have a finite amount of time on this planet, and would love to know I am doing everything I can to live the shit out of this thing before I go. And, I am happy that I could start now, before failing health and my arthritic old body start to make adventuring difficult. I smell the sea and the flowers (and the bad smelly things on the side of the road as well), I see the beautiful light as the sun surrounds the clouds at sunset, I walk in the pouring rain, I hold my lover’s hand, I appreciate the great waves I catch, and I feel every footstep and every breath for the gift that it is.

I guess I might be becoming a better person? Or maybe I should say that I feel like I am slowly becoming the older person I always envisioned myself to be, but was unable. This is reason enough for me to punch out, to slip out the exit door from the machine and walk away.

I may not be productive in the sense of the “American Dream”, but this seems so much more productive, doesn’t it?