Mar 11, 2013

By David Cain

Well I’m in the working world again. I’ve found myself a well-paying gig in the engineering industry, and life finally feels like it’s returning to normal after my nine months of traveling.

Because I had been living quite a different lifestyle while I was away, this sudden transition to 9-to-5 existence has exposed something about it that I overlooked before.

Since the moment I was offered the job, I’ve been markedly more careless with my money. Not stupid, just a little quick to pull out my wallet. As a small example, I’m buying expensive coffees again, even though they aren’t nearly as good as New Zealand’s exceptional flat whites, and I don’t get to savor the experience of drinking them on a sunny café patio. When I was away these purchases were less off-handed, and I enjoyed them more.

I’m not talking about big, extravagant purchases. I’m talking about small-scale, casual, promiscuous spending on stuff that doesn’t really add a whole lot to my life. And I won’t actually get paid for another two weeks.

In hindsight I think I’ve always done this when I’ve been well-employed — spending happily during the “flush times.” Having spent nine months living a no-income backpacking lifestyle, I can’t help but be a little more aware of this phenomenon as it happens.

I suppose I do it because I feel I’ve regained a certain stature, now that I am again an amply-paid professional, which seems to entitle me to a certain level of wastefulness. There is a curious feeling of power you get when you drop a couple of twenties without a trace of critical thinking. It feels good to exercise that power of the dollar when you know it will “grow back” pretty quickly anyway.

What I’m doing isn’t unusual at all. Everyone else seems to do this. In fact, I think I’ve only returned to the normal consumer mentality after having spent some time away from it.

One of the most surprising discoveries I made during my trip was that I spent much less per month traveling foreign counties (including countries more expensive than Canada) than I did as a regular working joe back home. I had much more free time, I was visiting some of the most beautiful places in the world, I was meeting new people left and right, I was calm and peaceful and otherwise having an unforgettable time, and somehow it cost me much less than my humble 9-5 lifestyle here in one of Canada’s least expensive cities.

It seems I got much more for my dollar when I was traveling. Why?

A Culture of Unnecessaries

Here in the West, a lifestyle of unnecessary spending has been deliberately cultivated and nurtured in the public by big business. Companies in all kinds of industries have a huge stake in the public’s penchant to be careless with their money. They will seek to encourage the public’s habit of casual or non-essential spending whenever they can.

In the documentary The Corporation, a marketing psychologist discussed one of the methods she used to increase sales. Her staff carried out a study on what effect the nagging of children had on their parents’ likelihood of buying a toy for them. They found out that 20% to 40% of the purchases of their toys would not have occurred if the child didn’t nag its parents. One in four visits to theme parks would not have taken place. They used these studies to market their products directly to children, encouraging them to nag their parents to buy.

This marketing campaign alone represents many millions of dollars that were spent because of demand that was completely manufactured.

“You can manipulate consumers into wanting, and therefore buying, your products. It’s a game.” ~ Lucy Hughes, co-creator of “The Nag Factor”

This is only one small example of something that has been going on for a very long time. Big companies didn’t make their millions by earnestly promoting the virtues of their products, they made it by creating a culture of hundreds of millions of people that buy way more than they need and try to chase away dissatisfaction with money.

We buy stuff to cheer ourselves up, to keep up with the Joneses, to fulfill our childhood vision of what our adulthood would be like, to broadcast our status to the world, and for a lot of other psychological reasons that have very little to do with how useful the product really is. How much stuff is in your basement or garage that you haven’t used in the past year?

The real reason for the forty-hour workweek

The ultimate tool for corporations to sustain a culture of this sort is to develop the 40-hour workweek as the normal lifestyle. Under these working conditions people have to build a life in the evenings and on weekends. This arrangement makes us naturally more inclined to spend heavily on entertainment and conveniences because our free time is so scarce.

I’ve only been back at work for a few days, but already I’m noticing that the more wholesome activities are quickly dropping out of my life: walking, exercising, reading, meditating, and extra writing.

The one conspicuous similarity between these activities is that they cost little or no money, but they take time.

Suddenly I have a lot more money and a lot less time, which means I have a lot more in common with the typical working North American than I did a few months ago. While I was abroad I wouldn’t have thought twice about spending the day wandering through a national park or reading my book on the beach for a few hours. Now that kind of stuff feels like it’s out of the question. Doing either one would take most of one of my precious weekend days!

The last thing I want to do when I get home from work is exercise. It’s also the last thing I want to do after dinner or before bed or as soon as I wake, and that’s really all the time I have on a weekday.

This seems like a problem with a simple answer: work less so I’d have more free time. I’ve already proven to myself that I can live a fulfilling lifestyle with less than I make right now. Unfortunately, this is close to impossible in my industry, and most others. You work 40-plus hours or you work zero. My clients and contractors are all firmly entrenched in the standard-workday culture, so it isn’t practical to ask them not to ask anything of me after 1 p.m., even if I could convince my employer not to.

The eight-hour workday developed during the industrial revolution in Britain in the 19th century, as a respite for factory workers who were being exploited with 14- or 16-hour workdays.

As technologies and methods advanced, workers in all industries became able to produce much more value in a shorter amount of time. You’d think this would lead to shorter workdays.

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

Western economies, particularly that of the United States, have been built in a very calculated manner on gratification, addiction, and unnecessary spending. We spend to cheer ourselves up, to reward ourselves, to celebrate, to fix problems, to elevate our status, and to alleviate boredom.

Can you imagine what would happen if all of America stopped buying so much unnecessary fluff that doesn’t add a lot of lasting value to our lives?

The economy would collapse and never recover.

All of America’s well-publicized problems, including obesity, depression, pollution and corruption are what it costs to create and sustain a trillion-dollar economy. For the economy to be “healthy,” America has to remain unhealthy. Healthy, happy people don’t feel like they need much they don’t already have, and that means they don’t buy a lot of junk, don’t need to be entertained as much, and they don’t end up watching a lot of commercials.

The culture of the eight-hour workday is big business’ most powerful tool for keeping people in this same dissatisfied state where the answer to every problem is to buy something.

You may have heard of Parkinson’s Law. It is often used in reference to time usage: the more time you’ve been given to do something, the more time it will take you to do it. It’s amazing how much you can get done in twenty minutes if twenty minutes is all you have. But if you have all afternoon, it would probably take way longer.

Most of us treat our money this way. The more we make, the more we spend. It’s not that we suddenly need to buy more just because we make more, only that we can, so we do. In fact, it’s quite difficult for us to avoid increasing our standard of living (or at least our rate of spending) every time we get a raise.

I don’t think it’s necessary to shun the whole ugly system and go live in the woods, pretending to be a deaf-mute, as Holden Caulfield often fantasized. But we could certainly do well to understand what big commerce really wants us to be. They’ve been working for decades to create millions of ideal consumers, and they have succeeded. Unless you’re a real anomaly, your lifestyle has already been designed.

The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulging during their free time, and somehow just getting by.

Is this you?

Two weeks ago I would have said hell no, that’s not me, but if all my weeks were like this one has been, that might be wishful thinking.

Jan 23, 2013

Hipsters? Couponers? Extreme Retirees? Expats? Who’s living the good life with minimal spending?

Jan 20, 2013

I started noticing that my Aveda shampoo doesn’t lather when washing my hair sometime before the New Year’s 2013. Today I had a minor scratch on my finger and when I put my hand under the shower water to check if it’s warm enough I felt a sting as if someone poured acid on my wound. The skin is itchy when just out the shower. Also the water tasted very bitter to the taste, of course I won’t drink it. Earlier today my father complained that he scratched lightly a red dot on his forearm and it opened as a wound and a bit of blood came out as if he was scratching it for some time. My mother also noted that lately her shampoo doesn’t lather up. I began noticing that the Aveda shampoo we use to wash every clients hair at our barber shop started finishing way quicker than a month ago. When I asked the employees they said that one squeeze into the hands doesn’t lather up.

My advice: Avoid skin contact with New York city tap water as much as possible! It is toxic to the level that is visibly a health hazard. If you took showers every day, cut down to a minimum per week (I know it is hard to do but it is better to be healthier than cleaner). Drink and cook only with natural spring water (NOT purified but spring water). Purification does not remove fluoride. Subscribe to bi-weekly natural spring water delivery. You will notice that the taste of your tea/coffee and cooking will become better. Avoid Poland Spring water delivery since they add a small level fluoride into their natural spring water. I use Crystal Springs at $4.99 per 5Gallon bottle. Brush your teeth only with fluoride-less toothpaste, I prefer Toms of Maine since it’s both affordable and healthy.

Oct 1, 2011

Jun 19, 2011

This is a repository of facts about humans. Please come back to this page from time to time to see most recent facts.

• Our brains are designed to seek out novelty, but too much information can overwhelm them; we are generally better at assessing risk when listening to Bach than with the chatter of TV news.
• Men’s brains tend to shut down after they have proposed a deal, waiting for the response. Scans show that women brains continue to be active, analysing whether they have done the right thing.
• Humans are the only animals that can delay gratification, a function of the prefrontal cortex. However, the prefrontal cortex only matures after the age of 30, and later in men than women. Before that, we are more likely to seek immediate gratification.
• If groups of young men are shown pornographic pictures of women and then asked to choose between safe and risky investments, compared with men shown non-pornographic pictures they choose far riskier portfolios.
• Our brains reward social interaction with the release of a chemical called oxytocin. It makes us feel good when we follow the herd. Stock market bubbles are one likely result of this.
• Our brains are wired for human oxytocin-mediated empathy (or HOME). We are biologically stimulated to love (or hate) what is most familiar to us. We are built to form attachments, to value what we own more than what we do not own. This fact skews the rationality of all our investment decisions.
• If stomachs did not have a lining of mucus, your stomach would digest itself.
• There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
• It takes about 60 seconds for a human blood cell to make a complete circuit of the body.
• The average person will shed 40 pounds of skin in his/her lifetime.
• 1/15th of a pint of blood is pumped with every heartbeat.
• Humans share 98.4% of our DNA with chimps. In comparison, we share 70% of our DNA with a slug.
• The lightest baby to survive weighed a mere 283 grams.
• On average, women say 7,000 words per day while men manage just over 2,000 words.
• The human brain uses 20% of the body’s energy but is only 2% of the body’s weight.
• On average, humans lose 40-100 strands of hair per day.
• A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100mph.
• A cough can reach the speed of 60mph.
• The average person will drink about 16,000 gallons of water in his/her lifetime.
• It takes 17 muscles to smile while taking 43 muscles to frown.
• The human brain is composed of 75% water.
• Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.
• More germs are transferred while shaking hands compared to kissing.
• There are approximately 550 hairs in a person’s eyebrow.
• The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue.
• A person produces 10,000 gallons of saliva in an average lifetime.
• The hardest bone in the human body is the jawbone.
• The number of eye blinks varies greatly from about 29 blinks each minute if you are talking to someone to only 4 blinks each minute if you are reading.
• The average human blinks 25 times per minute.
• A nail takes around 6 months to grow from base to the tip.
• Each second 10,000,000 cells die and are replaced in your body.
• Your liver performs over 500 functions in your body.
• The average person spends 1/3 of their lifetime sleeping.
• More germs are transferred when shaking hands than kissing.
• The average person (from western culture) consumes 10 liters of alcohol per year.
• Roughly 75% of people who play the radio in their car sing along to it.
• Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.
• Your right lung takes in more air than your left one does.
• The human brain is composed of 75% water.
• 70% of the composition of dust in your home is made up of shed human skin and hair.
• The tooth is the only part of the human body that can’t repair itself.
• One human hair can support 3kg.
• Humans are the only animals that cry tears and blush.
• It takes the interaction of 72 different muscles to produce human speech.
• If the normal one hundred thousand hairs on a head were woven into a rope, it could support a weight of more than twelve tons.
• The fingernail grows about 1.5 inches per year.
• The total amount of skin covering an adult human weighs 6 lbs.
• The average person flexes the joints in their fingers 24 million times during a lifetime.
• Each person inhales about seven quarts of air every minute.
• On average, we breathe between 12 and 18 times a minute.
• The average guy will grow about 27 feet of hair out of his face during his lifetime.
• Approximately 1 out of 25 people suffers from asthma.
• The average man sweats 2 1/2 quarts every day.
• One out of every hundred American citizens is color blind.
• An average person laughs about 15 times a day.
• A human heart beats 100,000 times a day.
• Many sailors used to wear gold earrings so that they could afford a proper burial when they died.
• Some very Orthodox Jew refuse to speak Hebrew, believing it to be a language reserved only for the Prophets.
• Because they had no proper rubbish disposal system, the streets of ancient Mesopotamia became literally knee-deep in rubbish.
• Sliced bread was patented by a jeweler, Otto Rohwedder, in 1928. He had been working on it for 16 years, having started in 1912.
• Ancient drinkers warded off the devil by clinking their cups
• The Nobel Prize resulted form a late change in the will of Alfred Nobel, who did not want to be remembered after his death as a propagator of violence – he invented dynamite.
• Coffee is the second largest item of international commerce in the world. The largest is petrol.
• Only 1 child in 20 are born on the day predicted by the doctor.
• Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, never phoned his wife or his mother, they were both deaf.
• There are over 200 religious denominations in the United States.
• Eau de Cologne was originally marketed as a way of protecting yourself against the plague.
• Theodor Herzi, the Zionist leader who was born on May 2 1860, once had the astonishing idea of converting Jews to Christianity as a way of combating anti-Semitism.
• The Great Pyramid of Giza consists of 2,300,000 blocks each weighing 2.5 tons.
• Urine was once used to wash clothes.
• The city of New York contains a district called ‘Hell’s Kitchen’.

Jun 9, 2011

By Steve Pavlina

Online social networking has forever changed the ways we connect with each other. Which of these changes are helping you create a positive and abundant social life? Which changes are leading you towards stagnation?

Do you consider interacting with web browsers and online profiles to be social behavior? There’s certainly a social aspect to it in the sense that you’re communicating with people via the Internet, but it’s a pretty limited channel for satisfying your true social needs.

Typing messages back and forth or reading status updates can’t compare to having a real face to face conversation.

Clicking through someone’s photos is a lifeless 2D experience compared to seeing a real body in its full 3D animated expressiveness.

Video-Skyping is a richer way to connect, but you can’t touch an online video. You can’t even share a handshake let alone a hug.

Where does this path really lead? As you make more online friends, it leads you to spend more time with your web browser or your cell phone. This means less time to spend on real face to face human interaction.

Social networking via the Internet is like eating junk food. It will fill your belly and give you some temporary satisfaction, but in the long run, it doesn’t do much for your health. It can also encourage you to over-consume because it doesn’t give your body the nutrition it needs.

The Need for Socialization

Human beings are innately social creatures. We’re born completely dependent on others for our survival, and as much as you might like to think otherwise, this doesn’t change much throughout our lives. Humans are not solo creatures. We band together to meet our needs, not just our survival needs but our emotional needs as well.

One of the worst punishments to inflict on a human being is solitary confinement. After some time completely alone, most people would gladly spend time in the company of convicted murderers than be subjected to further solitude. Simply put, we need each other. Any humans who may have been truly anti-social would have been bred out of existence long ago, since we have to connect with others to reproduce.

If you find yourself addicted to online socializing, don’t see it as an addiction. See it as a real human need. Whether you’re willing to admit it or not, you need to connect with other human beings. And you need to do this often, ideally spending a significant part of each day in the company of others.

The problem with trying to meet this need via the Internet is that it doesn’t fully satisfy the need for socialization. This leads to over-consuming, spending more time in online socializing that you’ve consciously decided.

In January I quit Facebook, shutting down my personal page as well as my fan page. I shared my reasons for doing so in my Leaving Facebook blog post. I also shared an update after 30 days in my 30-day Facebook Fast post.

I realized that being active on Facebook couldn’t compare to real face to face socializing, so I shifted my social time towards more offline connections. I made it a higher priority to connect with people in person. I still communicate online with people frequently, but I don’t invest as much time on it as I did last year.

I noticed some key differences as I made this shift. One difference is that I’m having a lot more fun. Doing a lot of online socializing tends to drain me, but face to face interactions usually energize me. Deep conversations about personal growth, the nature of reality, or other subjects that interest me are inspiring.

Another difference is that face to face conversations can create the kind of connection in an hour that it would take a month to achieve online. When you can hear someone’s tone of voice and see their body language, you’re going to understand them much better than if you simply read their words on a screen. This is one reason I started doing live workshops too — people can instantly grasp ideas in minutes that might otherwise take hours of reading to comprehend.

Faux Socialization

If you spend a lot of time alone, you’ll often feel the urge to do some type of faux socialization. You may want to flip on the TV so you can see other people. Or you may want to check your email or social networking sites impulsively. Or you may want to read a book, so you can feel you’re engaged with other characters. Reading my articles can fit the bill as well, giving you the sense that you’re connecting with me; yet the reality is that we may be many miles apart.

Yes, faux socialization is still a form of connecting, just as junk food is a form of food. But it’s probably not the best way to meet your needs.

The socializing part is a genuine human need, included in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a sense of belongingness and love, but the faux part can constitute an unhealthy addiction. Just as junk food crowds out healthy food, faux socializing crowds out healthy socializing.

When you get more of the real thing, you’ll find that your taste for the fake version gradually drops off. If you eat a lot of fruits and vegetables every day, junk food cravings will tend to subside within 30-40 days. If you do a sufficient amount of in-person socializing (ideally every day), your interest in online socializing will tend to diminish.

To shift towards a healthier and more abundant social life, don’t worry about trying to quit Facebook or anything like that. Instead, focus on amping up your face to face socializing. Make a point of doing something social several times a week, every day if you can swing it. You’ll likely find that after about a month or so, socializing online will seem a lot less interesting, perhaps even boring.

If you work with people, you may enjoy a lot of socialization in the normal course of your workday, but if you work at home like I currently do, it’s especially important to allocate time for your social life — offline. This can make your workdays more productive in the long run since you won’t feel as much of an impulse to get your social needs met via the Internet during your workday.

Someday the Internet may be so advanced that it can meet our social needs in truly satisfying and fulfilling ways. But for now it’s still in the junk food stage, too artificial to compete with the real thing.

I’m not suggesting you need to give up online socializing. Treat it as a companion to face to face socializing, but not a substitute. Make your in-person social life a significantly higher priority than your online social life. This is very important to your path of personal growth. There are many aspects of human social development that get stunted by excessive online communication and which can only be fully developed with sufficient face time (no pun intended for the geeks who are capable of noticing the pun).

If you’re not sure where to begin, start by setting the intention to expand your offline social life. When offline social opportunities come up, say yes to them. When you get inspired by an idea to do something social, act on it. It will take time, perhaps a few months, but eventually you’ll have a rich and abundant social life, and you won’t feel such a desire to try to meet this need through faux socialization. Fill your belly with real food, and you won’t be so hungry.