Roll your own ----> Life (Reposted)

I work twelve hour days. That doesn’t leave much time for recreation, so I’ve taken to shooting hoops at night before bed. fortunate for me, there’s a park a few blocks away. on several such nightly excursions, I would come upon some of the local youth, smoking pot and drinking on park benches. Being as I am, I have more than once struck up a conversation. It was during one such interchange that that topic turned to career. I explained that my view of job and career was to take what you already loved to do, and get smart about how you can get paid to do it. These two young men responded by siting that they liked smoking pot and getting laid, and the conversation drifted to other things, but the thoughts about career stuck with me. In my view, we have had the whole concept of career worked out backwards for a long time. The basic premise of “making a living” is that you educate for a length of time, then work your guts out until your at least in your late fifties, then, when your mentally, physically, and spiritually worn out, you enjoy the dubious luxuries of the “golden years”. why is it that we feel the way we do? Why are we obligated to live in such a foolhardy, haphazard manner? I feel that there are three interlocking principles that we need to reassess if we are ever going to get away from this dissatisfying lifestyle which has become the status quo for the majority of us.

1) Have it NOW.
There is within culture today an intense drive to have our needs satisfied immediately. Microwave it, make a down payment on it, CHARGE IT. You know there is something wrong in our culture when instead of the total price of an item, we want to know what our low monthly payments could be. This attitude lures us in when we’re young, and by the time we realize whats happening, we’re trapped. We’re forced to work 80 hour weeks at jobs we hate just to pay the “low monthly payments” on things we no longer even have.

2) Happiness = Consuming.
There is this great myth in life that most of us believe, and all of us, on one level or another, have bought into. that is, that somehow my level of happiness is dependent on the things that I own or the money that I spend. this is absolutely a bizarre thing to believe since there is so much evidence to the opposite in our lives. let us examine some of the definitions of the word consume: CONSUME~

• devour: eat immoderately; “Some people can down a pound of meat in the course of one meal”
• serve oneself to, or consume regularly; “Have another bowl of chicken soup!”; “I don’t take sugar in my coffee”
• spend extravagantly; “waste not, want not”
• destroy completely; “The fire consumed the building”
• use up (resources or materials); “this car consumes a lot of gas”; “We exhausted our savings”; “They run through 20 bottles of wine a week”
• engage fully; “The effort to pass the exam consumed all his energy”

We have lost sight of the fact, it seems, that it is in giving, creating, and enjoying what is free all around us that true happiness is found.

3) Keeping up the “Standard of Living”.
If one were to do a bit of research, one would find that the standard of living concept was a response to the fact that with the advent industrial revolution, people for the first time could easily have all that they needed. so the question for those pushing economic growth to occur was, how do we make those things that were prior to this point considered luxuries into needs? the answer was to introduce standards of living. example: I am a physician, therefore I must own multiple cars and a big house. there is a standard for living for each socioeconomic level, and almost invariable that standard is several thousand (or tens of thousand) dollars more than what is actually earned. this is why no matter how much we make, we are always going into debt. we are always trying to attain the next “standard of living”. it is in this manner that we maintain our slavery to the almighty dollar as it drains us of time and energy, constantly chasing the next highest level.

So whats the answer to all of this? if we carefully reassess these three concepts and check their influence in our lives, we can remove ourselves from this vicious cycle of dissatisfaction and unhappiness. what would it be like for example, if instead of trying to live up to the next highest standard, you chose to live one standard below what your capable of? suddenly, your rich! what if you choose to wait for purchases until you can truly afford them? suddenly you don’t have to work all the time. what if you chose to revel in the joys of life all around you? suddenly, you have lasting, cost free satisfaction. And isn’t that what we’re all looking for? satisfaction? as it is said in an old book, “But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. …

A tale of two countries: US and Honduras, a contrast (Reposted)

Recently I had the opportunity to leave the comfort of the US and venture abroad on a medical mission trip. The ability to be involved in humanitarian projects has been a dream of mine for some time, and so I was understandably very excited. As we flew into Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, my vision of a third world country seemed to be accurate. Below us a tangle of streets faded into view. Controlled burning was being done on some of the hillsides, and the airstrip was one of the shortest I’d ever seen. As we rode to our outlying base camp in a faded school bus, I saw more signs of poverty, lots of skinny dogs and skinny kids running down dirt roads that were lined with barbwire shrouded walls and rundown buildings. It seemed the perfect picture of what one would expect. But as the week progressed and I began working with these people more, I started noticing something strange. One morning as I was working on patient intake, I became aware of a sense of disquiet within myself. Some of these people have been waiting to see a doctor for a long time. Some of them for hours. And yet, not one of them was surly with the delay, no one complained, no one was put out that they were not at the head of the line. Each person sat in our rickety chairs and waited with beaming faces for their three minutes of time with a doctor. Thats when it dawned on me as to just how different these people were. In the US, if I was working in a clinical situation such as this, with medical shortages and delays such as this, I would not even be able to speak above the roar of indignant people. People who have been well trained in the lessons of constant victimhood and who assume that they are the center of the universe. This realization grew on me with each day that went by. The children cared for each other and loved each other. They didn’t take a thing for granted. Another thing that was conspicuously absent was the common waiting room spectacle of mothers yelling at their children. It was simply absent here. Completely, bafflingly absent. On the plane ride back my mind was filled with images of the people and their love of life and each other. How did we in the US, who are so rich materially, come to such a place of abject spiritual poverty. In Honduras I saw dogs treated like animals and children treated like people, in the US I see dogs treated like people and children treated like dogs. Where have we gone wrong? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not so naive as to think that there is no abuse or hate in Honduras. There certainly is. But among those simple people in the rural villages I saw a reflection of what many of us in America lack. An appreciation for the things we have been given: life, health,family. A lot of talk has been going back and forth recently about how we hope to be the philanthropic west and give a computer to each family in impoverished areas of the world. We want to save them with our benevolent influence. Perhaps we will be the ones to be saved.

The Glorious #1 (reposted )

Greetings! Today I’m kicking off my new blog, fresh squeezed perspective. We’ll be exploring culture, productivity, and the emerging trends in information technology. We live in a rapidly Evolving world, and in order to succeed in that world one needs to develop a mindset that takes into account the now fluid movements of culture and the way that information technology is shaping our lives. Gone is the time when culture could be categorized by decades. Now we measure the rise and fall of cultural trends in months if not weeks. Gone also are the days when the worlds power brokers were the individuals with money. Today the power of change lies in those individuals that hold the attention of the most people. We stand on the edge of a information renaissance that will change forever the way that we view culture, commerce, and each other. its going to be an interesting trip.