An Analysis of Life in 2006 A.D.

© 2006 by Eric S. Meyer. All Rights Reserved. Advertising and Printing Paid for by Eric S. Meyer.

 For me, I am one of those people who lives alone, barely knows his neighbors, lives a somewhat boring existence, except I probably know one person in this world better than anyone: Me. This essay is about just that; this is about my views, in a honest and real description and revealing of who I am. I am not a perfect person in any regard, and therefore, it follows this essay is, naturally, imperfect as well. But I try to be honest and real as a jump from topic to topic.

 This was written to be read beginning to end, but not to skip sections, although skipping sections may undoubtedly provide more insights into who I am than not reading this essay at all. But this essay is not really about me; it is an expression from a person in the United States who had a little time on their hand, and who choose to write a bit as a representation of my “groups:” as a college student, as a 29 year old male, as a non-smoker, as a member of countless groups, including those that are not so pretty: as a mentally “ill” individual, as a child from a home where the parents divorced each other while I was in my teens, as an anti-social character. Now, I will explain each of these points.

College Life, A Career and Income

 As a college student, I am faced with “behavior modification” technology daily, used against me as points on tests and homework. This system, I see it, was designed to prepare workers to become factory workers. However, as I grow to see the irrelevance to my goals and life with these “points” that can be earned and so forth, I grow irritated and annoyed with the entire structure of traditional schooling. For me, I keep going to class, so that in hopes I will have my own school that will be for-profit, and do all the right things, in a culture where schooling tends to do all the wrong things, at least from the perspective of a student.

 It is my belief that my schooling is preparing me to work for someone else, on an hourly basis, to seek instructions and to not take control. It may be that these observations are shared by you and many others. I shall now analyze each of them to see how my experience relates to all of this.

 Most people work for someone else. They desire a consistent paycheck each week, month or unit of time with low risk of it being low. This is especially compatible for installment plans on a new car, house, jewelry, and credit cards. Such attitudes manifest a pro-consumerism, anti-investor mentality. True, rent and utilities are often due monthly, but working for oneself can be just as effective at paying these bills as working for someone else.

 For stability and predictability with money comes sacrifice of the excitement of success in alternative ways of earning money. Another benefit of working for oneself is that television is less necessary to obtain and experience highs and lows in moods. Working for oneself is defined loosely as any activity which gives to the community in a way that is imbued by one's experience, values, hopes and wisdom. Under this definition, going to Walmart for 10 hours to earn $10 per hour is being a slave to not only time but to sustain the wealthiest family on earth: The Waltons. Similarly, working at McDonalds restaurant is also sustaining a wealthy family. By contrast, writing a book may consume upwards of 50 weeks of 50 hours each, or about 2,500 hours in all. At Walmart, you could sell your time, and a piece of your life, which you can never re buy or regain, for about $25,000 in wages if paid $10 per hour. After taxes of about 30%, you may have $18,500 to actually have under your true control as an asset. If you need more money, you would have to work more than 50 hour weeks.

 If you were a freelance writer, a business owner, an author of literature, a computer programmer, an inventor, a consultant, a politician, or an actor/actress, your dimension of integration with the economy would differ greatly. The main deviation is in that quality of your work will be more a determinate than quantity. Quality and quantity are two very, very different aspects of integrating in a community.

 Quantity is when you are paid to give up part of your life in exchange for your employer to try to make as much profit as possible from from your foolish surrender to the so-called economic realities. Quantity is based on time, and is the commodity I see City College of San Francisco focusing on with its points, grades, credits, measurements, and other quantitative measurement systems. Like a part of a machine, at CCSF we are molded and labeled according to a gray scale system of gradients. This is advantageous for employers who want to get a part (a student) to do a particular task (a machine part) based on their definitions. In this system, if the employer has an ingenious set of instructions, s/he may make big profits. If the employer has minimal instructions, the CCSF graduate may be confused and resist taking the initiative to invent solutions, and the employer will have less profit. The profits are a function of the product of the student's grade times hours divided by the expanse of the units of work to be done. Generally, two students of the same grade point average will do twice the work as one student by themselves in the same amount of time, and, it would follow that they would do half the work of four graduates in the same amount of time, provided they all had the same grade point average.

 Quality is a very different commodity, as it gets the calculations messy and confusing. With quality, you may have a team of four students (not yet graduated) who can do the work of sixteen “Grade A students” on a particular job, based on creativity, leadership, and motivation. And yet, those same four students combined may do a particular job worse than one “Grade C student” could do. In essence, grades are a measurement system for helping do an existing, well-defined job repeatably, while making the assets of the graduate worker (grade point average, major) easily calculative when the number of hours is known to provide predictable work output. This can be useful for employers to hire workers to get a clearly defined job done at the best price, but leaves work in creative, emotional, and intellectual property related work undefinable and unpredictable in profit yields.

 Quality matters. When you want a movie, you buy a creative, emotional and one with unique ideas (intellectual property). When you want a song, you download or buy one that is imaginative and expressive, one that does not sound like all the rest. When you want a computer program, you want an application that is inventive and has a good feel, with at least some different characteristics from other software. What you probably don't want is a movie with all the same cast trying to repeat the past 50 movies except to do it with slightly less cost each time, nor a song that lacks any content, or 50 titles of the same title you do want all almost the same, nor 500 titles for a use that is irrelevant to your needs, wants and desires.

 When one is a business owner, they can choose to take risks, and based on the quality of those choices, they may prosper or go bankrupt. Sounds harsh? The alternative is to make others rich with your soul, blood and thought in exchange for an existence as a consumer in a culture that values meaningless work, endless shopping for luxuries and unnecessary property, and personal finances where a person may go to City College for 2 or more years, graduate, work for about 30 to 40 years, then be forced to draw Social Security. Social Security requires excessive assets be sold prior to receiving a monthly benefit check, so a disciple of the Capitalistic culture may lose his or her cars, houses, expensive household items, due to debts, and would not receive Social Security until AFTER the assets fall below a certain range. For point of fact, the bank accounts generally must not exceed $1,500 for individuals, or $2,000 for married couples. Got a life savings? With Social Security, you must live on your life savings until it is depleted. If you try to give your assets away, that is considered fraud, and will bar you from Social Security for a number of months, even if you are homeless. Point of fact: all life is a risk, and to take a risk with an alternative income may actually have less risk to you in the long run than an illusion of a conventional income.

 Quality means that with an alternative income, small choices can lead to big outcomes. If you write a book, and spend a few dozen extra hours to find a promotion/marketing agency with good rates, you may gain an extra couple percent return on your investment. If, after you wrote a book, you choose to go on a talk show for an interview, you may gain 100,000 more sales of your book. At $10 per copy profit, that is one million dollars. For an investment of one year, or 2,500 hours over 50 weeks of 50 hours per week, does that compare well with selling your 2,500 hours to Walmart for $25,000, considering that the day has the same number of minute and seconds in it either way?

 Quality also means with alternative incomes, you receive back what the economy gives you. With quantity, however, you receive a set amount from your employer regardless of how well you work, and as you put in more hours, there is a linear return of benefits. Double your hours, double your pay, to a point, although overtime pay and tips does slightly confuse this a bit. Quantity means too if you want to double your pay, you typically would need to work twice the hours, meaning you will have less free time for other things. Of course, you only have 24 hours in a day, and 7 days to a week. So your income is limited with this model, unless you marry and he or she works too, or your children work to help benefit the families bottom line.

 Quality, for the most part, allows a different kind of geometry, a most splendid and potentially empowering one. With it, you may double your pay by simply taking certain risks and giving up relatively small amounts of time. You might write a book over a year, then take a risk of selling it for a dollar less per copy to try to boost sales. You might write a computer program and hire a third party to write some code for it to make it more useful or functional, and by spending an extra $50,000, your program may prove to sell for 15% more. If you sell ten copies, 15% probably won't matter much to you, but for 5 million copies, you would earn a return of 10,000% on a $50,000 investment. Returns like this are not unheard of or even unusual in intellectual property, a key industry of alternative incomes. The writer of the popular game Doom was living on welfare with his wife and children for about a year, until his program become well-know. Then, in a matter of months, his family become millionaires. He was quoted as saying that he was confident that he had repaid all the welfare checks after his game was selling by the thousands per day.

 Quality, therefore, can provide hills to attempt and benefit from, in a landscape where the terrain is not flat nor uniform, nor is it predictable. Quantity, therefore, can provide a step forward while a bayonet is figuratively to ones neck, while stepping up a gentle incline towards a fall at retirement until death. If you enjoy predictability, you may enjoy knowing your life is moving gradually towards the next credit class, then towards graduation, then for employment, then for many years of work, until you can't work then you retire in poverty unless you are very lucky or rich. Admittedly, you may find a mate and make a family that can greatly distract you from your meaningless subsistence and orderly routine, but hey, you might just wonder some day, “Where has all my life gone?”

As a 29-Year Old Male

 I am almost 30 years old, and am a guy. I have many thoughts, and dreams and goals in my mind floating around. Here I will try to focus on those issues that relate most to me.

 As a prologue, I will specify that often ordinary people are afraid to speak up because they don't want to be singled out or discriminated against.  If everyone where to publicly admit to all kinds of addictions, dysfunctions, and other unhealthy behaviors, then the insurance agencies, employers and peers would be so overwhelmed as to be less discriminatory, if not on basis of justice and what is right, on the basis of having so many negative attributes for so many people they would probably just give up. Of course, murder, rape and even many felonies are inexcusable, and are not referred to in this idea of non-discrimination. Rather, bi-polar disorder, eating disorders, interpersonal relationship failures, other health and personal issues are my targeted point here. If we all knew of the challenges of our neighbors and community, we would stand the best chance of ending such discriminations.

 Arguably, some people would use all available information towards personal gain by exploiting every detail known to them. So be it. They will alienate the community, thus having fewer friends, and their psyche will be pressured be more noble and fair. The true reason we work is to share our talents with our community, not to earn money or buy stuff. In fact, buying stuff really means buying resources that can be experienced with the expectation of sharing that resource with others.

 What do I think about? Well, I shall accept the permission and liberty to be frank here.  I often think about relationships, how I will share my talents with the community, how I will meet my obligations with others, what my life will be like in the next week, month, year and so on. That pretty much is a synopsis of my thoughts. Of course, I dream about many things, often relationships, as they relate to sex, intimacy, communication, boundaries. I seek ways to give to my community that which I am able to do effectively and enjoyably, as work is drudgery if hated, and work is empowering if enjoyed. I worry how I will pay my creditors, make good on promises to others and over all conform to the structures that govern resources changing hands, and I wonder about my future, not by going to a “psychic” but by knowing what I have now, where I am going, and what I think of what I have now and what I am going.

 I will admit, I am very preoccupied on relationships, especially of the type of intense physical and sexual intimacy, perhaps because I have not been in an intense relationship since August 2001. In my experience, I am very poor at dating and building a relationship in a conventional, traditional way. Instead, I seek to connect emotionally through long letters and things I create, such a music and software. I identify myself as a nerd, and have internalized this title into my fabric of who I am today.

 In my life, I have often decided with regard to dating women that I want to be expressive of who I am, even if the true me is too shocking and weird. On the opposite extreme, I consider being “nice” and “normal” to try to get dates, and gradually reveal more of my oddities and eccentric ways. Since my personal life is not particularly successful in terms of having many friends, I write this article with the implicit hope that of the 5% of readers whom I don't repulse, I might get some takers of exchanging phone numbers, email addresses, and going to geekish places like a park, a discussion, composing music together, and to exchange occasionally, but potentially large letters. I was pursuing a woman in 2005 who was annoyed with a 18 page letter I had emailed her, complete with references to books in true Modern Language Association style format. She asked that I stop giving her such long letters, or she would “throw them in the trash.” I got the point, although hurt, and to this day have zero contact with her in any shape or form.

As a Non-Smoker

 I don't use street drugs, or nicotine or alcohol. I get enough head rushes from my occasional blunders in life with items I create, like compact discs and articles. I find the uncertainty that each publication carries, and the unintentional miscommunication thereof, are stressful enough, with both distress and eustress. I consider television to be an addictive drug, of greater harm to the public than nicotine or alcohol combined, because it causes its victims to turn against themselves and others.

 Television is deceptive for both its victims: its targets and agents. By target I mean any person who buys something because they think they will feel more popular or sexy as a result of acquiring it. By agent I mean any person who affects others to buy something based on their actions. In other words, television is a despicable drug of immense power, and the only solution to mend our culture from it is make channels available to every interested person who wishes to express some idea or feeling. Only then will it go from a bureaucracy owned by mainly large corporations to being a medium of expression for the masses, such as the Internet has done for us today.

 Therefore, I consider television to be a drug that does more to disrupt the health of individuals and families than alcohol and tobacco products combined. This is no joke and the sooner the populace wakes up to these facts about this sinister medium the better off humanity will be, starting right here with our culture.

 Where else but on television can you find a ready supply of propaganda telling you to buy and buy and buy all sorts of unnecessary stuff that don't benefit you but instead range from distracting you from meaning to distancing you from meaning. Meaning is the fabric of living, and is not dependent on religion, but instead simply on having a reason to be happy and be committed to doing something noble in one's life, instead of just doing what the television says or unfocused impulses and urges.

My Less Noble Groups

 I am labeled all these: Bi-polar, have divorced parents, and have nerd qualities. I say, so what? About 1% of the population is diagnosed with Bi-polar in the United States. Might it be possible that bi-polar is caused by environment? In a culture that values money over relationships, and getting ahead over getting enjoyment from one's existence, except for shallow occasional weekends of meaningless “pleasure,” is it any surprise our citizenry are so confused and at odds with one another?

 My parents divorced when I was age 16. I was going to boarding school, and yet, I felt miserable because my two parents both said horrible things about the other. Marriage seemed such a temporary and insignificant thing for two people to have, in my view at age 16 and beyond. “How could two people who were married hate each other so much?” I would ask myself.

 Marriage to me means usually two people of different genders have a contract for the offspring they create, where the man may work many hours to bring in money, while he feels he is needed and may resent his wife for getting to be home all day. The wife, however, typically does hard labor for more hours than the man, and tries to satisfy him sexually, while she feels used and continues on anyway, at least for the sake of the children. Economically, if the wife leaves the man, then she may suffer from a withdrawal of financial resources, and may be prone to feel less beautiful or attractive as a mother. For the husband, he may leave the wife, and if he does so he too many suffer economically, because of child support and alimony payments, not to mention half the shared assets and property. But wait, it gets worse! If a couple are producing progeny and not married, then they may have limited rights to custody of the children involved, and have a negative stigma attached to their family if the neighbors and community, pumped so full of propaganda from the television, act as agents to oppress the unmarried family. Plus, many insurance underwriters don't include unmarried partners for most group or family policies. Of course, marriage between two gay men, or two lesbian women are equally valid and healthy as opposite-sex marriages, except they have have slightly different issues to contend with from the community and government.

 With regard to be being an anti-social character, so what? I deserve the same amount of food, water, clothing and energy and housing as anyone else. What's more, I deserve no MORE of those same resources either.

 In class, I am often a bit quiet, but when I feel safe, I may raise my hand a lot. I have a lot to say, indeed, and want to share my warped perspectives and quirks of personality with my community. At least until the community acts in unison to shun and expel me from its fabric. But I won't say I think that WON'T happen, because I already feel rejected by every community I have ever known, at least to some degree.

 When I went to public high school, I wrote out my thoughts on war. My peers called me a communist and stole pens and my calculator from my pockets in the school halls. The family mail box was bashed in. My family received threats of having our house burned down. Our family car had garbage placed upon it. I was called a “communist pig.”

 Now, I feel a sense of pain and impose a bit of indifference upon my heart and mind. My thoughts and feelings are imbued with a sort of insipid tone as to decrease my continued lesson from happening again: that most people don't like who I am, so I need to avoid others to minimize my tarnished name from getting to prospective employers in the community.

 Today, I assert that I will be honest with who I am, even if being honest means revealing too much of who I am and what I represent. As one quote goes, “I rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.” As I see it, I rather know my ideas are not valued by most peers, than to live in wonder. For nothing is as wondrous as to take a chance and to be known than to be always safe by both risking nothing and gaining nothing. So, friend, I present before you, an expression of me: Eric S. Meyer, the annoying, assertive person who carries a computer bag everywhere and who ran for Student Trustee with 1/3 votes, the person who has a lot to say but few friends who will listen. Email me if you want to take a chance, Usallsys@aol.com -EM