Wishing your home to be warm and cozy this wet, cold day here in Oklahoma. Saturday leisure blessings. Here’s to hoping you too get to drink some Guinness as I will with a friend-colleague here in a spell.
There are moments I wish I was financially independent. I’d live semi-removed from modern society in a cabin or cottage and spend my days hiking, gardening, cooking, and blogging. “Dreams are what make life tolerable,” said Rudy’s friend to him in that beloved movie.
Careerism:
But then I have to get up from my Okie armchair and get back to the “grind.” Pressures remain to maintain until death the “American dream,” which is no longer just about 20th century careerist goals (ie to climb up the corporate ladder no matter the sacrifices, a six figure salary, 2000 square foot home, 401k, medical “insurance,” keeping up with the Jones’ etc), but now about the 21st century absolute ability to free oneself of traditional religion and morality, to encapsulate oneself into a narcissistic, self-contained bubble of technological hedonism, and to turn what is left of society into a diabolical hell on Earth.
Medical insurance is becoming financially unwarranted. Servility to the corporate structure is
destroying most people’s humanity and personalities. Economic materialism, engineered by the corporate elites, has almost entirely destroyed humanity and culture.
And so I am renewed to be counter-cultural, alternative, ever seeking peace of mind. Hopefully that will mean soon relative freedom in my profession if not self-employment.
The Simple Life:
To be spiritually, mentally, and physically healthy. To have true freedom and peace. To be able to make a living and maintain a social and cultural life without being a proletariat to the corporate structure and materialism.
To work to live, instead of living to work. To order all outward activities to inward contemplation, and not to allow oneself the be ground to a pulp my modernity. The simple life.
A stable, fruitful income and work life. A warm, orderly, clean home. Three square meals a day. Some books, a few games, limited technology, a garden, some animals. True friends.
Guinness beer:
Well one can try as do I. And today I’m happy to say at this moment I am living “the simple life.” In an hour it’s a Guinness at Kilkenny’s Irish pub to laugh with a pal about modern ironies. Later play with the dogs, read, watch a movie. Tomorrow is Mass, lunch, and more rest.
Until modernity sucks me back into the capitalist whirlpool come Monday morning. Cheers.