One Day all to Myself……

Recently, I’ve realized that many people have been making a demand for the authentic in many areas of their life.

I am talking about the deeper stuff, such as the search for the meaning of life. The reason why you go to work – why you divide your hours into neat packets, where every minute occupies the intensity of a single working day, that kind of authenticity.

I see it all over the place these days. In shopping malls where people queue up just to listen to some religious leader who drives a sports car. They think he has the answers – he’s just in it for the money. If only they just stopped and think.

Usually when, I come across that all too familiar quizzical expression bordering on loss and inexplicable craving for the return to Avalon, it just makes me wonder where did we go so wrong? Where did it start to unravel?

Though the picture on the television might have grown sharper and clearer these few years. The sound progressing from mono to stereo and now to ear shattering surround nothing really that much has changed that much – I am referring to the content of course.

The characters might have sported tinted hair and pierced their ears. Or may have included expert opinions of economist, politicians and even scientist. They may have told us in that monotonous professional drawl like a physician recounting to his patient just after a medical check up; how everything is just hunky dory and we have 2,536.3 reasons to smile, celebrate and break open the champagne. We’re good for another 50 years. That followed by the economist who keeps on telling us; why we have never had it so “good” before in our history. Our gross national produce is rocketing through the roof, (don’t worry someone will come along to fix it) we are finally taking off to join the ranks of the 1st worlders – here we come!

It’s finally happening! Strap yourself in, suck it in and hold your breath – they are really going to hit that button this time and light that candle! Hellaluhya sweet Jesus we are just taking off like helium filled balloons, it’s the rapture. Its finally here!

Hey! Someone is even building a Ferris wheel over the Marina, the view will be better, we will stand two or three inches taller. Yes, we are finally getting there after all these years of hard work. The gravy train is finally pulling in – make a line!

They might have told us all these happy factual things – repeated them with colorful charts and numbers to convince us all what we should feel – or why we should consider cloning two of ourselves just so that our other half can give us a pat on the back for all the good work we have been doing all these years.

But it’s not working this time, something is broken and I see it all too clearly. And if you just stop what you’re doing. I mean really stop, not the bull shit stop, where ten percent of your mind is still either in the distant past or future and the other is figuring out how to really impress that gal. I mean really stop – you would see it only too clearly: people aren’t happy.

I am not the saying the economist and technocrats are wrong. I am not saying the math is skewered or that the traditional measures of private and organization success just don’t measure or add up. Sure they do. Only something is amiss: people aren’t happy.

They say a man gets assaulted by these doubts at least 3 or 4 times in his life – it’s an occupational hazard for me. I deal with numbers that means like one of those actors in a cheap Hong Kong flick. I just keep talking to ghost while the rest wonders, “who the hell is he talking too?” I see lines, invisible ones cross and intersecting other lines. I see dots, I connect them, they form patterns. I see something that bothers me: people aren’t happy.

I ask myself whether perhaps this is one of the perils of having to live in a post modernist society where on the face of it, its just one of the scouring effects brought forth by a society accelerating inexorably towards globalization. Some people are just going to get displaced. They’re just going to get poorer and poorer. The chips are stacked against them – the system is bent. Others are just going to get richer. It’s the new reality of post modernist living. You’ve got to like it or lump it, but that’s how it’s coming out. Only, people are not happy.

Sure globalization is here to stay, we cannot undone the internet anymore than it makes sense to bang our key boards into ploughshares or return to the cottage industry. We have seen the pictures before, Buddhist monks in saffron robes, holding on to their lacquer bowls while they chat about celestial problems blue tooth style on their mobile phones. We have read about those distant call centers tucked somewhere far off. We’ve probably talked to them ourselves without knowing it. Technology is changing the way we work, live and play. Jobs are continually redefined, the future is bright, but people are still not happy.

So let’s get serious to pinning this sucker down! What is this? Man! Is it some kind of debilitating disease, like sick building or Gulf War syndrome? Why are so many people simply assaulted and even displaced by that all too familiar feeling of estrangement from the overwhelming truth – why aren’t they happy?

I need to find out, I simply must so I look through the tabula, spread sheets, statistical tables and reports – I mull through the equations looking for correlations both qualitative and quantitative. Comb through the econometrics and scalars in search of a mythical line, but its seamless, long, tall and broad, stretching like an endless barrier like the great wall of China. No really. I am not joking you should happy, but you not, so you have to be the problem. Yes the problem is you! You’re the round peg in a world of square holes. Hey it ain’t our fault that you don’t fit man!

“You’re having a nervous breakdown you are not happy when you should be happy.” I say to myself, I panic, I check my savings account, its all there all the magic numbers lined up perfectly. If I don’t do anything silly for the next 50 years, it should all come together quiet nicely – life that is.

I look out of the window, no menacing nuclear fall out. It will be a few more years before the Indonesians decide to really consider building a nuclear reactor in Surubaya. Be cool.

So why does this feeling persist? I know, I need Prozac, depression is treatable I say to myself three times, just to remind myself all the evils of this world generally fall into the category of threes, along with heart burn, hair loss and slippery bathroom tiles. It’s a fact of life.

My condition shouldn’t come as a surprise, since the only problems worth advertising solutions for these days are problems treatable through the spending of money. But money cannot solve all the problems of this world a part of my mind whispers (I am starting to hear voices now. OMG! I am really losing it this time!) – you know what I mean by, “only problems” – the guy who doesn’t have the courtesy to keep time, he keeps you waiting while you chug down another cup of coffee that you just know will keep you awake. The chatterer in the darkened movie theatre who just has to spoil the moment by taking that call from his stock broker, **** his mother. Those stuff money can never ever solve.

Yes a pattern is finally starting to form, I see it now, it’s a bit fuzzy, but I the edges are coming together – I think, I may have even discovered a cure for my debilitating condition which describes why, people are not happy – I haven’t given this disease a name yet, but it should rhyme with “globalization” or “progress” just in case anyone doubts these ills are the result of the age of communitarianism (that’s a big word, where did it come from?)

Till now the golden rule of economics has always been that “homo economis” (economic man) will continue to serve as a reference point, if he has food, security and a roof over his head, he would hardly have any rhyme or reason to grumble. That’s why homo economis needs to get that promotion, that car, that girl with a cute smile, 2.9 obedient, well-adjusted kids, that condo overlooking the bay. More money? More opportunities? Homo economis can’t help himself, it’s a vampire thing – he’s hard wired that way, nature programmed him that way. Right? Wrong!

The truth of the matter is despite our bludgeoning GNP, GDP, PCI our GNH has never ever been so low before. Yes, its time for you to learn a new performance index – gross national happiness.

Why is all this happening now? Well one reason is only in the last decade have economist, psychologist, biologist, philosophers and intellectuals begin to begun to decipher our minds. You know that joy center of the brain roughly the size of a pea that lights up and says, “whoope!” Whenever we ace our scores, find that parking lot or when Friday winds to a end and it’s the guy you hate in human resources turn to buy the next round of drinks.

Of course, the idea that money isn’t the center of the universe isn’t exactly a new thing. Its being around for an awfully long time, when the first apes discovered they could just as well use that wide and broad femur to crack another apes skull as easily as splitting a nut – man it seems hasn’t really changed all that much, and most recently even in the 18th century political theorist such as Jeremy Bentham argued for the need to incorporate a “happiness” index to define personal and organizational success. Long before him Rene Descartes declared that all the problems of the world, was best solved by being ignored and just being happy (the first recorded seminal study on how to be an 18th hippie. He was certainly ahead of his time. Now you know why they wore wigs and flared collars). And there are some philosophers who still agree with him. They argue that the supreme difficulty of the problem of our times is a result of the fact that the human mind just isn’t built to understand its own basis – rather like the impossibility of an eyeball seeing itself.

Fortunately these happy pessimist remain in the minority tucked somewhere in the lunatic fringe, but of late they have been making a come back, and. If you think it’s just a passing trend like a trail of meteorite, think again. Recently Thailand has already adopted a happiness index. After last year’s military coup, Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont (who doesn’t look like a very happy chap himself) promised to make Thais not just richer but happier as well. Long before that in the tiny kingdom of Bhutan where people often refer as “the world” as another celestial body completely divorced from Buddhist cupolas and spires gross national happiness measures have led to smaller class rooms, wider seats on trains and even promoting the green movement by inspiring the creation of national parks.

Clearly the irony is lost on the Singapore government. The whole idea of well-being, not just money should be the benchmark of personal and organizational progress sounds a bit like the science of transmuting lead to gold – alchemy.

The science remains unclear, fuzzy even to suggest it’s a playground for hucksters and charlatans as happiness can be attributable to virtually a few million factors ranging from the mean average rainfall, to whether the train runs on time or whether any one of the respondents are suffering from an in growing toenail or terminal brain cancer. Its hocus pocus – they say then and now.

The whole idea of happiness is multi-factorial, it’s a spectrum ranging from the deeper philosophical questions such as “what is the meaning of life,” to whether you favorite football team managed to win the cup that season – to exacerbate the complexity, the former could well be discovered just as easily while reading a tome by Aristotle or while perusing graffiti in a toilet cubicle. Its mumbo jumbo the hard nosed experts say, hardly qualifying as serious science. Anyone could be expert, what should be tested? What can be tested? How do we reconfirm the results of the test with theory? Does happiness even have a law? How long is a piece of string?

Perhaps our intuitions about happiness just makes sense in a senseless world – perhaps what really makes life worth living is the small stuff that has nothing to do with GDP or GNP – the really mundane stuff, like whether our kids rush to the door when we return home – the strength and trust between our loved ones – the hope of spending more time with them to reclaim back what the world may have once leached away – perhaps it’s the wit in ordinary conversations over satay and a cold beer, that golden moment when it just comes together, camaraderie between family, friends and our loved ones – perhaps just perhaps that really is what life is all about…..happiness…..I feel much better already….yes its another beautiful day.

(By Darkness / Socio / Political / Philo – EP 993287-2007 / The Brotherhood Press 2007)