100th Post ..

First draft!!! Help!! Due Monday.

By labor we can find food and water, but all of our labor will not find for us another hour.”

-Kenneth Patton

Life’s Frying Pan Creatures

I see the sadness of what used to be our lives. It is torn between today and tomorrow, the terrible mockery that it was, or could have been. Our histories lie broken unable to escape, their feeble attempts falling soundlessly on the floor to lie with them. Is today’s world depleted, sold to the highest bidder, our old simplistic life forgotten, unwanted, and hopelessly out of date? Has technology forced us to change or are we as helpless as our pasts? Richard Florida, Arlie Russell Hochschild, and Walker Percy are three distinguished authors who make outstanding outcomes in their essays when it comes to the love-hate relationship we all have with our changing world.

We see our world today as this perfectly round sphere, but in actuality it is like a battered piece of tin, crinkled from what havoc we have wreaked upon it. Our once prosperous earth has become our personal punching bag of commerce and war. What was once meaningful is now lost and only the fortunate still grasp the essence of what makes us whole. In her essay, “From the Frying Pan into the Fire,” Arlie Russell Hochschild beckons us to recognize that the hole we are digging—called expansion, growth—will eventually be our graves. This hole will be so deep the corporate ladder will not be tall enough to help free us from this hell. She states: “…it is true that capitalism is a cultural as well as an economic system and that the symbols and rituals of this cultural system compete with, however much they seem to serve, the symbols and rituals of community and family. This means that working long hours and spending a lot of money—instead of spending time together—increasingly become how we say ‘I love you’ at home” (217). What Hochschild is getting across here is that capitalism is now seen as the blueprints on how we should live our lives. This system is the inner gangrene that festers among our unknowing buyers and sellers of this world. I too have noticed that the way I spend time with family is usually out shopping, sacrificing my hard saved pennies to the capitalism gods above: the Market. This push from a society of where we once had peaceful moments, where advertisements were scarce, and good company was valued has now become a place we must designate a price tag.

It is pathetic and disheartening that we must throw the cold bucket of water upon our minds to shock us from slumber so that we may see our corrupt and superficial existence. America’s rags to riches theory can be dumped into the trash among with the rest of the rubbish we once held dear, and our new Stalin is here to enforce its ways from nine to five and every other hour in between, while our families are sent to console themselves at fast food restaurants. I have found that I am missing a sense of purpose in my life, because there must be more to this struggle with minimum wage and expected advancement with education. Walker Percy documents in his essay, “The Loss of the Creature,” that the extraction of knowledge from a lesson is not fully comprehended unless that student wishes to delve deeper into the meaning, the essence, of anything, everything. The shift of being put through the motions to the actual understanding and learning of a subject can truly be influential. And that is what is missing in today’s society. Where is this ‘shift?’ Percy elaborates: “…the person is not something one can study and provide for; he is something one struggles for. But unless he also struggles for himself, unless he knows that there is a struggle, he is going to be exactly what the planners think he is” (415). We cannot force feed ourselves, our families, into believing that the equation of time at work = money = love is completely and totally wrong. Easing into reality is less painful that the full jump that others may not be willing to make. The recognition that there is a struggle is the first step into over coming that jumpers fear. As Percy says “…the sightseer must be prepared to enter into a struggle to recover a sight from a museum” (414). We must be ready to enter a world we may be uncomfortable with, a world that is run by commerce, and we must recognize that commerce cannot and will not control our lives.

Whereas Walker Percy begs us to recognize the anxiety we put ourselves through, Richard Florida beckons us to see the brilliance of what has been created. Florida’s essay has a spark of optimism that the last two lack in abundance. This new world of technological advancement happily bubbles from his little pores in his essay “The Transformations of Everyday Life.” His title is a real spark for conversation as well. What are the transformations of everyday life? It seems to have a hint of the previously stated equation time at work = money = love and he seems to believe it. Florida dives into the new emergence of a creative society in our world today. He builds this panoramic view that appears breathtaking until he pulls out the rug from under our feet. He states that: “Society is changing in large measure because we want it to… That driving force is the rise of human creativity as the key factor in our economy and society. Both at work and other spheres of our lives… Creativity—‘the ability to create meaningful new forms.’ … is now the decisive source of competitive advantage. In every industry, from automobiles to fashion, food products, and information technology itself, the winners in the long run are those who can create and keep creating” (198). This screams of Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest. Our economy has been base paired in our genes and it’s a jungle out there for anyone who is not a member of his creative society. Florida deliberately shakes up our theory of how time should be spent. He goes on to knock the wind from our chests: “Our fundamental social forms are shifting as well, driven by forces traceable to the creative ethos. In virtually every aspect of life, weak ties have replaced the stronger bonds that once gave structure to society… Instead of communities defined by close associations and deep commitments to family, friends and organizations, we seek places where we can make friends and acquaintances easily and live quasi-anonymous lives” (200). Are we all still breathing? Instead of close families and communities we give that up so that we can live semi-solitary from the world around us. That hope that by leaving this world we could have affected the lives we touched is quickly replaced by marketing, advertisement, and this ‘creative ethos.’ The day human compassion and friendship is turned away in favor of marketing techniques is the day the 70 percent of Florida’s non-creative culture should gladly walk away from society to become a hermits.

If Arlie Russell Hochschild deplores capitalism at the expense of family, and Percy calls for our attention to encapsulated knowledge, then Florida must be the man on the wrong side of the fence. The mixing of these opinions is not meant to anger, but to enthrall readers to identify what is missing. I know I have an emptiness inside me that no amount of advertising, nor creativity can fill up. Our world is tapped out from commerce, it is that lonely pop can being kicked down the road, its adverts crumpled, nonexistent. The desperate hope we should cling to is that one day we will set aside our superficiality to spend more time with the ones we cherish more than our work schedule.