I think a lot about security. I'm 28 years old, and graduated from college with a degree in East Asian Studies froma big university. The feeling I got from my teachers, parents, and peers is that I would inevitably "go on" in life to do something great and exciting - start my own business, make lots of money, write a book that sold lots of copies, do some exciting research in a field like medicine, or some other equally notable life path. I have the background that is supposedly the top of the global pyramid of inequality in which we all live. I'm a college-educated, white male in early 21st century America. I'm supposed to make use of the gifts that I have been given in my genes and upbringing to make some mark in the world.
How does this relate to security? I think most of us college-educated young white Americans are aiming to convert our priveleged backgrounds into security for our lives and those of our children. We get higher paying jobs and save up money for big houses, vacations, college costs for our kids, cars, and many other things. In living this lifestyle, we compete with others to advance our self-interests, leaving others behind who can't (for many reasons) achieve the same level of success in these endeavors. We take our money and build large homes with lots of space for each member of our family. We drive as nice a car as we can afford. We do what needs to be done at work to prove that we are worth the money we get paid and hopefully more in the future. We worry about whether we're getting paid enough, or how we might get paid more, or how we can get the best deals with our money to get more while paying less. Sometimes we give a small amount of money at church, or donate some to a charity whose work we respect. We try to save up for retirement in our IRA, pension accounts, or investing in real property. We buy insurance for our cars, our houses, and our lives. We save what we can now so that we have cushions for the rougher times that may lie ahead (two kids in college at once, unforeseen illness, or sudden loss of our job). I feel like these are the terms of our lives in modern American culture.
What does this have to do with security? It's one way of approaching security in our lives. If we save up money, then we can take care of ourselves in the future. We spend so much time, however, working at our jobs and trying to get as much as we can while paying as little as possible that we become involved in a cycle of life where we distance ourselves from the people and environment that surrounds us. If we work 9 to 10 hours a day, we don't get to see our families very much. We rarely ask to cut back to part-time work just to hang out with our kids in the afternoons during their summer vacation. If there is one promotion available at work, we compete to get it with friends. We don't generally share the extra wealth with the woman in the next office just because she's really nice and works as hard as we do. We book vacations at places that are prohibitively expensive to people who make less money than us, showing that we can afford the good things in life. We rarely take the poor family down the street to Cabo San Lucas even though they're nice folks we've known a long time.
The themes are about competition and scarce resources. We're competing more and more with a greater number of people for nearly everything in the world. It is difficult at best to feel connected to the people around us when so much of our lives is steeped in competition and saving up money. We're aiming to achieve a high degree of security by out-competing those around us, but I think the cost in social and emotional well-being is tremendously high, for ourselves and our society.
I've really enjoyed exploring the idea of building social capital in my life rather than financial capital. I like volunteering (as I think most people do) because I get to give my life away to help out other people. I like working with people where the bottom line is not how much we earn but how much satisfaction we get in our work. I like the idea of taking the huge resource that is my life and giving it back to my friends and family in the form of making myself available to them. I can help one friend build a house, help another through a crisis, talk with another about how to build a community, help a stranger fix his bike on the roadside, or give someone I meet at a party tips on swimming even though I've just met them. I love giving my life away.
I think that as we give our lives to each other, we build a sense of connection that is more satisfying, longer-lasting, and deeper than relationships based on money. We want to help other people because we know their lives are like ours. Other people want to help us for the same reasons. By sharing, teaching, and being kind to each other, we create good feelings that turn into more ways to help each other have good lives.
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