STOP THE TREADMILL, I WANT TO GET OFF!

STOP THE TREADMILL, I WANT TO GET OFF!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2007

“Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face: from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of earth.”

Thomas Wolfe
LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL

There was a time when the rhythm of the seasons kept our feet on the ground in harmony with Mother Nature. It was a time when there were no pesticides to kill insects that ravaged our crops; when we took in stride the fickle hand of Mother Nature in terms of droughts and floods, tornadoes and hurricanes, erosions and corrosions because we had a bulwark of trees and rocks and natural barriers to control this rapacious disturbance of land and love and life.

We were hearty souls and accepted the unforgiving nature of Mother Nature as most of what and who and where we were was created out of her and went back to her as we came out of her.

It was an authentic cycle, with little invention other than what was necessary for survival, as a reflection of Mother Nature. But today we are so separated from our source of being that we run faster and faster without realizing we are not moving at all.

Everything we have is artificial and a barrier, the mother lode of invention. We are lost and fight desperately to return to the womb of our nature, but have lost our way, and so measure our lost ness in other ways. Today, we call it affluence.

QUALITY OF LIFE

Not only has our affluence failed to make us better off, it may actually have made us worse off. Not only does affluence fail to solve the most basic human problems, it creates new ones. We measure the wrong things; we adopt policies designed to promote the wrong things; we spend our affluence on the wrong things.

We have wasted too much time listening to economists. Milton Friedman, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve and now a private citizen like everyone else, tells a group we are heading for a recession and the Dow Jones Industrials plummet, as they do in Europe and Asia on cue to his words. He no longer is privy to the most current economic data but his celebrity still throws a wide swath.

Studies indicate that wealth is important as people struggle from poverty to subsistence. After that, welfare gains diminish and other aspects of life become more important. But once on this treadmill of wealth producing, it is nigh impossible to get off. It becomes the narcotic of the affluent.

The poverty of imagination kicks in and willful neglect of the evidence to the contrary is ignored.

Economic resources are not final goods. Wealth is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The true end is welfare, well-being, life satisfaction and usefulness. We all know this but something gnaws at us to be better off than the Jones and so we never get off the treadmill. We measure our identity and our worthiness by an ever-expanding display of affluence compounded by the incremental growth of our net income, paycheck to paycheck, or portfolio report to portfolio report.

Since we cannot define welfare, well being, life satisfaction or utility other than in ambiguous terms, we attempt to reduce everything to how much we make, how much we are worth.

What exactly does it mean to have 946 billionaires as reported by Fortune anyway? Or to see that in 1979 0.1 percent of American tax payers (those making $233, 539 or more in adjusted gross income) accounted for 3 percent of income according to the IRS, or that in 2000 the cutoff for the top 0.1 percent was $1.6 million and their share 10 percent of income?

This sounds as if a tremendous gap until you insert inflation. What it does indicate, and Time (March 19, 2007) reports this, is that the rich are assuming the major share of the tax burden. This has resulted in a major reduction in the deficit ($177 billion), but that does not necessarily bode well for the economy.

When wealth and taxes are not equally distributed across society, it is in a position for enormous collapse sometime in the future. Imagine what might happen if the rich, who are now paying 35 percent of the tax burden, suddenly go belly up. It is not a pleasant thought to contemplate.

Go to any sizable city in the Untied States and Europe and you see homeless; you see rundown neighborhoods; you see the poor in impoverished circumstances. Rome crumbled when citizens were distracted with coliseum extravaganzas rather than jobs. Money and welfare, jobs and identity go together. The more money we have the more welfare and well being and life satisfaction we have because we have a job and feel useful. Extremes in any case never serve people because what serves people is what we learned from Mother Nature and that is the rhythm and balance of life.

The paradox of wealth is that it absorbs more attention, more preoccupation with it, allowing less time and capacity to enjoy it. This is as much a function of having far too many choices to make as it is to being exposed to too many opportunities to make bad choices.

I have known a number of people who created wealth quickly – the millionaire kind – and just as quickly were paralyzed by it. Then I’ve known others equally as wealthy that made good choices, but complained about all the choices they left on the table and never exploited. In both cases, they eventually surrendered to depression, while those far less wealthy envied them, having no idea what they had escaped.

Economists tell us that choice shouldn’t work this way, but in my experience this is precisely how it has been seen to work.

Affluence requires more choices and therefore poses more problems that take time and energy to solve. If you can afford a private school for your children, with all its possibilities, your life has just grown a good deal more complicated. It is not only the five-figure fee for your little ones that is required but also your involvement. On this treadmill, the next iteration is a college that requires in the six-figures for a four-year degree, and then all the accoutrements expected at that level and status.

Once we have been blessed with the idea that we are affluent, the principal weakness to our status rears its ugly head, and that is our inability to exert self-control. We have a powerful tendency to indulge our children in all the excesses that now have become necessities of our own self-indulgence.

THE “HEDONISTIC TREADMILL”

It gets a little complicated as to whether our children have led us into this gross hedonism or whether we have led them into it. In either case, everything becomes spur of the moment and our interests of a short-term orientation. Then, as our wealth increases, so does our myopia. We are the last to know that we are living on the edge.

Confusing the matter even further, the market continuously blindsides us with new options to distract us from our treadmill status, causing us to possess the latest novelties before they become conventional, be they in electronics, boats, cars, homes, jewelry, or other artificial stimulants to support our hedonism, narcissism, individualism and disorientation.

Now joining the affluent on this merry dash to nowhere are the non-affluent who attempt to mirror the affluent in every way, thinking that the affluent have found the way to welfare, well being, life satisfaction and utility, when they are as lost as we are, only they hide it better than we do because they have more money.

The rational consumer at any level is a fiction while choice is fallible to a fault.

The choices people make do not always accord with what they would judge to be in their best interest because the focus of the choices are on what others have and what others are doing. The most vulnerable to making bad choices on this basis once were considered people making nearly $100,000. They were no longer at the subsistence level, or struggling, but a long way from being wealthy. Yet, the temptation to put on the face of being wealthy proved overwhelming for many. How else could they be envied? So they would rob Peter constantly to pay Paul, and live literally on a shoestring. Now that figure has been increased to the person making nearly $250,000 a year.

When expectations are driven by an outside agenda, the treadmill owns the person.

The problems of self-control are not new for the wealthy or the want to be’s. What kept us off the treadmill and within bounds was a network of self-restraints provided by the state, and by various social and religious institutions.

Peter Drucker, the corporate guru, noted that executives up through and immediately after World War II demonstrated amazing restraint. They paid themselves modestly or only about five to ten times as much as workers on the line. Now, with restraints weakened if not non-existent, executives pay themselves more than a thousand times as much as workers on the line. This is not the exception in society but it has become the rule. Workers at all levels take what they can get without any restraint or conscience. Self-control is gone and people are running faster and faster and going nowhere because they realize they are all on their own. There is no societal safety net.

If anything, we have become married to the products we buy because little stands between what is produced and what is consumed.

How many people do you know that don’t own a cell phone? It is now a necessity, not for emergencies but to be constantly talking and listening for the pure business of talking and listening while walking or running on that treadmill. We have become addicted to timesaving devices, which allow us no time. Who has time to read a book or listen to the sounds of a running brook or to the stillness of nature?

We want desperately to have a good time but a pervasive aspect of our psychology does us in. We cannot stand stillness. We must have noise. We must have new acquisitions to give us pleasure, but they do so for less and less time. We become bored, feel cheated, short-changed, and depressed.

This reminds me of that song, “Is that all there is to love?” So, we’re off to find the next new thing. This process of adaptation has been referred to as the “hedonistic treadmill.”

It is an apt expression, as on the exercise treadmill, we don’t get anywhere; we don’t even get any exercise. The time we spend on the “hedonistic treadmill” is time we don’t spend nurturing our minds and growing as persons, learning to live with others and to appreciate that community is of many hues and many cultures and that is where our nature is truly nurturing.

Affluence, paradoxically, divides community. When a society has enough wealth to live above the subsistence level, close relations flourish. When the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) dominates a society, life is increasingly oriented toward consumption and separation. Wealth becomes the measure of status and not community involvement. Complicating the picture further, family and friends are running faster and faster on this same “hedonistic treadmill” and so are not available to counsel each other on self-control measures, or indeed, to lend a helping hand with other problems. Every man is for himself.

When wealth becomes the primary yardstick of status, other things recede into the background. It results in a kind of arms race of wealth as acquisitions thrive on inequality with the wealthy running faster and faster for longer and longer simply to keep up with their peers.

This is all a measure of stuckness, and the reason I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.

Mother Nature always wins in the end. Concern for status and competition have found career minded young people preoccupied with their careers with marriage and children taking a backseat to affairs of the heart.

Minorities are now becoming the majority, and moving in to fill the vacuum of those in single-minded pursuit of increased GDP producing negative effects in their personalities, psychology and physical health, not to mention taking the playing field and game away from them.

We always show our prejudices when we want to hide our own ill-advised behavior.

The majority today looks around them and sees people of other cultures and languages dominate the shopping malls and public places, and feel mounting insecurity, which increasingly afflicts both the white-collar and blue-collar classes. They fail to learn from this natural flow but move to enclaves of their own type, which grow smaller and smaller.

But it is impossible to run from a society when you are on the same treadmill as it is, a society in which children are neglected, marriages are unstable, jobs are precarious, trust is absent, and virtue has all but disappeared. You are stuck. It is necessary for you to get off. I got off in 1969 in my thirties, seeing that as I was making more and more ($50,000 without paying any taxes in 1969 dollars from South Africa) and was less and less in control of my life.

It prompted me to write the essay then (1972) that has become A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD today. And it is why I now offer it as a book because what I saw as an inconvenience then has become merging on a catastrophe now.

PREORDER INFORMATION: $20 (S&H included). Checks to: Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.