Your first thought might be that the post will be of making your life into a service to others. While it's a noble goal, today I want to write about something else.
I want to write about a life in which every aspect of it becomes a service provided to you.
It would be life in which you don't really use or even acquire any skills that are needed for your survival, because all the necessities are being provided to you by an entity, for a price.
We have been moving towards such a reality for quite a while already. We are doing less and less of basic tasks like chopping wood to heat the house or raise animals and grow crops to put the food on a table. Heating usually coming with the bill and food comes from the supermarket, or a takeaway.
We no longer fix our cars, radios and bikes. There's someone we pay to do it or we simply buy a new thing. We no longer gather water, catch fish and repair our socks. This outsourcing or every aspect of our life maintenance tasks is making us weak, vulnerable. Everything in our lives seems to have a monthly installment that comes with it. Life became an almost maintenance free string of often meaningless work that brings no real value in order to pay for things we could do ourselves and with benefit to ourselves and others.
We no longer know how to take care of ourselves. Take away the electricity and the taps run dry, cash machines stop working. Where do we get the water from?
And what if a virus spreads around and people start to buy everything they can in panic. What do we do then, when the shelves are empty? Is there someone coming to the rescue?
In our relentless search for comfort and indulgence in laziness we have got the the point of losing our resiliency, strength, willpower, discipline, skill...
We have lost the real values, swapping them for trinkets and a fantasy of easier is always better. We have cut every corner we could have.
And while we are getting weaker by the day, there are those who benefit.
Supermarkets do not want you to buy at the farmer's market.
Supermarkets do not want you to grow your own food.
Energy companies prefer that you use their electricity instead of gathering your own wood.
Food companies do not want you to buy meat from your local farmer, they prefer that you buy their processed garbage. They make tones of money selling it.
They do not really even want you to eat the fresh vegetables despite pushing vegan diet onto the world. They'll process them on the cheap and sell it to you quadruple charge.
They constantly, relentlessly whisper to your ears about how easy and simple life can be, just eat this, take this pill, drink that and take this loan. And you need to have this new thing and don't forget to buy that... We fall for the idea of buying all this stuff we don't need to make more time for ourselves while spending all this time making money to pay for it.
Moments like this, when the virus comes along, the bubble bursts and the truth comes out. I only just wonder whether it'll be enough for us to finally see it.
But what do we do you ask? The solution for this is what I have written a long time ago about: Personal Responsibility.