Good point, Peter. When you have demoralizing and therefore fatiguing "industrialized" work that has been broken down into inevitably dissatisfying unintelligible fragments -- true even of much "white collar" work -- combined with an agressive search for efficiency-for-profit that requires overwork just to let a family earn enough to meet social expectations for decent living, expectations that require an excess of expensive, intrinsically useless gadgetry (note that I realize that such gadgets have incidental but still very great benefits; I have two Macs and an iPhone, a microwave, and a car -- but no TV), and a material infrastructure that has been spread out geographically to meet the demand for more auto sales, leaving us to spend far too much time driving to and from our various activities: when you put all this together, it's not surprising that mental and physical health have to be maintained artificially instead of being supported by the ordinary daily routine.
My ex's way of living and my own illustrate this in a small way: she is a successful pediatrician and doctor of oriental medicine who, with her second husband, has opened a successful clinic and beauty treatment spa, and who over schedules our daughter with activities scattered around town so that of my circa 4,000 miles a year in the car (I work at home), fully 3,000 are for my daughter. My ex is fiercely disciplined and manages to cook well, exercise, and find recreation outside of her lengthy weekly work schedule, but it is, even for me who am only peripherally affected by it, rather exhausting. Note that discipline counts: her second husband, an OB-GYN, just turned 50, recently competed in his first Ironman -- in Wales. Some years ago I read an interesting book by an ex MIT MS graduate whose Master's project had been to live with a very strict Amish or Mennonite group so traditional and secretive that he could not name their location (somewhere in the midwest, I think) to discover how their leisure time, quality of life and life-satisfaction compared to those of the average American. He found that because of community, simplicity in their manner of life, and maintenance of largely forgotten, traditional methods of work, that despite their eschewal of "labor saving devices" --- no horse drawn, gasoline-powered cultivators or motorized churns for them -- they were on the whole happier, more leisured, better fed and better rested than his control group. -- Tho' I doubt they rode bicycles. FWIW and as an aside: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/not-amish-but-close/ On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 8:04 AM, Peter Morgano <uscpeter11...@gmail.com> wrote: Not to get too meta here but the problem for alot of us is we are in a > society that demands we work 50 hours a week and keep up a working > family unit AND look great all the time and just something has to give. > Newsweek had a great article last week pertaining to how this modern > schedule is affecting women but touched on that no-one can lead a > happy life at those levels. It is just sad to see a society that villifies >people who are out of shape or frazzled so bad from just the daily > grind that at the end of the day all they want to do is watch tv and eat > some chips or ice cream. -- Vote early, vote often, vote Rhinoceros! http://tinyurl.com/d7muj2t ------------------------- Patrick Moore, Albuquerque, NM, USA For professional resumes, contact Patrick Moore, ACRW http://resumespecialties.com/index.html ------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en.
