Exhibit A: Take the intelligent and well-educated mid level corporate guy who works 50 plus hours a week, year after year, thinking he is “well paid” and “important” because he brings in a handsome salary.
Does he know he is being “domesticated“?
All work day long his body is fused to a chair. His mind – melded to a computer. His caffeine charged cubicle existence of multi-tasking and manipulation, plays out under artificial lights and within a comfortably conditioned bubble…. of stagnant air.
That is, when he is not rushing through airports and traveling around his “territory” – becoming even more physically and emotionally disconnected from home and his family – despite what his cell phone and lap-top tells him.
Either way, his cortisol-addicted mind and body are fused to a “communication” device of some sort throughout his work day, and therefore in a state of perpetual anxiety and stress….except when he is asleep….thanks to “Lunesta”.
And either way, he spends the majority of his working day – SITTING.
The prime years of his life ….rapidly bleed away…. as he pursues his quarterly goals with Pavlovian passion, totally disconnected from Nature and the animal he was wired to be for over 2 million years.
Yet year after year……he drones on. An automan.
In his rare “down time”…..he takes his muscular gas-sucking car out on country roads while listening to his I-Pod, squeezes in a couple of brief whirl-wind vacations per fiscal year (but only with his Blackberry at his side), consumes mass quantities of heavily processed food, mindless entertainment, and other “stuff” like there is no tomorrow…..yet can never “make” enough time to enjoy all those toys he’s financed…..all the while… taking permanent shelter under an expensive roof that covers way more square feet that any single human, or even small group of humans, would or should…..ever….. possibly….. need.
In between “conference calls” even at home, he sweats the numbers of “success” every week, all the while throwing his own family and his own health under the bus. He ends up on “Prozac”, as well as with some other horrible drug dependency and/or behavioral neurosis that makes him difficult to live with…but he manages to hide it pretty well.
His wife resents him despite the comfortable salary he brings.
He is mentally stressed out, or overweight, or outta shape, or lonely, or spiritually bankrupt, or depressed….or any combination thereof….and doesn’t quite know why.
Afterall, he is a well paid and well thought of “successful” business man, living in an advanced society. He is a “winner”. A real “go-getter”.
Ultimately, he dies before his time of some kind of physical breakdown, OR if he is “fortunate”….he makes it to his “golden years” …where he lingers in the forgotten background of a society operating at light speed….on a diet of 15 different drug prescriptions…..before dying a lonely and drawn out death.
A producer, consumer, and a credit score. A tool of materialism.
Discarded at the end onto the mountainous heap – unrecycled.
His hollowed out existence a relentless series of self-absorbed blurs, seeking physical comforts at all costs, punctuated here and there by mostly psuedo victories and ambiguous defeats….. all spent in “continuous partial attention” to the ones that loved him the most.
And his well-conditioned children, if he had any, more likely than not…….. will follow mindlessly in his footsteps.
Great visibility – poor vision.
What a tragic legacy.
The bigger tragedy is that this “situation” is rapidly becoming “normal” in “advanced” societies. And more often than not, people with this type of mentality are the ones “leading” the show.
Or at least they think they are.
So now we have powerful whole societies that “lead” the world…..built upon an unsustainable foundation of addictive and contagious consumption, instant gratification, catastrophic waste, obsessive busy-ness, chronic self-absorption, and incessant mass-media entertainment…an illusion transforming people into commodities and dragging them along at the breathtaking hyper pace of the Information Age.
DOMESTICATION OF THE SPECIES?