I’ve been meaning to write this post for several days.  I was appropriately depressed in unison with the title.  But I have been horrendously busy at work with no time to spare.  I have also been enjoying what I’m doing and my mood is not somber.  I am in fact quite content with myself, well centered, happy.

Still, I have been navigating thoughts of inadequacy.  Books sometimes have a tremendous impact.  When something resonates with me, I internalize, make it my own.  You have probably already observed that in the numerous book references at Doctor-Conde.com.

Dear readers, how many of you feel you’re alien in your own worlds? How often do you feel you don’t belong?  How often do you lose sense of what’s “home”?

I have been away from my place of birth for 28 years.  Other than my own nuclear family of wife and 2 girls, I have no extended family nearby.  I don’t talk to my siblings that often (to a large extent my choice as well).  I have taken distance from many friends and extended family as well.  As time has gone on, I have closed doors and said goodbye or just not called back in a while.

Here in New York, I have few people with whom I regularly “socialize”.  I think that by “socializing” I mean spending time face to face visiting and doing things together, even helping each other out.  Things like knocking on someone’s door just to visit for a while.  Or helping someone cook a meal, play chess, plant a tree.

Even though I have a country club membership, I don’t have any “friends” or “buddies” out there.  I do have many dear friends, mostly women, with whom I relate regularly, mostly by phone or in writing, sometimes getting together for a lunch or dinner, but not in a very traditional sense of “socializing” as I described above.  I wouldn’t just knock on anyone’s door for a visit or to see what they’re up to.  A silly example: if I were to move a block down, I can’t think of any “guys” I would call to help me move.  I used to when I lived in the “old country”.  I used to when I was in graduate school in Atlanta.  Now, I know I can call and pay somebody…

I write these things not to elicit your pity but rather to be descriptive and make a point.  The point is that I’m neither from here nor there.  I’m not from anywhere.  Maybe it has something to do with being a stranger in a strange land.  But maybe more profoundly, it’s the way adult life unfolds in urban/suburban western civilization nowadays.  Things change after college.  When we settle down and create our “families”, we close the doors and look inwards.

Does this matter?  Should I sit down and cry?  Should I take up golf and start “making nice” with the guys who regularly play the rounds at the club, talk about sports, politics, money and business?  I don’t think so.

I had already mentioned Stephanie Coontz in my prior post “Marriage, the Secret Files“.  I have been reading Stephanie’s latest release which is a new edition of a book she wrote in the 1990s: “The Way We Never Were“.  I’m not quite past the mid point and it’s a little heavy reading.  But the gist seems to be that our infatuation with marriage and the nuclear family are recent creations of cultural imagination and not our historical or natural state of being.  Maybe our natural state of being is “socializing”.  I wonder what the ultimate punchline will be but I suspect that there’s something to the effect that we’re designed to be in “tribes” or broader networks of interdependence than just the nuclear family.  I firmly believe that and that’s what’s wrong with me today: I don’t really have that network of interdependence or tribe, really.  I sort of have it at work where I work in pretty broad teams, but that’s a very limited punctual spectrum.  I don’t have someone to help me move, unless I pay them.

Years ago I attended a spiritual retreat where we focused on “ideas for a new economy”.  At the time, I sat down and wrote an outline of what a “new economy” or maybe even a “new world” would be like.  But I think it’s probably more appropriate to call it a collection of items that help explain “what’s wrong with me”.  Rereading it recently, I’m pleasantly surprised to see how well it aligns with my current philosophy.

Here it goes:

Assumptions

• We are in a “New Age” of spiritual awakening with different values than those experienced in the last 10,000 years of human history
• The “New Economy” refers to an economic ideal consistent with the value system aligned with the New Era

New Age values

• Humans are spiritual beings
• Humans form an interdependent social community
• The human race will survive and continue to evolve for the foreseeable future
• The goal of spirit is to merge in harmony with all other spirits

Human Nature

• Humans are primates
• Our natural environment is the hunter and gatherer band
• It involves living in groups of 20-30 people who constitute an “extended family”
• We are not built for the “nuclear family”
• We are built for geographic diversity
• We need diversity so we need to expand our “tribes” to include new people we meet along the way
• Private property is not natural since we are naturally nomadic
• We are programmed to change landscape
• Primates, like all mammals, have a system of feelings and impulses with the following objectives:
  Preserve one’s life
  Preserve the life of the group
  Preserve the life of the species
• Humans are part of a community of life on the planet

Current Status of Human Reality

• Our world today is the result of the transformation of human culture from hunters/gatherers to agriculture and sedentary lifestyle 10,000 years ago and then to industrialization 300 years ago
• The world today is primarily individualistic and based on the  nuclear family
• We are not built for today’s world
• Dissonance between our nature and the world today:
  Individual property
  The nuclear family
  Monogamy / polygamy
  Male chauvinism
  Sedentary lifestyle
  Routine and boredom (for lack of change of scenery)
  Longevity
  Diet
  Sleep patterns
  Sex
  Distribution of work vs. play
  The anonymous collectivity

So how do we cope?

• We are spiritual but spirit must respect our nature
• The spirit must kill the ego that propels us toward individualism
• The way to kill the ego is going inwards, seeking the center, living in the present
• Killing the ego helps us be better collaborators and “tribespeople”
• The only “sacred law” is free will
• The spirit is creative and expressive

The New Age

• A way of life that reflects the values of the new era
• What does this mean relative to social organization?
• We would be better with
  • Less traditional nuclear families
  • More “communities” or mini-communities
  • Sustainability and self-sufficiency
• Focus on education
  • Understanding our nature and spirit
  • Much more focus on spiritual practices (meditation, healing, etc.)
  • Respect of human nature and life on the planet

The Current Economy

• Capitalistic in most of the world with communist pockets
• Communism is based on ownership and overall state government
  • Overall violates free will
• Capitalism is based on private property and profit maximization
  • We must recognize that capitalism is responsible for the economic prosperity we enjoy today
  • But at a high cost in terms of human charity and social hidden costs such as pollution and waste of resources
  • What is good for the individual is not necessarily good for society
  • The government has to be a referee and provider where there are vacuums
  • E.g., without the government it would be difficult to have highways
• Profit maximization is not evil; it’s a means to allocate resources
  • Society invests capital in projects with high return
  • Explicitly performance measured in monetary terms

The New Economy

• Capitalism?
• Explicit recognition of costs and “social” benefits
• Role of government to incentivize collaboration

So there you have it dear reader.  My blueprint that explains what’s wrong with me and how to fix it.  Maybe generations ahead.  But today, all I control is myself, my words and actions.  Seems like we’re back to free will as the driving key principle.