Yesterday evening i watched a documentary about Chinese workers and their much less lucky working conditions compared to us in Europe: one woman was working in her farm for 15 hours each day, managing barely to live of it, while her husband works in town and they only meet in the week ends.
Another young girl was working in a factory from 6 am to 6pm and was not allowed to speak with her colleagues, nobody was allowed to speak with the others, for the whole 12 hours. She had a bed in a 15square meters room that she was sharing with other 3 girls. She only had Sunday off and she thought she was lucky and had a good life.
A woman and a man worked in a big town 600 miles from their hometown, they had to work so many hours that could not take care of their children who were 6years old. The kids remained in the village with their parents. Even if the distance was of 600 miles, they had only time to see their children once a year, for Xmas.
To me their life conditions, especially of the last couple, were not satisfactory but I remember the bits of life told me her and there by my grandmother and the fact that she too did not know what a holiday is and did not know what a hobby is, since everything that she kept herself busy with in her life ( and still today, 92,she is alive and kicking!) were activities need for living or surviving, from cooking, to farming, to knitting,sewing and recycling. Even scraps of newspapers.
Maybe today, with our life rhythms were our job is actually doing work for others and not seeing the results in our practice, if not at the end of the month, in the form of the salary, we are not anymore connected with the purpose of our work. Or maybe we just have enough time to wonder about that.
Or maybe we have lost the purpose, the main goal that we want in our life.
In the case of my grandmother, it was purely surviving and raising 4 kids. The society was made up like that, the other families were functioning in the same way and there was no possibility or luxury to actually stop and think how worse it could get or wondering what was the purpose of all that hard work.
Then people were more religious and believed in some sort of divine justice and once again all the people of the classes had the feeling they belonged to those classes and were getting a sense of the purpose even by the class itself.
I have the feeling that in our world, society of today, at least in the western countries, the multiplicity of life dynamics and the less connection with the environment, has made us more unclear of where we are going or why we should be going towards a goal. And we are also less religious so also the rules, and somehow securities given by the dogmas of the religion do not reassure us anymore, do not make us anymore part of a community and with a sense.
But maybe it is a good thing.
If the purposes of our lives are so fixedly established by the government ( with social classes) and religion, and the community itself in which we live, then we have certainly not much space for our own desires, if we are able to see further from what has only been presented to us, as a chance.
When all the rules are set, and they are quite fixed and quite clear, you can only play a limited choice of moves.But if the rules are more vague, or not as many, then we have certainly more freedom.
Freedom also implies more responsibility and more need of information in order to form one's real choices. Choices that are less influenced by the choices of other people and more by our desires.
So our problems as humans all come back to the same question, our purpose.
If you have chosen the religion, your God will have established rules and purposes for you, this will male your life regulated and you can wake up in the morning, thinking that living this life and then dying in 80 years make sense because God said so and will give you eternal life if you continue it.
If you have chosen your job or your family, these will be points motivating your stepping out of the bed in the morning and being active.
But what if, you need to have SOMETHING ELSE to motivate you?
What if, all that, does not satisfy you or convince you enough?
Maybe it is time for a new human paradigm, maybe it is time for us humans to find a new goal.
Or to push our knowledge further, we should have more scientists and more philosophers, more researchers in all fields, to come with some new possibilities, about,
what are we living for?
why are we here?
what is awaiting us if anything?
Nel mondo occidentale di oggi, il senso di un obiettivo per cui vivere e motivarsi al mattino quando ci si alza dal letto si appanna sempre di piu'. Le classi sociali che un tempo creavano un senso di appartenenza si diversificano e la religione che un tempo rappresentava per molti, un elemento motivante,perde sempre pi'u importanza e contenuto.
Un tempo i nostri obiettivi o motivazioni esistenziali erano anche influenzati dalla comunita' per cui molto poco rimaneva veramente da scegliere, questo dava anche poca liberta' ma il non essendone coscienti faceva si che per i piu' non fosse un disagio, in quanto non avevo necessita' si uscire dalle possibili alternative che conoscevano. Oggi invece si ha bisogno di nuovi paradigmi e possibili scopi di vita. Se la religione, le classi sociali e la comunita' ci influenzano di meno e non corrispondono piu' al nostro senso di identita' oggi all' essere umano servono piu' ricerca per creare nuovi paradigmi e per avvicinarsi di piu' alle risposte delle domande " perch'e viviamo? perche' siamo qui? che cosa ci attende, se ci attende qualcosa? ".
