The Simpler Life

I am convinced that the disease which afflicts our society is not so much stress, as insisting on yielding to sources of potential stress. I am surrounded, all day, by people who base their sense of self-worth on their levels of dangerous, heart-disease inflicting torment, and yet who consistently moan and bitch about how great life would have been before such irritations; and who yet, in the same breath, speculate on how humans existed before the advent of cellular phones.

Stress is only what you allow it to be. Yes, modern employment is harrassing and filled with little annoyances. The phone rings. The fax machine makes incomprehensible burbling sounds. The printer isn't networked, no matter how many times you click the add printer button on the baffling Microsoft console of doom. Ah, for the simple, gentle life before modern technology, when life was easier, more relaxing . . .

Wake up at 4:30 in the morning, right as dawn breaks. Get dressed, no central heat, no shower. Crawl outside, where it's 35 degrees F. Find some wood. If you're lucky, it got chopped the day before. Possibly by someone else, even. Grab an armload and carry it into the house, which is drafty and has no plumbing. Light the fire, without a Bic, and hang a big heavy kettle. Wait, strike that. Go back outside, pump the water out of the well you dug yourself, put it in a bucket, bring it in, and then fill the kettle. Grind some grain and add it to the water, and eventually, while you stagger back out and (if you're doing well and can afford them) feed the chickens which you have to kill yourself with an axe when you want to eat one, it will boil and you can make some disgusting mess of porridge, which can then sustain you all day while you labor in the fields wearing scratchy sack clothing, so that you can go to bed at dusk (or get eye strain mending your rags by candlelight) and get up the next day and do it all over again. If you're female, you'll most likely die during childbirth at some point, covered in blood and laying in a pile of dirt. No birth control. No painkillers. No antibiotics.

How did people live before cell phones? Well, you were presumably alive for more than the past ten years, you figure it out. Why am I not stressed out about getting up in a relatively warm house, running my hot bath out of the tap, buying a three dollar latte, and sitting down in a comfortable chair and answering email? Because I'm not a fucking moron.

Why do some of us have the luxury of being raw foods organic vegans? (Not the Editor, of course - I devour cows with a spoon.) Well . . . because it's not, in fact, 1800. Or anytime earlier than that. Or later than that, and anywhere else in the world. We have it pretty good, folks. I am not somehow less good at my job because I don't wank all the fucking time. I come home, pet the cat, feed the zombies some human flesh (raw foods of a sort, and organic, most of the time), and play some mindless video games, and really, it's not too bad.

So relax. What's the worst that can happen? We get a temp job. The rent still gets paid. There's still organic soy slime in the refrigerator to suck off of a recycled paper plate. Get over it.