As a guy without a family, working less days in a week has done wonders for my mental health. I am happier with three or four days a week. Although government subsidies have been making financial life quite stress free, those days I don't work the government will throw me a few bucks to compensate. It will be sad when that program ends but it has to eventually, its not sustainable. Heck it feels kind of nice to get back some of that employment insurance money I paid to the government on every paycheck ever
I don't have all those fancy toys but that is the lifestyle I have chosen and I am okay with it. Sure I would love to have a boat and a camper and a Harley but the amount of hours that would take working. I would rather spend that lifetime relaxing, reading or going out for lunch with friends. As long as I can afford to live comfortable without having to stress about money too hard then things are good. They say the number one regret people have on their death bed is that they wish they did not work so much.
Working all those hours to buy shit I don't really need never made me happy. In fact it made me unhappy, always having to wake up and do what I didn't want to do day after day. There was no drive to get out there, to make that bank so I could support my family.
Miss having extra cash for traveling but there are always things to save on to make up for it
I do think about the communes too sometimes. They have that slab city in Utah I think, somewhere out in that useless desert land. Those communes remind me of summer camp life. I imagine you go there and things are amazing for a while, but then that itch of home starts to scratch. You want to get back to doing things in your normal life. There is a lesson to be learned there though in these groups, and it is a sense of community. As a society I think our sense of community has diminished to a detrimental point but we can't even see that. It is like this missing arm that gives us phantom pain all the time. Everyone hiding in their living rooms watching tv or surfing the internet. Having short form talks over text messages that fail to provide the healing that good conversation does. Even the bar has become a joke for socializing, I guess we only meet strangers on Tinder now.
I think there is a way to get much of that back without having to start our own secret society. It starts with us getting out there in events and socializing, talking to our neighbors more. Not being so fucking timid and scared of one another all the time. During the pandemic I realized how much I really missed those few community events that went wayside during covid.
Then we have the omish or hutterite communities. I worked at this one place where every other person there was what we call an Ex hutterite. So basically when your a certain age you get yourself a wife and they give your own home on the colony. Since single guys have to wait until they are thirty to get a home they often leave the colony becoming ex hutterites. This guy I worked with talked about going back, and at first I could not believe how someone would want to go back to that seemingly boring existence. He explained how it all worked and you know I gotta say it did not sound all that bad. He said you were given a task for the day and if you completed it early that free time was yours. No bills to worry about, supper was always on the table and everything you needed to survive was provided for you. They have their own schools and make their own clothes.
The spillover from that is humans still have wants and the allowance for personal property was next to nothing. So they have built a bit of a reputation as thieves in the local community. I can't say I really blame them, such is human desire. It is essentially communism in Canada.
There has to be a system where the lazy and hard working reap what they sow. I am not so big on applying the stick to get people motivated, either they want to do it or not and thats fine. A barter system commune sounds right up my alley though. I can get to work on producing shitty alcohol and weed, maybe wire some shit together for who needs it
