two miracles

My father grouses about the fact that people don't pick up street pennies anymore. But it's just mental calculus. Without thinking, we all calculate how much a penny will enhance our life, compared to the time spent bending over, retrieving, and storing. If we see someone grabbing a street penny, it's a curiosity, isn't it?
And the calculus extends...most people who become well-off reach a point where they don't bend over for coins of any sort. Having been a self-sufficient non-materialist all my life, i've always danced on the balance between knowing what i need to make to live, set against how much of my life i'm willing to sacrifice on the wage-earning altar. I've been very aware of my mental calculus lately. In cities, street coins are common, but when you're a biker, the calculus changes. Stopping for a coin can take time, even minutes if you factor in traffic lights. If i'm walking, i'll snap up anything silver. But i've realized that a quarter is the only guaranteed stop for me as a biker. Dimes depend on my mood. Nickels, forget it.
And the calculus extends...most people who become rich reach a point where they don't even bend over for a stray bill. They know how much their time is worth, and snapping up dollar bills, even if they did it all day, would be a bottom line loss.
And the calculus extends...hypothetically, there are the ultra-rich who wouldn't even bend over for a thousand-dollar bill. In terms of their ledgers, that nine seconds would be utterly wasted. For others, that bill represents a week's labor. Or a month's. Or a year's...
My point is not merely the insanity of our market economy, which absolutely requires that there be poor people. There is no "ideal capitalism" in which everyone gets what they need. It has never, and can never, happen. If you want to be rich, someone has to be poor. Corporate capitalism goes further, and requires not just inequity, but horrific deprivation.
My point is how this turns us all into instinctive commodifiers. We make these calculations over street money, with zero conscious thought - a precise mirror for how we treat people. When a new person comes into our life, we instantly size them up as potential friend, lover, or associate. And we proceed to court or ignore them, based on those largely subconscious, surface calculations. How will a given person enhance our status, security, or happiness? It becomes a metric of trade-offs. Potential reward versus possible rejection. Exciting versus annoying. Societal approval versus personal growth. Libidinous satisfaction versus social censure. Brilliance by association versus being second (or fifth) banana.
We commodify everything and everyone around us.
Are you comfortable with your worth being both random (based on fad or fashion) and tenuous, with all sorts of valuations (aging, illness/injury, the behavior of those you associate with) entirely out of your control? Of course not. No sane person is comfortable having their life reduced to their surface characteristics. And everyone knows that sting of rejection which feels howlingly unfair.
Even though deep down we all know you CAN judge a book (or person) by its cover with at least 99% accuracy, that 1% is a mindfuck in which all sorts of traumatic, life-altering shit swirls.
In theory, some of this sounds like it shouldn't be so bad. It almost sounds like it makes sense. With sex, and our constant search for "the one", it's almost tempting to think that eventually people who are perfect for each other will FIND each other. And then all the rejecting and sacrifice will make sense. Never mind the unending alleys of loneliness and false hope. Eventually, all systems tend toward equilibrium, and people, whether in friendship or love or business, will find those who balance them?
It's so tempting to think that's true.
But it's not. At any moment in our life we might be more happy or less happy, but in this culture, fear of loss is our only guaranteed lifetime companion.
And deep down, we hate that, we don't understand it, we cannot make it MAKE SENSE.
Is it all capitalism's fault?
Yeah, pretty much. Or on a deeper level, it's the fault of a poison which got into humyn consciousness around the time that agriculture gave us something we'd never known before - surplus stuff. Valuables (in this case, food) in piles larger than we could possibly need at the time.
In response, someone stood up and said, "That pile is MINE."
Humynity has been a descending shit spiral ever since.
Is it too late to spiral back up? I sure hope not. The feelers among us, those who don't get crushed or go insane or kill themselves, they do keep trying, don't they? Even the non-feelers are not so thoroughly mercenary as i've described. Our basic humyn nature is social. Our basic nature understands that to help others is to help ourselves. At heart, we are silly, sharing monkeys, and even the worst of us never dreamed of becoming selfish adults. Most of us, even in the most disastrous moments of our lives, try to not hurt others.
But the calculus of how much we've destroyed our world, and other animals, and the essentially playful, loving spirit of every humyn traveler on this rock, went way past apocalyptic a long, long time ago. If our grandchildren are to survive at all, we're going to need two kinds of miracle - technological and moral. By our standards, the first should actually be easy. The second, we've never seen.
But i'm not about to give up.
I love you all.