In Paolo Coelho’s book The Alchemist, the protagonist is told that there is an emerald on which has been inscribed the meaning of life. Someone pointed out to me that this implies that the secret isn’t all that complicated, but I’ve been thinking that I’m sure what’s written there isn’t spend 2 hours in a traffic jam and then push papers around all morning while you wish your job was more fulfilling.
Bonobos are our closest relative amongst other species, and they spend their waking hours like this:
- Foraging: 36%
- Resting: 18%
- Moving: 32%
- Socialising: 14%
Which perhaps means there’s the Bonobo equivalent of a commute. They’re gatherers, after all, and they travel from food source to food source during the day. And it’s not surprising that socialising is important, since our relatives depend just as humans do on the group for survival. Bonding takes time but it pays off in protection, procreation, and even in finding food. Two heads are better than one and a bunch of heads are better than two.
Now I presume that the reason there’s 6 billion humans and only a single valley full of Bonobos has to do with humans being very good at producing food, ever since the invention of agriculture and herding, and protecting ourselves – what with the invention of the AK-47 and the cruise missile and so on. So it would be logical that we got to spend a lot less time on the equivalent of “foraging” and “moving”, and more time on the equivalent of “resting” and “socialising”. Except that we don’t.
What we seem to do instead are a lot of things related to moving money around and keeping track of who owes it to whom. Even in the industries which actually produce something or provide a service much of the actual time people spend working involves keeping records on behalf of the people who push the money around. For every hour spent growing something or making something or cutting someone’s hair there seems to be 3 hours spent keeping records or organising insurance or talking on the telephone. People don’t do very much, they mostly comply with regulations, annotate their compliance, calculate taxes, advertise, report, and get very very bored by it all. I have a sneaking suspicion that if Bonobos worked under a similar arrangement they’d all starve to death without even getting 14% of their time to socialise.
Which is not to say all the apparently meaningless activity doesn’t have some purpose. It’s there to solve a simple problem in a very complex way. By the banks of the Nile is the archaeological remains of a village which had been inhabited by scribes, 3500 years ago. They painted writing for the Pharaoh, and also decorated his mausoleum. For this you need records of how much painting had been done, how much they were to be paid for it, who owned the land the village was settled on, and so on. If you didn’t have those records someone might cheat someone else./p>
As I see it that’s what it’s always boiled down to. When your brother needs help putting the engine back in his car you turn up on the Saturday afternoon, help out for a couple of hours, and he gives you a beer at the end and says thanks. You know that when you’re moving house he’ll come around with the truck and help shift boxes. Those scribes, on the other hand, were working in a system where there was less trust and less goodwill. If I asked my brother to help out painting the mausoleum he isn’t going to be too happy when it turns out there’s not a spare coffin in there for him.
So what I’m saying is that our big complex society of strangers works because we spend an awful lot of our time covering our arses against being ripped off. We don’t trust people beyond what can be enforced by law, and the law starts where goodwill has stopped. Maybe that’s why there so much law and so many regulations and why we spend so much of our collective time covering our collective arses against so many possible ways of being bad to one another. But it is a waste of time. We would, if we could, rather spend our time socialising, resting, and most of all doing something which doesn’t figure on the Bonobo’s list at all – being creative.
We can make our lives a great deal richer, but to do so we have to find a way of doing without some of the laws and regulations and record keeping. That is going to require a culture of generosity replacing our current culture of protection and fear and getting away with anything that isn’t nailed down in some contract somewhere.
There’s another thing we also spend a lot of our time and energy on, and that’s being bossy. Chimpanzees are hierarchical in the same way as humans, but Bonobos are bloody hippies by comparison. Good for them, I say! Think about the amount of money we spend on government and on the armed forces. The alternative, as I see it, is to allow people more freedom and more responsibility. It’s not a simple change – if you have less “Occupational health and safety inspectors” and less thick books of regulations for them to enforce, for example, then that requires for the people that they’re currently inspecting to be thoughtful and well informed and care about the consequences of their actions.
We have a system of government, an economy, and a whole society built around making sure that people can’t get away with being too selfish or mean to one another. There’s no way to change that overnight, but the conditions required for it to change are that we start acting in such a way that all this effort becomes unnecessary. Being kind, being generous, putting the interests of strangers at least up in the same ballpark as our own.
The benefit is immense. We can double or triple the number of hours each day that we get to spend doing the things which truly make life worth living. Socialising, resting, and being creative. Having fun, in other words.