A new ideology is emerging. One that says do what you love while you can. Do what you do best, not what pays most, writes MARIE MURRAY.
THE COLLAPSE of the capitalist consumerist creed has awakened a realisation of what is of value in life.
It alerts each of us to the importance of doing what we love, while we can, and before it is too late. It reminds us that life is to be lived in the present rather than planned for in the future. It is “now” that matters. The present is available to us. The past is not. The future has changed from what it once promised to be.
The belief that if one worked hard, was diligent, prudent, thrifty and financially responsible, you would achieve a safe future, has crumbled.
It has been eroded as effectively as the stocks, bonds, shares and properties that people purchased in order to have a pension and security in their later years in life.
It has been dismantled as surely as their dreams of the kind of future they would enjoy when their years of work were over and they would finally do the things they loved to do.
How many people imagined a time when life would be at a more gentle pace and the intellect would be treated to the delights often denied in the interests of paid employment?
They would read the books that awaited them. They would travel to those places that they had neither time nor money to visit in the past. They might winter in the inexpensive luxury of the sun and return to enjoy the summer months at home. Or they would tackle the garden. They would have time to landscape it, to plan and plant and enjoy it every day.
For some they would play golf on a weekday, or swim each morning, or walk to the shops for newspapers to pour over in the quiet mid-morning. They might visit museums and have time for art exhibitions and the theatre.
They could hike or hill walk. They could sail. They might write poetry. They would master the crossword. They would meet friends in town. They might go to the zoo. They would get tickets for the proms. They would learn to play a musical instrument or return to one rusty from lack of use.
They would spend time with grandchildren, precious time they never had to give to their own children, such was the tyranny of the working day and the days working for the future.
They would savour the reward for the years during which they arose early each day, travelled to work, worked hard, saved for the future and their children’s futures. They would be happy. They would retire and reap the return for a lifetime of work.
They were wrong. They did not know that their dreams would be stolen, their security shattered, their aspirations undermined, their diligence denigrated, their thrift thwarted, their self-sufficiency penalised and their plans crushed.
Which is why a new ideology is emerging. One that says do what you love while you can. Do not save or store but trust in your capacity to have enough if you enact your dreams now. Do what you do best, not what pays most.
Engage in work that completes you rather than competing in the workplace for a future that may not be.
Do not imagine that you are invulnerable at work. Do not sell your soul to a corporate callousness that can dismiss a person with the stroke of a pen.
The ideology of adequacy is emerging in the form of appreciation of having enough for your needs and not wanting more than you need.
The belief that life is to be lived is intensifying. The monocracy of consumerism is ending. The despotism of need and greed is over.
It is not just that people are afraid to spend, or that they do not have the money to do so, although many are truly impoverished now. It is that, regardless of finances, they no longer want to live their lives under the oppression of a consumerist ideal that has proven so false, so impositional, so exploitative, so seductive and abusive.
Time for reflection has alerted many to the fact that they do not wish to return to that model of living again.
We should not buy our way out of recession. We should find our way into a new paradigm, one of our own creation and imagination.
It should be shaped by what is best for us as individuals, as communities, as people who might dare to live our lives as we wish, rather than in the service of ideologies that were not of our making and not made for us.
Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murray is director of the Student Counselling Services in University College Dublin