Live life while you have it…
An end and a beginning
I have been in a somewhat procrastinatory mood lately – I ‘put to bed’, as the journalistic phrase goes, my final episode about travel through South America a week or so ago and posted it with a feeling of ‘so now what’? I needed a break from writing, and some time to reflect on what I should do next. Yes, I still have a story line going on the Thailand portion of my blog, but that too will come to an end sooner rather than later, as I can only blather on so much about a non-career in acting, and a lot of what I might want to say wouldn’t be publishable as it would get me invited to an “attitude adjustment” session, or simply thrown out of the country, and so I am in limbo as to what to do next.
My local translator has been feeding me suggestions over the past few months: do a VLOG, do more on Twitter, comment about politics, write about lifestyle topics, write about other countries you’ve been to, etc…… and I guess that is what I shall do, if only I can get out of this lethargic state long enough to put more than just a few hundred words together.
The young and the old, how lives, and futures, converge and diverge…
The next stories – local and global
I actually did sit down a week or so ago and put a few notes and outlines on paper as to the flow of contents for the Thailand stories, and I will write a bit about doing business in Thailand – the wonderful business climate and how super easy it is to jump through a million hoops to get your business up and running and all your papers in order so you can actually put your entire life into a company and still not own it, and a few other things; not to forget the 20 Baht notes that must be slipped to fresh graduates hired on as temporary employees to get them to actually take your documents to the next desk down the line so that eventually your papers will end up with the person who must sign them….. it’s all a lot of fun.
I will take you on a few turns through a few countries in Africa, a continent that I would love to explore more, and the documentaries that we produced in those nations. From there I suppose I will tell you about making documentaries in Thailand, and how, by being involved in those projects, I have traveled through nearly every province of the country and have found that if you still want an authentic smile and a good meal, you will be hard-pressed to find it in cities like Bangkok, Pattaya, or Phuket – there is a tiredness about the country, a tiredness with politics, a tiredness with economic inequality, a tiredness with maintaining a facade that everyone knows is fake but is being forcibly imposed, a tiredness with having to deal with bureaucrats who seem to live in a bubble a century or more old, a tiredness of having to deal with 19th-century thinking and actions while living in the 21st century; in general a tiredness that eventually leads to restlessness, and recklessness.
After a lifetime of hard work, we all need a break…
The cost of living
And so, as I sit in another airport and have a few hours of time to put to good use, I am working out my next sequence of moves and stories. I have mentioned before that I fully intend to hike the Appalachian Trail, bike the route from Southern Alberta to the border of Mexico, cross Canada on bicycle from West to East and back across the USA; take the trans-Siberian railway, and do a few other such things – time is of the essence. As I was thinking about all those things earlier today, I also thought about how we all seem to get into trap at some point in our lives – to eat we must have money, so we have to work to earn money, which we then spend on food, and housing, and, and, and, etc., and at the ripe old age of 60 or 65 we are (hopefully) thanked by a thankful company for our many years of service before being more or less booted (actually just shuffled ) out the door to be replaced with someone much younger, and a lot cheaper. By that time, we don’t move so fast anymore, and we can’t do all the things we might want to do, and god help those of us who haven’t saved enough money by retirement to actually live another 20 or 30 years.
The reality is that for someone to live in a reasonably decent state in Europe or Canada, you need your own house, mortgage paid off, and about 1 million dollars in cash or cash equivalents (other than the house) to survive into your 80s or 90s – that equates to about 40,000 dollars per year at 25 years. That’s a huge chunk of money, and it’s that ‘need’ that keeps so many people clamped fearfully to a chair and desk that they would rather give up. I am no economics guru, and I certainly don’t have the answer to the problem (yet), but it seems that working for a company that pays you a pittance and then throws you out at 65 while the owners drive around in the latest Porsche or fly around the world in private jets, is not exactly what life is meant to be.
A much more pleasant view in life
Finding an alternative to the 9 – 5
I don’t have an alternative answer, but it does bring me back full circle to my original thinking regarding this entire blog site – there is more to life than the 9 – 5 or 8 – 5 and weekends off with a smattering of summer holidays thrown in. The beach in Mexico year after year after year after year for 10 days of sunshine and Tequila is something that’s been sold to us by marketers, it’s what we’ve been led to believe is the ultimate way of life; work hard and you will be rewarded; work harder, and you will : make a lot of money for the company and earn yourself a plot six feet under ground a lot earlier. So let’s find an alternative, and put joy back into living.
