Monday Essay

Surviving the 21st Century “Jungle”: juggling conflicting demands

 

You are a parent of a female teenager. During the weekend, at midday, she finally goes into the bathroom to have her morning shower. You –the parent--go to the kitchen and start cooking.  While your daughter is taking her bath, you open the tap water faucet in the kitchen. The water fluid going to the bathroom diminishes; the water in the shower slows down. Your teen-ager acknowledges that and shouts at you. “Mother: stop taking water in the kitchen.”  You get the message: the pipes are communicated. Situations like these, little inconveniences and sometimes family clashes happen all the time.

Most of modern comforts and conveniences come with some price tag or effort and inconveniences, unavoidably. Consider the Automatic Teller Machines. Their commercial operation dates back some 40 years ago; their wide spread use the world over came about a decade ago or so. This has transformed banking and given clients many conveniences. Yet our tendency is to overspend, overdraft and run sometimes into heavy debts (good business for the banks). Similarly the mobile cell phones were commercialized also some four decades ago.

But it has taken some three decades of marketing, engineering and social changes, for wide sections of society to change their daily patterns and use them at large. Of course for work and family life -- mobile phones-- provide enormous flexibility and convenience. Some people are “hooked” and always connected, called 24/7.

These behaviors slowly—or fast—erode people’s peace of mind, privacy and habits: they may disrupt their sleep, place them in a “constant arousal alert” that diminishes their immune system, and harm personal and private relationships. Undoubtedly to live “on the call” and “on the go” –always available--opens many business opportunities; yet it may come at the price of surrendering all private life, threatened mental exhaustion by abuse or excess use.  

Unfortunately this reinforces the belief that we mainly live to work and not the other way around.  Cars are the same. No one would have dreamt of traffic jams, high oil prices, traffic accident 70 years ago. So naively considered, we are stuck with these technologies. Some call the “side effects” or “unwanted” inconveniences. Bit it seems it’s very common, more than most of us would like to.

Some people may dream of a remote, savage or simple “jungle life” as found in some areas of the Amazon jungle, the deserts of Australia or the forest of Indonesia. Surviving patterns in “stone age” tribes, with “primitive” technologies is common; these tribes are extremely fit to their environments’ in many respects.

Yet their survival depends totally on the well-being of their communities or clans. Individuality is non-existing; they cannot afford it socially or technologically. In these contexts, you conform or you die; that’s it. No freedom of choice. The clan or tribe decides for you. Your whole life is almost decides ahead of you when you are born. They have a slim, if any, room for dissent. Opposition is severely punished; it may endanger the whole community.

Most “primitive” societies—a gross estimate is  some 20.000 years of age, without much innovation-- value tradition, conformity and obedience. Modern technological societies value innovation, career-management and individuality. They seem very different, centuries’ apart, yet we are humans: we still need to eat, make a living and love and care for our children and young.

So as humans, we don’t have many choices depending in where we are born; pick yours: “traffic jams”, high oil prices in modern democratic societies; or being isolated and outcast from your jungle tribe in a jungle tribe. Of course, they are many shades of “alternatives” in between.