Sunday, August 26, 2007

Today

Today, I have been reading other people's diaries. These are people with very different lives from my own. It reminds me that there are other places, other ways to live. It also inspires me to write more. In particular, cheeseburger brown's verbosity(self-proclaimed, but easily proven) makes me want to write more. I don't care if it's to share, or just to write it down.

Sometimes, I don't understand how our society works. I understand in principle that specialization leads to more efficient utilization of resources. It's easy to see in the example of a doctor how specialization leads to better quality of life. But it still seems to me that there's a lurking gotcha, waiting for some future signal to leap out and grab the world. Or just me. For instance, how is it that I get paid for what I do? I exist to support a scaffolding that supports the upper echelons of a billion dollar corporation so that they may direct the tiny ants at the bottom. And those ants aren't even gathering food!

update: I was able to better frame my question and get a (budding) economist's opinion. Since our society(the United States) has such a low percentage of the population employed in the creation of basic goods and necessities(farmers, weavers, tanners, construction workers), what happens to the rest of us if a calamity/sudden tidal change in the economy renders our jobs invalid?

His response was more helpful in macro type of way. The United States has passed through several phases of development, agricultural, industrial, mechanical, technological. Were one to become somehow impeded/obsolete, then we have the infrastructure to fall back on another. Which somewhat answers my question, but I still have this strange feeling in my gut. We are a service-based industry. What if the farmers don't want our services?