The binding nature of life's complexities

This episode looks at the things that bind us and how "binding" manifests itself in so many interrelated ways and how this stops us from doing the things we want to do sometimes and prevents us from taking opportunities when they are presented.

Transcript

The binding nature of life’s complexity and what to do about it

Good morning.

When we are born, we are born into a miracle of complexity which is the world around us, everything you can see hear or imagine is a miracle of complexity. We are instantly able to breath and eat and survive in this environment the moment we are born. This moment in time, at our birth, it is probably the only single moment when life is really at it’s simplest for us. We have no expectations, we have no commitments, we are quite simply “just born” and this is how we start out in life. We are probably the purest form of human-being right at that moment, with no past and no real future to speak of, just a physical need for food, warmth, security and comfort and of course lots of sleep.

From that moment on we are subjected to expectations, these are placed naturally before us and normally by our parents. We are fed at regular intervals (normally when we scream to start with and later when feeding time comes round), just the fact that we are put into a regular feeding pattern starts the process of expectation and a forward thinking nature. We become accustomed to being cuddled when we fall and hurt ourselves, we enjoy the attention that is foisted upon us by everyone around us, we like our comfortable bed and the warmth of the central heating. Very quickly we adapt to our surroundings and accept them as normal and “to be expected”.

It’s worth pausing for a moment and considering this state of affairs. We have in effect before our first birthday accepted an enormous amount of things as normal.  Regular food, love, attention, warmth, security and so on. The reality is that none of these things are “normal” at all. For 40% of the world food is not a given, neither is security, warmth or cool air as needed. In fact you could look at 40% of the world and say that by their first year (assuming they make it to one year of age), their expectations could be entirely different. They might not expect a meal when they are hungry, they might not receive the love that they might be due or the attention and they might live in quite insecure settings climactically, economically or socially.

The point i am making here is that we all develop expectations based on our surroundings and these expectations are formed early in our lives and we carry them with us throughout out lives as they become the foundation for the future motivations we develop in our lives.

Imagine what growing up not knowing where your next meal will come from? What sort of behaviour would that drive in you as a young adult, what sort of priorities would you place on food as a result.

You can see how is just this simple example you have become bound to a set of experiences and expectations that you might not be aware of. Why do some people have to eat everything that is placed in front of them despite being full to bursting whilst others leave half their plate untouched?

These are some of the most basic forms of binding that we encounter in our lives. In some ways they are some of the simplest to identify once you understand how we can be influenced by them. 

The reason I am sensitive to this subject is that, I was asked the question “what binds you” a few years back by a Shaman and this question has continued to surprise me every day since with insights into the level of cognitive binding that takes place in mine and I assume all of our lives.

As we grow up we encounter a greater level of complexity and binding. In fact the binding becomes multidimensional and interrelated and that is why life gets more complicated as we grow older.

I will now give you two examples of what I mean.

The first is a story of a young person who has left home and is living in a big city and getting their first steps on the ladder of their career.

Let’s call this person Sarah for the sake of argument. Sarah has been working in a large city and has managed to get herself a job at a local company. It doesn’t pay much as she has little if no work experience and as a result she sleeps in a flat with 4 other people as this is the only way to pay the rent. She has enough money for food and the odd night outing apart from a few clothes and her mobile phone, she has very little by way of possessions with her.

One day she is called by a recruitment company who ask her if she is interested in working in another country far away. The money is three times what she is earning now and tax free and the employer gives her accommodation too.

The next day Sarah tells her boss she’s leaving, by the weekend she is packed and has told her flat mates she’s leaving and by the following week she is in another country and starting her new job.

Sarah didn’t have a whole lot to think about in this situation, she packed in her job that wan’t worth a great deal to her anyway, gave the housemates a few weeks grace to find a new flatmate and packed her suitcase. She rang home to tell her delighted parents the good news and got on the first flight.

At this stage in Sarah’s life she has very little binding her to a location or a situation. Most of the aspects of her life are either temporary in nature or easily given up. Decisions about her career are not hugely important as she has just started her career so she is not technically putting much at risk by moving jobs or careers at this stage of her life. She may have a relationships which might be hurt by a sudden change of location, but generally speaking people in the early 20’s are not looking to settle down and have children, so the likelihood is that this too may not be much of a constraint on her decision making. 

It is at this stage of your life that you will or should always be being given the advice to “go and make the most of it” by people much older than yourself. This is normally because there is a tacit understanding from the older age group that at some stage you are going to be bound up in so many aspects of your life that clearing off to foreign lands to take advantage of an exciting opportunity is a long forgotten dream by most.

Now compare this story with another one. Paul is 40 and working in the same city. He has a good job and a family. He’s an ambitious person and also gets a call from a recruitment company offering him a very highly paid tax free job in another country far away.

Paul says to the recruitment consultant “give me a few days to think it over”.

Paul goes home that evening and talks with his wife and explains the offer he has received. Between them they talk through the implications of the job offer and the following list of things arises for consideration.

• Do we have to sell the house? Or can we rent it out? How much will we get for it and will this pay the mortgage?
• What about the cars - they are on a lease plan and still have 2 years to run, will the new company compensate us for this or do we have to sell them?
• What about he Children's education, what are the schools like in this new county? And what about all their friends they have here?
• What about our parents, when are we going to see them - how often can we come back during the year?
• What about my job says the wife, do I have to give that up?
• Will this job mean that you will get a better job when we come back? We are coming back aren’t we?
• What about fife the dog, we can’t just leave her here - who’s going to look after fifi?

You see how within a few years of life we can become enmeshed in a complex set of relationships and interrelationships that effectively bind us to the reality we have created for ourselves. How likely is it that Paul is going to pack a suitcase and get on the next flight. His boss will kindly point out that he is on a 2 year notice period and can’t walk out on the job, his wife will point out that it will take a few months to pack up the house and find a tenant and anyway the school finishes in September so the kids can’t move until they have done their exams at the end of the year anyway. Mums knee operation is set for November so there is no way his wife is living until March next year at the earliest and will need the house and the car until then, and this means the Kids need to stay in School while ease is here and next year is a big exam year so we can’t disrupt that.

All in all, and just on a superficial level Paul and His wife have almost zero chance of getting on the next flight - I mean, we’ll lose our deposit on next years holiday to Greece if we go!

Why do you think it is that CEO’s of multinationals get paid millions? Is it because they are worth millions, or is it simply a matter that to relocate someone with the right experience and skills at that level means you have to break all the thing that have them bound in one place and pay for them to move? Is is a form of compensation for all the breakage that is causes. 

The reality is that life is a web of constraints that bind us. 

The bit that I probably react to most is that often people make these decisions without regard for the restrictions they place upon us. We don’t think twice about buying a car on a lease agreement as it is cheaper and easier than trying to buy it outright, so we give little consideration to the fact that although it is cheap, - off we were to lose our job it suddenly becomes very expensive as we have a lengthy contract we need to honour. We can’t just pop off to another country if we get another job as we have to take care of the lease agreement and the selling of the car or the settlement of the outstanding payments.

It’s the same for a mobile phone contract - this also might not work in another country and so you are saddled with the ongoing contract until it is up for renewal.

If anything - in todays society we have worked out that renting or leasing is the key to a cheap life where we can access and “own’ and I put this in quotation marks, anything we want. The problem is of course that what looks like a good thing is a web of steel. For the companies that offer these services to people they are great, it means that whatever happens in the economy all of their clients are bound up contractually and need to keep paying. Gone are the days when sales revenue stopped when a recession hit, the responsibility for revenue is no linger that of the companies and the sales force, it is instead your responsibility and that of the lawyers that threaten to take your house away if you don’t keep up payments.

We are a bit like a dairy cow these days, we are regarded by business as a regular source of milk, in good times as well as bad.

This means that we have effectively given up an element of choice in our lives and we have done so for what appears to be a convenience. In reality we have become enslaved to a capitalist system that needs us to survive.

I often say to my son, if you can’t simply pack a bag and go, then you have committed yourself to a level of permanency that may not be of your choosing. Be careful how you choose to bind yourself.

There is an important lesson that comes out of realising that we can be caught up in a system of commitments that we may not be aware of making at the time and only realise when we can’t do something that we want or need to do because of them. One of the things I find hard to understand is the lack of forethought that goes into things these days. So many people struggle to imagine what might happen in the future if they were to do the thing they are thinking about doing. It’s almost like these days we must have or do what we want as if it is some sort of right we have. We rarely stop to think what this thing will do to us and to others if we go ahead with it. In a sense we have been programmed just to maximise our short term pleasure and not to think too much about the wider implications fo what we are doing.  In a sense we are being asked not to think about the consequences as if that might prevent you from doing or spending what you are planning.

Life is very much like a game of chess, and if you have never played this game then I encourage you to do so. You can only really become good at chess if you can look ahead 4 or 5 moves and see all the possible moves that your opponent could make as well. You have to be able to cover off many lines of attack and ensure that your own pieces are protected as best you can. In a nutshell Chess is about committing to various moves whilst being fully aware of all the things that could go wrong and having a plan to counter these. It is about risk taking and planning and forward thinking. Life is very much the same as chess, and if you do decide to play chess you will often find yourself completely constrained or bound by decisions you made four or five goes before and not able to go anywhere on the board.

The reason I am telling you all of this is that we are entering a period of time in the world when things are going to stop being predictable and steady. Job security is going to become hard to find, skills that you thought you had are going to be overtaken by new skills that you will need to have to gain employment. You may have to have multiple jobs or clients in order to earn a living and there are going to be regular amounts of time when there is no work at all. You might think to yourself how can you possibly know that about the future - well I am not really talking about the future, the last 15 years has been like this in Western Europe and the USA and the trend is just growing. All I am really doing is telling you where the thing is heading. The USA is a declining empire and the dominance of the dollar is waining. Western Europe is also on the wain and with Brexit the UK is firmly set on the same path. The reason that I am talking so earnestly about what binds us is that with the uncertainty that is coming in the future in regard to work and income, we must be very careful about the commitments we make financially. We are coming out of a period in history where mankind had more of everything than we could possibly need and were encouraged to mortgage our future earnings through loans and credit cards in order to have all of these things we wanted “now”. But this was also a time in history where we had stable employment and a regular income. We still have that buying habit in the world today and organisations are primarily focussed on getting us to consume as much as possible. The difference however is that moving forward we really won’t be able to predict how long we will have a stable income and how much that will be.

So the answer is going to have to be that we don’t commit to long term financial obligations, we need to be unbound by thing, able to move to where the work is, able to quickly do a three month training course when we leave a job to increase our skills so that we don’t become redundant. We can’t have the mortgage, the lease cars, the 12 month rental agreements and so on, we need to be agile and fleet a foot if we are to survive and thrive in this new workplace that is being built around us. We need to stay healthy because the national health services are not going to be around for very much longer as free services and we won’t be able to rely on state pensions in the future so we are going to have to save a shed load of money into the bargain too.

This is all starting to sound a bit like “Moscow rules”, the spy craft term for everyman for himself when an operation goes wrong or is compromised and in a sense it is a bit like that. The future will be a time for the sovereign individual or to put it another way, you can only rely on yourself as the state will not be there to support you. However, I rather think that it will go another way, I think that we will find security is community as we move forwards, much like we did in the 1870’s. Towards the end of the 1870’s unions were created in the UK to represent the workers who up to that time in the industrial revolution had had no representation and had become ill-treated by the business owners of the time who were more interested in making profit than the livelihoods of their workforces. The quakers preceeded  the rise of unions, but also contributed to this idea that living as communities that supported each other was a good thing. Indeed the very idea of the National Health service in the UK was an exercise in community.

Well why on earth are we heading in the opposite direction I hear you say, well to understand that you need to understand the way natural systems work. If you think back to school time you will no doubt remember that there used to be a 6th form who were aggressive and domineering, maybe even bullies, and when they left school the year below them used to be the opposite, that was because they knew how unpleasant it was to live under a domineering class before them so they were softer on the years below them. The year below them thought these 6th formers were soft and too easily taken advantage of, so when they got into the 6th form they tended to be harder again. Well societies are much the same except it takes more like a hundred years for the class to change. We have just had the liberal class of 6th formers leave and the new hard cases are back in town and they think we have all gone soft. So they are taking away all the things that could be relied upon and making life harder for everyone.

I know this is a bit of a simplistic explanation, but it does have an element of truth in it. The next 50 years is going to be a time of complete economic, political and social turmoil. We are going to have to live with massive changes to the world because of climate change, we are going to have to transform all of our economic away from oil. We won’t have real money any longer, we will have to pay for health services and save for our own retirements. We will probably have countless jobs and no careers and we probably won’t want to own anything that will retract our movements.

So a bit like a chess game, I have laid out many of the moves that are being played by the system at the moment and you need to decide how you are going to play your game too. One of the most important things I can say in all of this is that be careful as to what binds you or could bind you. The freer you are to move and make on the spur of the moment choices, the happier and less stressful your life is going to be and ultimately the more successful you are going to be in the new world going forward. Remember in life, that if everyone is heading in one direction, it’s probably a good bet to be heading in the other direction. As humans we have a nasty habit of forming a herd mentality and rather like lemmings we have a predisposition to run off the nearest cliff in large numbers. So take your time, think about what a decision today will mean to you in the future, don’t do something just because everyone else is doing it. Think about it, get the facts, make up your own mind and then make a decision. These are all key skills that will determine how successfully you navigate the coming years.

The best of luck to you and I hope that you have a fund and wonderful time. The world is full of remarkable and interesting people and things. Played right, this game of life can be fun and relatively stress free, but for that to happen you must be your own person, if you give your freedom of choice away to others, then you will find life a lot harder to navigate.

Remember, always look for what binds you, you will be shocked at the ideas, the thoughts, the traditions, the contracts, the relationships, the promises that all go into creating a web of restrictions. It takes a strong person to resist the binding and an even stronger person to enter the web and live with some of the binding. 

As always, I have enjoyed making this podcast. I am specially indebted to a few of my listeners who make a regular contribution through the buy me a coffee link. I do these podcast to support the book How to be a good human and to help primarily young people to navigate through some of the topics of the day. If you enjoyed this podcast and or found it interesting perhaps you could pass it on to someone else that might also be interested. My aim in doing these podcast and the book is to help people, but although I can write or narrate these things, the one thing I can’t do is find the audience for them. The only people that con do that are you the reader or the listener, so I will be internally in your debt if you would act as a form of marketeer for these podcasts and spread the word.

Many thanks and I look forward to talking to you all soon.