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Because I am a weirdo, I am currently listening to ‘Understanding Power’ which is notes taken from speeches, meetings and talks by Noam Chomsky. Don’t ask why, I’m just a bit weird!

Chomsky though is an activist, someone who seeks social change, someone who seeks fairness (at least in his own mind) whatever fairness means. When this was written he had been around for a while and grew up in the 1930’s (it was published in the early 2000’s)

In the book though he’s held up as being one of the cleverest guys ever and in the book, he describes the hopelessness of ‘modern poverty’. He grew up very poor as the son of an immigrant in the 1930’s and understood what poverty was, but he felt at that time that there was hope and hoped that it could be better and it could go somewhere. He goes on to talk about hopelessness of middle-class poverty and how people are stuck now, in a rut, that they think they can’t get out of because they have to keep on the hamster wheel to maintain their standard of living because that’s what they have to do.

So, sit back, take a look, identify the people around you who are stuck there.

Years ago, I wrote a blog about ‘Five happy people’ and how out of the 100 people you know there are probably only five that are happy. One of my friends (you know who you are) emailed me straight back and said “I’m happy” and he was the only one!!

Your job exists to give you the life that you want and if you don’t have the life that you want then what is your job doing? The biggest driver of this though, the most horrible aspect, is that we’re status beings, so we measure ourselves against other people.

When Chomsky was growing up it was the movies and for a dime you went once a week and measured yourself against the glitz of Hollywood.

When my parents were growing up it was Terry and June.

When I was growing up it was starting to get to MTV and now look at it. My 11-year-old thinks that success is being a YouTuber, and maybe it is now, but when I was his age I was bored and had loads of time to think, to look around me and to play in the park. I don’t think the hopelessness of dissatisfaction will affect me, not for long, because there are too many things to be satisfied with and too much joy to find in different places.

I could understand being hopeless if tragedy struck, if something happened to my family, but not if something happened to my car or my house or even to my job.

The less you compare yourself to other people the less you have to compare yourself with and the more you can get on with doing the work of trying to make a positive difference which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Blog Post Number: 1917