Before & After

Before

We have such hectic lives today as we are all dealing with issues related to work, school, money, security, and healthcare. We convince ourselves and our children that the only way for us to find happiness and prosperity is to work ourselves to the bone with intensive education and then working long hours at work with our often mundane jobs for decades, and then we hope that we have accumulated enough wealth to support ourselves in old age. Many people get depressed and end up being medicated to try to deal with it, while others suffer from the well-known health risks associated with stress.

School

We spend most of our young lives going through the drudgery of school, working late nights through mountains of homework, and we fill our spare time with extra curriculum activities to hopefully give us the competitive edge over other students when it comes to college admissions. Then if we have worked hard in school we get the chance to bury ourselves in debt and put another 4 years into our education because having any college degree has become the only way we can possibly get a good paying job to support ourselves.

Work

It is quite startling that with over 50 years of advances in technology, computing, manufacturing, automation, and production, that we still have a 40-hour work week and as a society we strive for an unemployment rate of a few percent. Today we also have the majority of woman working which has nearly doubled the workforce. The truth is that instead of us collectively working less hours, we have much more competition for fewer jobs, our employers can pay us a lower wage, and all the benefits of our advances go to the top 1%. The consequences of this is that to stay ahead we have to work more, take fewer vacations and leisure time, and often take on multiple jobs to try and make ends meet. Fifty years ago a household could have a man supporting the needs of the family giving the wife plenty of free time to meet the needs of the family, but today a household typically needs two incomes to support a family, so there is simply not enough time in the day.

All this leads to more stress in our lives as we try and find the time to keep up with our obligations at work and home. We rush around in our cars, at the grocery store, in the mall, to and from school, the sports fields, the gymnasium, and the dance class, desperately trying to stay on top of it all. At the weekends, instead of enjoying our free time, our kids work in grocery stores trying to get some extra cash, while the rest of us play catchup with mundane chores like laundry, cleaning the house, yard work, and perhaps preparing some meals for the refrigerator ready for when the madness begins again on Monday.

After

There is no significant stress related to work, school, money, security, or healthcare in Nutopia, because everyone lives a modest happy life where their needs are met by the community as a whole, with everyone contributing their fair but light share of labor to allow the community to function efficiently.