Are you part of the machine?

Remember when you were a kid and you envisioned a life of unfettered freedom and adventure when you grew up and were able to do whatever you wanted! Well, usually something happend along the way that derails those grand concepts and pulls our soaring thoughts of adventure and freedom to a screeching crawl. Adulthood becomes a routing of working for all-too-often unsatisfying jobs simply because we need a paycheck to pay for this thing called life. Well, not specifically life itself, but the trappings therein-- houses, cars, food, utilities, clothes, and perhaps a boat if you are lucky. And oh yeah, and that's not even considering the child equation which is a veritable money abyss in its own right! hehe
At any rate, we work to support all these things which we consider to be "our life." It's odd how our identity becomes completely dependent upon, in many cases, these jobs that we do to support these lives of ours. I mean, without the job that brings the paycheck there is no house, no car, no paying the utilities, and sure as hell no nice boat or mid-life crisis Corvette! If we dislike our jobs, we feel hollow that what we do not like (or hate in some cases) what has paid for all this stuff and it kind of feels meaningless. So, what do we do, go out and aquire MORE stuff to assuage those empty and hollow feelings. In turn, ensnaring us further in the trappings of these "machine" jobs to stay afloat and pay for all these "things" It is truly a vicious circle! In college I remember reading an article for a psychology class that referred to this syndrome in respect to employees a many meat packing plants. The work, cutting and viscerating carcass after carcass is such horrible and mind-numbing work that the companies compensated (read: kept the employees attached to empty, mind numbing jobs) by doling out relatively high wages that would allow the employees to buy nice luxury items like the boats and cars to assuage the emotional emptiness induced by their "machine" jobs.
Well, when you think of it, aren't many of us in that very position? We work for huge, impersonal companies which lack emotion and true humanity, and we perform often mind numbing and dull jobs. We are trapped, trapped in a machine that knows we are hooked and can't leave because we need to pay for those wonderful "things" in life. Why do you think jobs check employees credit reports? (they do, not all, but many). If a company sees that an employee has accrued large sums of credit debt they know the employee will not be in a position to leave their job. Thus, the company does not have to offer any liberal annual pay raise at evaluation time because it is almost a given that a severely indebted person will not leave their job.. And again, the machine has us.
So, what do we do? I am not sure. I can tell you this, however. I was once considered "homeless" when I lived in Las Vegas after I lost my apartment and resorted to living in a tent along the beautiful shore of Lake Mead. As I camped out in a small tent I had very few possessions, all of which fit in my 1984 Mazda RX7! As I watched the sunsets dance across the lake and ate what little I could scroung together for food, I felt amazingly happy, for I was free from the entanglements of the civilized world-- rent, bills, car payments (my car was all mine!), mortgage. Few people would consider those conditions admirable or desireable, but I can tell you there is a tremendous feeling of liberation in the elemental life..
Enjoy :-)