"Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity." -- Charles Mingus
Analogy
Let's imagine that there are 200 people shipwrecked on a remote island. They are living normal lives, with few hardships to distract them from their daily whims. There is only one catch: 199 of these people are fanatical Dungeons and Dragons players who live, eat, breath and sleep the game. And one isn't. In fact, the one that isn't has freely admitted that he hates the game -- or any game -- in which complex rules are created almost entirely in the imaginations of the players.
Since they are stranded on an island, and since they are fanatics, the 199 gamers have made D&D a sort of unit of trade to get food and luxury items. What is the one non-gamer to do when it comes to surviving, much less getting along with everyone else? None of the D&D players care about the things that interest him. In fact, they look at him as if he is the one with a problem for refusing to play along with the majority. If he wants to get along with them and have a "richer" life, then he has to play their silly game, no matter how much he hates expending brain power to perpetuate someone else's fantasy world. A couple of times in the past, he very reluctantly accepted their invitation to play, but he hated every minute of those experiences (although the social interaction -- such as it was -- had its merits). As he played, he watched these gamers closely. He could see how willingly, how unquestioningly, they followed the unnecessarily complex and completely arbitrary rules. Not a one of them made a single peep of protest.
They have to be crazy, he thought, for not getting up and walking away from it all. Real life -- beautifully simple life -- awaits them if only they would open their eyes. It's nice to play games occasionally, but don't confuse it with living ones life.
General Reality
Since I was a kid, I have felt the same way about humanity's needlessly complex economic infrastructure as that one non-gamer feels about living a D&D life. I am especially repelled by our society's bureaucracy-laden business, legal, and financial elements. Of course, that's where most of the attainable job opportunities lie. The rest seem mostly to involve backbreaking labor or mindless assembly-line work (both skilled and unskilled), and the purpose of those jobs is merely to perpetuate that very same economic infrastructure. This has always been a completely depressing, demoralizing turnoff for me. We are all expected to play our parts in this arbitrarily complex "game" if we are to be thought of as functioning members of society, or if we want the luxury of putting a few crackers in our tomato soup every now and then.
My Present Reality
For the past month, thanks to a friend who talked me into it, I have been working in a private, locally owned, financial-investment-and-tax agency, and I must say that I am utterly repelled by the unnecessarily complex and utterly ridiculous bureaucratic/legal/financial reality that humanity has created for itself. I work every day (albeit at a very low level) with a completely hodgepodge, disorganized mess of financial documents, tax papers, purchase receipts, donation receipts, income statements, depreciation statements, loss statements, investment numbers, handwritten records, random dollar amounts written on the backs of envelopes, and so on and so on. These come in all shapes, sizes, designs, folds, purposes, conditions and rules (and half of them must be unstapled from one another). These papers are designed either to allow the government to rip off as much of the people's money as possible or to allow the people to pay as little taxes as possible, even though, in order to do so, they either have to lose their money by being failures or else they have to give bunches of it away (far too often to churches). Either way, they don't get to keep it for themselves.
Some of the headache-inducing conversations I have heard have included the following phrases and statements (and these constitute just the TIP of the iceberg): "basis of investment," "unrealized gains," "estimated taxable income," "monthly/quarterly/yearly statements," "depreciation," "accumulated adjustments," "income distribution," "retained earnings end-of-the-year," "retained earnings unappropriated," "Schedule MQ (or M2)," "non-dividend distribution" and "beginning-year retainder." Our three preparers (all great people) recently discussed the motives of the vultures in the county government regarding an aging piece of farm machinery: Should it still be considered a useful part of the farming operation or should it be "allowed" to sit idle and thus be taxed as a "luxury" item (or something like that). They also once discussed the fact that the county likes to swoop in and double a landowner's taxes if he or she owns income-producing property but is not using it for income-producing purposes (same as that piece of machinery). One of our preparers actually spent part of a day searching through computer and paper records for the proof of sale of a taxable cow (yes, a single taxable cow out of a herd of about 18!!!) that a farmer sold but then listed as the "wrong" sort of income. They feared he had sold it "illegally," or, in other words, in a way that would incur the wrath of the all-powerful mafiosi at the IRS.
Aaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhhh!!!!!!
What busybody idiots invented all these ridiculously complex ways of keeping track of -- and stealing as much as possible of -- what is supposed to be a very simple "unit of trade" to put food on our tables and a few luxuries in our homes? I can hardly believe that we Americans willingly tolerate (or even condone and defend) this travesty of a reality that we not only allowed to be created but which many of us have actually helped to create.
Am I a Misfitfor not playing this ridiculous game most of the time? That is unless the "perfect" job comes along? Most people would say "yes," I am a misfit, so I seldom tell anyone my feelings on the matter. They seem to think that if someone refuses to play this needlessly complex game then he or she isn't being mature or responsible. Certain people have actually said that to me, even though I have more money than they do and not a single debt to my name. However, I have always (or at least since junior high) secretly believed that I am actually one of the few normal people because I have refused to participate in this complex and utterly boring game known as "modern civilization," unless it is in the most peripheral way, and only when I absolutely have no other choice.
However, if I think I see a "perfect" job opportunity coming along, I'll take it, and then let you know.
Now I shall repeat the opening quote:
"Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity." -- Charles Mingus
