The Purpose of Generation Y

Hopefully I don’t offend too many when I speak on behalf of an entire generation, and surely I will, but  with rumors widely spreading that we are the new lost generation I felt the need to clear things up. It is true, there are no uncharted lands across uncharted waters (at least not on this planet) which need exploration. Google already photographed every inch of the earth and posted it on the internet to view for free. Unlike the often romanticized and enviable purpose of our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ “Greatest Generation,” there is no Hitler leading an army to overtake a continent and commit genocide (at least not on any important continents) which will rally us from depression. Without such obvious hurdles of focus many of this generation do seem lost.

So Gen Yers have asked themselves questions in trying to evaluate just the correct life path including: Will this make me rich? Will I make enough to pay my bills? How many years of my life will I have to work this hard? Is this company ethical? Should I start my own business that is? What will my parents or my peers think of me? Can I make a career blogging? Will this satisfy the creative person in me? What can I do to help people? What is my purpose? But despite good intentions a clear path hasn’t emerged for most.

The generations before us are now defined by their existent societal problems and the ways they solved them. Several of these solutions and their corresponding heroes have been etched in statues and become our history and childhood education. But the truth is that in the age of explorers, most Europeans lived what would be considered ordinary lives in feudal Europe. But, they lived their lives anyway. While World War II devastated many European countries, the United States border was relatively unharmed, the total number of people who fought in WWII was roughly 70 million when the world’s population was 2.3 billion. Though it was many, it was still a vast minority of the people that defined the generation as we know it. The ones who are remembered, the ones that really defined the generation, are the ones that zigged while everybody else zagged.

First, I must warn: the lifestyle of an explorer is unique, but uncomfortable, as the lifestyle of a soldier is unique, but uncomfortable. It will be no different for the great ziggers of Gen Y. They will have to remain passionate with the conviction for progress in the face of adversaries and apathy. They will encounter an onslaught of criticism and doubt no different than those of previous generations. Our generational leaders will have to abandon the comfortable lifestyle bestowed to us in pursuit of a more important cause. But what cause are we to lead? Well, like preceding generations we must battle our current societal problems and keep humanity alive for our posterity.

I know this is going to sound like I think the sky is falling, because today might be relatively pleasant for you, but it really is falling. It is not going to fall today or tomorrow, but roughly in the next 50 years our world is going to run into some gravely serious problems. For many in Gen Y that will span the remainder of their lifetime.

When clean drinking water becomes very scarce because we’ve exhausted or polluted most of our natural springs through fracking, pharmaceutical contamination, or any of our other terrible environmental practices, our ability to sustain our existence will be in jeopardy. When oil becomes scarce all of those industries which in some way rely on oil – which either directly or indirectly is by my guestimation at least 97% of the global GDP – will grind to a halt and cease to function in the way they do now. We do not have the infrastructure to support our massive population without oil. We don’t even have reasonably efficient ways to create new oil-free infrastructure without oil. 

Throughout human history, struggles for resources following overexpansion have caused countless wars and led to the defeat of nearly every extinct civilization from the Babylonians to the Aztecs to the Nazis. The struggle over the last of the earth’s clean water and oil resources will be unimaginably gruesome. Most people will lose.

These problems desperately in need of solving are apparent to many, yet society perpetuates with little relevant discussion. We face new, significant obstacles that we’ve never encountered in quite the same way. If they were old or simple challenges, they would have been met already. We don’t have Hitler’s army to repel, or vast oceans to navigate. Now we have to battle apathy and distraction from our real problems. We have to battle the many forms of personal and collective addiction to short-term gratification. We have to battle corporate dominance over modern cultural behavior. We have to find the will to show compassion and mercy toward all those we share the planet with.

Like generations before us our task is to solve our current societal problems. Those with imagination see them already and are actively working toward solutions. We receive daily posts on our Facebook feeds about some of this incredible work, and for a moment the names involved become legendary figures, like what’s his name with that video about the African army leader a couple years back. Yet this doesn’t inspire action and their names are quickly forgotten, lost after the next byte is consumed. 

Our capitalistic, consumption-based culture is unsustainable. So the great calling of Generation Y is to create one that is. Sustainability is a daunting multi-faceted task staring each of us in the face. 

However, we know that solutions will be multi-faceted as well, with significant contributions coming from science and technology, governance and politics, media and mass communications, education and economics, but especially cultural and even spiritual changes at the individual level. We have powerful tools at our disposal which will help us, but it will require real hard work and it will be uncomfortable at times. We have roughly 50 years to right the ship and build a sustainable planet in order to avoid serious catastrophe. That is our calling.

So who is up for the challenge? Who will lead the efforts and who will be next to join them? Who will abandon comfort and truly zig while everyone else zags? Who will figure out how to safely gain independence from endless consumption and short-term gratification? Who will make corporate responsibility something more than a running joke or marketing device? Who will create large scale sustainable societies that will allow our species to exist on this planet through the next generation? Who will inspire action over apathy? It remains to be seen. But for those who are still looking for a purpose, I have laid it out very plainly. We can be remembered as the generation that blindly drove humanity over the cliff or the one that steered it toward safety. Either way, the purpose of Gen Y is quite clear.

The Freedom to Not Have Health Care Is Not a Freedom

This has mostly been settled by the Supreme Court's 2012 ruling about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. But as the implementation date of the individual mandate approaches, I still hear a few murmurs and protests, mostly from House Republicans and their pundits, so I thought I should clear this up. The freedom to not have health care is not a freedom and it is definitely not protected in the US Constitution. The right to receive basic health care, including emergency care absolutely should be. Our country was founded on preserving all of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all of the people of the nation. That is why we flipped the bird to the motherland and went our own way. Health is an essential element of life and also a significant factor in pursuing happiness. Simply stated, healthier people are happier. So making health care accessible to all the people in the country and making that process more efficient is absolutely something the government should be involved with.

Since America, unfortunately, has a health care system primarily based around private health insurance, most commonly offered by employers, a mandate for health care access for every individual requires the purchase of private health insurance until a more thorough system overhaul can be implemented. But this requirement is not a violation of an individual’s freedom.

As the great libertarian Milton Friedman famously wrote quoted (and which I quote frequently) in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom “my freedom to move my fist must be limited by the proximity of your chin.” Essentially, personal freedoms are fine until they adversely affect someone else. That is the unfortunate price we have to pay for living in a world not made up entirely of small individual islands each with a population of one. So how does an individual's choice to not purchase health insurance adversely affect others?

A Possible Explanation for Neoconservative Republican Ideology

The contradictions of the neoconservative Republican Party viewpoint run wide and deep. In some cases the thoughts align with the libertarian ideal that the government should not be interfering where it isn’t absolutely necessary. These surface in vague arguments about the free market and job creation. Any burden on a business that is created from a law is clearly unnecessary. However, the government should absolutely make laws about your personal life, particularly what chemicals you choose to put in your body and the sex of two people in love who wish to be a family.

Another contradictory idea is that the government should not be handing out subsidies or freebies to poor people because it is an inefficient use of tax dollars that does not benefit the whole and creates dependence. However enormous financial breaks systematically placed in the tax code for wealthy individuals and large corporations is quite alright even if those subsidies mean abandoning previously stated ideals about the free market.

Neoconservatives generally feel that the words of the nation’s founding fathers should be infinitely praised and relied upon for creating a perfect Christian nation even though ‘God’ wasn’t added to our money or included in our Pledge of Allegiance until the 1950s, they granted us the freedom of individuals to choose their own religion in the very first amendment of the constitution, and they wrote in passages about how the government they were creating with their words will not always be relevant. For example, the one from the Declaration of Independence that goes “…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness,” meaning that the founding fathers knew that at least some of their words would have shelf life and would need to be adapted as society progressed.

Now, the predominant thought among progressives (people who naively want to make the country great for everyone) about these contradictory Republican viewpoints described above is that each is either a way to extract money from the poor into the pockets of the ruling class, or a way to garner the vote of uninformed, easily-influenced people, which really just serves to assist the first reason. While it is entirely possible that this is the case I think there might be a little bit more to it.

Vipassana Meditation: Part IV

This picks up where I last left off a couple weeks ago about my previous meditation experience and preparing for a three-day refresher course. I just got back last night and had to write about it.

After sitting the refresher course I didn’t think I would feel so good again. During the meditation nothing particularly amazing or unusual occurred so I almost didn’t think it was working. I was able to achieve more levels of deeper concentration, and sustain it longer. I felt the bleeding feeling throughout my back of stress and attachments coming lose through much of the course, which I've learned to take as a sign that things are getting better. But I was expecting some crazy shit to happen like the previous time and that really didn’t occur. There was no epiphany, there was no hallucinations. So for some reason I took this to mean that it hadn’t really worked and that the practice had lost its magic on me. Eh, not a complete loss, I probably de-stressed a bit, the food was good, and it was better than a weekend catching up on season whatever of whatever show.

I couldn’t be more wrong. While I fully realized there were consequences to what the practice could provide, I had always been very critical and skeptical about its application and benefit to me once I had returned to the real world. Since I had no plans of becoming a monk and that I have things to do in the real world I needed a system which would actually help me here.

It was upon returning to the real world where all the benefits of my weekend of hard work were realized. Part of the meditation teaches you to control your reactions. That instead of going through this unconscious cycle of reacting one can cut it off before that happens and this will help avoid misery. When one encounter senses, the body has built up a series of reactions to these sensory inputs, conditioning. I'll show you. When a mosquito lands on you, you are trained to swat at it without really thinking about it. There is a sensory perception of feeling the mosquito land on you somewhere, this is usually enough to alert your conscience, followed by a built in evaluation of good or bad, then an emotional and physical response. In the case of the mosquito it goes, there’s a mosquito on my arm (perception), this is a bad thing (evaluation), I’m stressed, annoyed, and worried it’s going to bite me and suck my blood which will leave some swelling and itch for a while, and I may get West Nile Virus (emotional response), I’m going to smack it hoping to kill it but at worst it will go away for the moment (physical response). While one mosquito isn’t going to ruin your day unless it has West Nile Virus, it does leave most everyone noticeably cross for a short period of time, and if that happened every five minutes for an entire day it would definitely start to take its toll. That stress you incur from the one mosquito when multiplied by a large number becomes a significant amount of stress. That can certainly affect your mood, and you might be left wondering why you don't feel better at the end of the day. Modern life isn't swarms of mosquitoes but there are many little stressors which can build up throughout the day. Maybe it’s a beep on your phone each time you get a new message which indicates another obligation that could be stressing you out. It could be the way somebody talks to you. It could be the way that other people drive you feel is adversely affecting you. Many of these things you can't really control. When all these things happen on a daily basis it can aggregate into unhappiness.

Capital Gains Are Ordinary Income to Many

During the last election cycle the issue of unique treatment of capital gains tax surfaced as it was determined that Mitt Romney and many other very wealthy Americans pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries because much of their income is derived from investments and not a salary. Those investments, if held longer than a year prior to their sale are taxed at 15% in most situations which is significantly less than the rate high income earners pay on ordinary income, usually around 35%. The rate is on par with the ordinary income level for a single tax filer who earns $8,926 – $36,250 annually based on 2013 rates.

What makes capital gains so special? A capital gain occurs when an amount received when selling an asset is greater than the amount paid for it. Sale of stock is the most common capital gain, however it includes almost any investment including bonds, real estate, equipment, and works of art but usually do not include personal use items. For tax purposes capital gains have been distinguished from ordinary income since 1913 though the rate at which they are taxed has changed several times since then. The drop to current level of capital gains tax of 15% was achieved through Bush II era legislation and represents the lowest it has ever been in US history. Though I don’t recall the Occupy movement ever claiming it as a specific gripe it well should have, and in 2011 Warren Buffett, one of America’s wealthiest (and most successful) investors, added to wealth disparity discussion when he claimed that the favorable treatment he receives on his earnings is unfair

A Rich Man’s Game

With a base in long-term investments capital gains disproportionately affect the rich, and luckily this is not a significantly disputed fact. However, it is my belief that this favorable treatment is unethical and detrimental to the collective welfare of our nation, which will be disputed by some. I propose that capital gains should be taxed just like regular income because after I disprove all the reasons the rich say it is necessary, all that’s left is an unfair mechanism which systematically helps rich to get richer.

The proponents of capital gains getting taxed lower than ordinary income rates usually do so under the guise that it sparks investment which sounds like it could be accurate. Lower taxes on an activity increases the propensity to do it, but it’s actually an argument based only on speculation. When you apply the policy to the behavior options of the investor the capital gains tax makes no difference in the level of investment.