Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything Read Online Free PDF

American General Corporation, said: “I’m often working eighteen-hour days. I rarely get more than four or five hours a night of sleep. And the way I view it, and I tell the guys, my senior staff, you know, these are seven-day-a-week, twenty-four-hours-a-day jobs. I mean, now, obviously we have our time off and I encourage people to take it. But the fact of the matter is that if a situation pops up and we have to burn up a Saturday or a Sunday and go into, you know, the wee hours of the morning we do so — I mean, I’ve been in sessions — particularly when you get into mergers and acquisitions where we’ve walked out of a place at four-thirty in the morning. You kind of have to be prepared to do whatever it takes. If not, you should find something else to do with your time.” 26
    Still, working all the time makes it hard for people to keep up with things like childcare, eldercare, house maintenance, cooking, and relationships with friends, family, and significant others. When employees put family ahead of work, they hear about it at work, and when they put work ahead of family, they hear about it at home. Some people are no longer sure they even have time to start a family or add to it.
    The economic story, though, says that time crunch, along with your non-work obligations, are your problem as an individual — not your company’s problem, or society’s problem. It’s something you need to solve yourself, however you can. That’s so even though, researchers say, the majority of families today are dual-career households and jobs are still being designed as though employees have uninterrupted decades to devote to a career and someone at home full time to look after the domestic side of life. 27
    Chances are, you don’t have that kind of time or that kind of life, but it doesn’t seem to matter.
    That’s how the story goes.

YOUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHERS
     

AND THE NATURAL WORLD
     
    In our extremely individualistic society we have come to see isolation and loneliness as akin to ‘the human condition,’ instead of as by-products of a certain kind of social arrangement.
     
—ROBERT SOLOMON
     
The leaves at the top, because they are water-stressed, are not doing as much photosynthesis per unit mass…In essence, the plant is investing a certain amount into those tissues but they’re not providing as much return on that investment.
     
—PHYSIOLOGICAL ECOLOGIST, BBC NEWS
     
    WHETHER YOU FEEL CONNECTED to the world or adrift in it, you can’t help but be tangled up with other people and the environment. You’re born into a family and maybe have one of your own — a significant other, children, parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews — people you’re connected to whether you like it or not. Your friends, as they say, are the family you choose for yourself. You’ve got neighbors too, whether you wave at them or pretend you don’t see them, people who live around you, or who you run into regularly at the post office, the grocery store, the gym, online. Then there are your colleagues, the people you work with directly and the people you know indirectly through work. You’re somehow tied to strangers too by virtue of your shared humanity, those unknown people on the bus or on the other side of the world. Past all of those relationships, you’re then related to your physical environment, to wind and water, sun and rain, in urban or rural settings, because wherever you are, you exist in physical space, shaping it and being shaped by it.
    Let’s start with family. Your kin relationships were once the glue that held society together. Friendships were considered luxuries, but kin relationships were about survival in an uncertain world. Kin were the people who were obligated to help you and who you were obligated to help when catastrophe struck. Being a member of a family meant you had lifetime membership among that group of people, and legal and cultural