George Monbiot

I've loads of pictures from my road trip down south and I will get them up soon, but I've recently been introduced to George Monbiot (check out the site, there is something for everyone) and want to share some of his words. In these articles he writes about obstacles we are now dealing with growing up and living in more affluent countries. Things i've been having lots of chats about lately.

"What the corporate or institutional world wants you to do is the complete opposite of what you want to do. It wants a reliable tool, someone who can think, but not for herself: who can think instead for the institution...

Even intelligent, purposeful people almost immediately lose their way in such worlds. They become so busy meeting the needs of their employers and surviving in the hostile world into which they have been thrust that they have no time or energy left to develop the career path they really wanted to follow. And you have to develop it: it simply will not happen by itself...

(This does not mean) that you shouldn’t take “work experience” in the institutions whose worldview you do not accept if it’s available, and where there are essential skills you feel you can learn at their expense. But you must retain absolute clarity about the limits of this exercise, and you must leave the moment you’ve learnt what you need to learn (usually after just a few months) and the firm starts taking more from you than you are taking from it. How many times have I heard students about to start work for a corporation claim that they will spend just two or three years earning the money they need, then leave and pursue the career of their choice? How many times have I caught up with those people several years later, to discover that they have acquired a lifestyle, a car and a mortgage to match their salary, and that their initial ideals have faded to the haziest of memories, which they now dismiss as a post-adolescent fantasy? How many times have I watched free people give up their freedom?"
see article

"The gulf between what we are told we should be and what we are is growing. As children’s expectations lose contact with reality, they are torn between their inner lives of fame and fortune and the humdrum reality their minds no longer inhabit. Advertising (and the businesses supported by it) is not the clattering of the stick in the swill bucket that Orwell perceived as much as the carrot that keeps the donkey moving. You are never allowed to come close enough to eat, however hard you pull. An economy driven by dissatisfaction could scarcely fail to cultivate mental illness."
see article

I think this is meaning so much to me at the moment because I've a) been tackling my own issues of what I want to do with my life, b) I've been hanging out with so many teachers, who I envy because their work is so needed and their path seems so clearly laid out and c) I've been hearing so many people talk about how quickly life passes, how easy it is to get sucked in to doing something just to get by, how we really need to make sure we enjoy life, that we fight to find our proper calling.