We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much.

We have multiplied our possessions but reduced our values.

We talk too much, love too seldom and hate too often.

We’ve learned how to make a living but not a life.

We’ve added years to life, not life to years.

-George Carlin

I titled this “third world problems” because, essentially, America is a third world country by the most current definition.  I don’t know what this thing is that we’re doing now, but it’s definitely not first world. [As usual, the west has it backwards.] We are way too caught up in trivialities. Life didn’t begin the way many of us live it. In the beginning, we weren’t born to parents who had to hire a live-in sitter because they worked all day and had no time or energy to raise a family. We weren’t away from home 40+ hours a week, in the car half the day commuting to a workplace that forced us to spend most of the daylight hours indoors. We didn’t stay abreast to the latest gossip or line up for the new smartphone release. Cancer wasn’t a thing. Depression wasn’t a thing. There was no gentrification. No plastic surgeons. No credit card debt or home foreclosures. Folks didn’t worry if their favorite coffee spot had wi-fi so they could avoid any human contact outside of their screen. Or if the steamed milk was organic from a grass-fed cow, because it all just was.

People, not soulless drones, had individual and collective purpose and respected the Earth’s resources. People appreciated the little things, worked with the land to extract just what they needed: food, water and shelter. They found happiness in a rainy season that bore plenty of harvest. They looked out for their fellow man, bartered goods and raised families as a community. Loved much, much more than they destroyed.

That is first world living.