Living On Purpose

When web site developers are building code for an online application, like a proprietary shopping cart, they need to know exactly what the application is supposed to do before they even start. They need to know who the audience is, what the end goal is, whether there will be volume discounts, whether the opt-in email list will be offered before or after the sale, and exactly how many steps the user should see during checkout.

As the developers near completion, and testing begins, managers will ask for new functionalities that nobody anticipated in the beginning. This is called “scope creep.” Now the developers have to go back to square one and try to hack in the new function without completely rewriting the entire application. It’s a patch, because deadline is coming.

Then, two months after launch of the application, users are demanding their own control panel so they can change details about themselves easily (just pretend this wasn’t written in the first place). Now the developers have to take code from another source and make it work with their own application. It increases the “bugginess” of the application because of some loopholes and perhaps not enough time built into the project for testing.

After a year or two of changes to the code, the developers feel it would just be better to start over, taking into account all these new features, and rebuild from the ground up. It would be a cleaner application all around. But budget constraints disallow this approach, and the application must make do as-is.

This is my allegory for how today’s society has been built. Systems and governments and political divisions have all been put into place piecemeal. Our society is built patchwork style, with lots of loopholes and bugs. People are falling through the cracks. People are losing their lives, their livelihoods. The bugs in this system run so far down and there has been so much scope creep in the infrastructure of our daily lives that it only makes sense to me to make a fresh start.

For instance, I know that to combat depression, a person’s diet needs to be clean, and free of highly processed junk foods and refined sugars. To be free of depression, a person needs to be able to make a living doing what he enjoys, whatever gives him a sense of purpose in his life. To be free of depression, a person needs to be able to communicate with his family members calmly without fear of an emotional blowout (often these blowouts are due to poor nourishment in the first place, which predisposes a person to fits of rage…)

But when I try to envision living like that in this society, I draw a blank. I go to work, I want to eat lunch, but there are no alternatives to fast food; nothing I can grab in a half an hour that fits into a “feel-good” diet…unless I really work hard at preparing lunches at home, which I don’t. I send my children to school, but they also do not have a healthy choice for lunch at school and they’re overwhelmed by soda machines and candy sold in the school store. Anytime I want my family to watch TV, I have to subject them to false advertising, violence, foul language, lack of morals…ok I’m sure you get it by now. Unless I extricate us from society, how can I make healthy lifestyle changes work, especially when the rest of my family is resisting any changes?

This is what an “intentional community” is all about. Wouldn’t it be nice to build your own society with a higher purpose in mind? Yes, there are monasteries, there are ashrams. These are communities centered around spiritual growth and connection to God. What if you wanted to include anybody who is hurting because of today’s society, regardless of religious views? Could it work? It certainly gets complicated. In mentally building my own “simcity” I realize I’ll need stores that only stock whole foods; nothing refined. I’ll need either our own tv channel or no tv at all. I’ll need schools that don’t treat children as cattle moving towards the guillotine, but as real individuals with infinite potential. I’ll need a medical care system that is radically different from what we have now, with no insiders’ links to big pharmaceuticals. Hmm, get rid of the bribery, the lies, the coverups…Wow, we really need to start over it seems!

But then remember that everything is already just as it’s supposed to be, because of God’s divine plan. Of course, we have free will to do what we want with our lives. It is by our own choice that we come to a healthy lifestyle; not because our parents forced us to move into this intentional community far removed from society’s current reality. And it is by our own choice that we come to know God, or reject God, or deny God, or whatever. Once a viewpoint is forced upon us we tend to resist it, don’t we?

Take M. Night Shamalayan‘s movie, The Village. click for a full synopsis–a spoiler.
Although fiction, we can see from this story that a forced intentional community can feel like paradise for a while, but then something always happens to spoil it! In the movie, the village elders “ferociously” protect the secret that their little idyllic village holds. And then the illusion they worked so hard to protect is shattered. They wanted to shelter their children from violence, and it was violence that shattered their world yet again.

So, while we live in our patchwork web application of a life here in society, we can bring positive intention to our selves. Truly, the answer to straightening out the twisted web of society is to love one another, then although the web of society remains the same, our perception of it is changed. To crawl out from the darkness of depression while encompassed within it seems very hard, much like you just need to start over; yes, a fresh start! But the way to do it is start by loving yourself, accepting yourself as you are, and exercise your free will to choose a better life for yourself.

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