Not a 'Rant'......Honest

No one ever accused me of linear thinking. That isn't either good or bad, it just is. Non-linear thinking does take one on some interesting mind trips: the question is, where is the line between cutting edge and over the edge?

Anyway, I was thinking about people whose life paths are highly non-traditional. By that I guess I mean that they are more decorative than useful.

That led me to thoughts of how our communities are organized today versus how they might have been organized 10,000 (arbitrary, to be sure) years ago. Back when we were hunter-gatherers, we lived in much smaller groups. Everyone had a function and contributed to the survival and well-being of the band.

If you were a member of such, you might have been a hunter, or someone who prepared the catch, either for immediate consumption or for storage and use later, perhaps in winter. Maybe you were a toolmaker, a farmer, a medicine person or a historian. There weren't books then; all records and collected knowledge of the band were passed from generation to generation by word of mouth from story tellers who were repositories of fact and legend. People would sit around the fire and learn by listening to his story.

Bottom line, though, is that contributions were required from every member of the tribe. There simply were not the resources to support a large number of 'decorative' individuals.

If the tribe needed to move frequently to follow the game or harvest the grain, a smaller community unit could handle this easier than a larger one. The smaller unit was also simpler in terms of organisation and control. The span of command was doable.

If a group wanted to live permanently in a single location, the questions of food supply, water availability and sanitation had to be addressed. Conservation of resources was a necessity even then. If the local area was 'hunted out' the group could starve; mismanage sanitation and disease could easily decimate the village.

Still, solve these and other issues, and you could establish your town, and economies of scale might allow some more esoteric occupations to flourish. Perhaps your community could support a budding scientist who might make discoveries which could improve the common good or a group of full time entertainers. These entertainers may have previously travelled about, visiting tribe after tribe, providing much needed R and R without being a burden to any one group for long.

Anyway, you get the picture.

Today we have the option of choosing our occupations and our lifestyles with an unheard of degree of freedom. Some of the lifestyle choices we make close the door, either temporarily or permanently on occupations available to us. Our high degree of specialization and integration are important factors which allow this. This all works pretty good in a system that is functioning in good order, much as ours has for the last hundred years or so, but we are coming up on more difficult times. Can you afford to be 'decorative' today?