It's Your Turn Now
Dear Friend,
You deserve family happiness.
You have put up with enough. You’ve paid your dues. You’ve surrendered your soul to do the “right thing” all of your life.
And you’re still waiting for payday.
Well, today’s the day you’re gonna cash in on all of that work.
It’s time for you to get a piece of the action. It’s time for you to discover the good life.
It’s your turn to be happy. And not a day too soon.
There is no reason anymore to put off family happiness. And you have it within your power today to put a smile on your face and keep it there.
I’m not talking about a magic potion that makes everything better. Instead, I’m suggesting something else.
Everything already is better. You just don’t realize it yet.
We’ve all been living our family lives the wrong way.
We still think we have to sacrifice our personal happiness to achieve family happiness . But, of course, you can see for yourself that this is ridiculous logic.
The 21st Century is ushering in a new Golden Age.
This new Age will pale all that has come before it. And you and I are blessed to be here when it happens.
The chaos you see before you today is nothing less than the final collapse of the Industrial Age in the West.
Most of the remnants of that Age withered thirty or more years ago. Other, more stubborn Industrial Age institutions, such as bureaucratic governments, used their power to hold on a bit longer. But their end is inevitable, too.
And so is the death of the old way of doing things. This “old way” is no longer necessary. And neither are our 20th Century methods of thinking. Our old (and now bad) habits.
It’s time for you to introduce yourself to a new world. And to take your place among its citizens.
First and foremost, we are entering a world with far less pain.
Yes, I know. You still see pain all around you. And more of it everyday. How can that be good?
What you see is the pain of identifying ourselves with a dying world. So we empathicly feel that pain. We experience the pain of being involved with dying institutions. Our money is losing value. Our old markets are deteriorating.
But look more widely. People around the world who before had little hope now have great hope. Human population is rising dramatically. Some would say that population increase is a bad thing. But in nature, a dramatic, long-term rise in population is usually a key sign of species success.
We in the West can now turn our primary focus away from mere survival and towards living a better, more fulfilling life.
We have been so busy. We busy bees have worked hard to survive. At least our parents did.
Then, when survival seemed assured, they kept on working, but knew not why. Then we came along. And we did what they did. We began our lives living as they did.
But we needed new reasons to keep working. So we worked to own more things. But we had no place to put them. We worked to accumulate more money. But we had no idea how to hold onto it. We worked to keep up with the Joneses. But we never really liked the Joneses, anyway.
Then we realized that this new life wasn’t so great. We no longer had a satisfying reason to work. But we didn’t know what else to do with ourselves.
Our life’s training, our culture, insisted that we keep working, harder than ever. But what we really wanted to do was kick back and relax. And we did kick back. A lot. But we never really relaxed. How could we? Our bodies may have been still but our minds were continually racing.
If you counted our hours, we had more leisure time available than ever. And at work, few of us were driven like slaves. We would never have made it in our grandfathers’ world. It just felt like we were driven like slaves. We stressed like slaves. It was all in our head.
It is now time to put this foolishness behind us.
We are ready as a society to start focusing on our own happiness.
Each of us is ready to begin living a life of happiness. We are exhausted by our old ways of living. And by the “promises” of riches that never panned out. We are tired of living a life on a treadmill. Of never seeming to get ahead. Of achieving only to realize that we really didn’t want what we achieved. Or that our achievement didn’t bring with it the satisfaction that we expected.
Our children need us, and we need them.
In our driven ways we have sent generations to be babysat by the State all day while we slaved away to make money to pay for things we never needed. And now we feel distant from our kids, and they from us.
Our partners need us, and we need them.
Yet we have forgotten what we saw in them. We have expected them to give us happiness, as if it were a gift on a plate. And when they failed in doing this, we threw them away and got another, only to experience the same thing all over. We wonder where those dreams of romance went. Was it all a fantasy?
Being a family can be tough. But it can also be a pleasure. Today, most people experience the tough parts but never see the good. It’s time for that to end. It’s time for true family happiness.
Humanity has many challenges to face in the 21st Century.
First and foremost, we need to do nothing less than relearn how to live.
Our culture in the West must rediscover how to be happy. This is not something done by societies or institutions. It is something that must be done by each of us as individuals. And then be shared among our families and friends. It is something that spreads through communities, and finally finds its way to the status of a cultural norm.
We are beginning this process, you and I, right now. We are doing nothing less than changing our entire world. We should be proud. I am. And you should be, too.
We must avoid overwhelming our planet.
Even too much of a good thing can stress our world. But this the good kind of crisis – a crisis created by success. And the same will, drive and knowledge that brought our species to this height will allow us to find equilibrium with our environment. It’s in our interest to do so, because this is our home.
“But things don’t look so great from here …”
Some would point to worldwide successes, and contrast that with relative declines in the more developed areas on Earth. Some of these developed areas are even shrinking. How can that be good?
The West is experiencing a kind of leveling.
For so long, the benefits of our species new success were concentrated in a few areas, mostly in the “West.” Today those benefits are spilling over throughout the world. The energy is just evening itself out, so it seems that the West is in decline.
Also, what we used to call benefits in the West, like jobs and industry, may not be what this region really needs now. These assets are leaving us. But our true wealth remains.
Truth be told, we in the West have it in our power to support our basic needs of food, clothing and shelter without the hard labor required of our ancestors. We just have to discover for ourselves how to do that.
Our Western culture still has the training that goes with life in an industrial world. We celebrate the work ethic that brought us to where we are today. But perhaps that ethic is better suited to those developing countries that are just now embracing traditional industrial growth.
In our Western, post-industrial world, we need to discover that our wealth is no longer in labor and industry, but in wisdom and creativity.
And the new and wondrous technologies that we have created in the past will allow us to generate all the wealth and personal security that our families will ever need.
For the first time, we will be free to focus our energies on higher level needs, such as happiness, and spiritual awareness. Such as love and family closeness.
That’s what I’m doing. That’s what Creative Family Lifestyle Design is all about. Family happiness .
It is this new age that is dawning before us that makes all of this possible. So don’t mourn the end of the world. Celebrate the birth of a new Eden.
I know that it is hard to accept what I am saying here whilst you are in the midst of the world as it seems today. A world in severe financial stress. A world in crisis.
We are simply watching the writhing death of an old way of life.
We need to stand back, out-of-the-way of this writhing, if we can. But that is all.
A shiny new world is there too. It’s just harder to notice. There is no hope of saving the old ways. And who wants to? Let them go.
Embrace this new world before us. Begin your new life today.
Today is your first day in paradise! Glad you could make it! I’ll save you a seat.
All the best,
Hugh
