How i live now: The merits of guns, germs, and xbox

How I live now:

I toil with children until two
I roil with paperwork and procedure for three more

I am free at five
Alone with my thoughts and freedom to do nothing

Everyone should have some time to do nothing.

Jared Diamond, in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel", postulates that boredom is what gave rise to our great societies.

The book is 440 pages but the aiuthor also made a movie for National Geographic. In the DVD he explains that the whole book started with a question. He had been visiting and doing anthropology in Papua, New Guinea for many years. It's a popular place of study for anthropologists because life for the people who live there has gone unchanged for virtually thousands of years.

One day an acquaintance of his from the village asked, "How come you White men have so much cargo and we have none?"
By cargo he meant possessions, technology, scientific advancements, etc.

Well, that basically spurred the entire book right there. Diamond's answer of course is Guns, Germs, and Steel. These three elements drastically affected the course of human history. But before those elements could even come in to play, it basically comes down to geography and natural resources. All the birth places of the original great societies ( North America, Asia, Africa) had one thing in common--people were able to sustain agriculturally based societies. See, hunters and gatherers live day to day. So much of there energy goes in to preparing for and implementing the hunt. Once humankind discovered sustainable agriculture, they developed granaries. With enough food stored up for the long term, people suddenly had free time. This, of course, led to division of labor. Now since there was enough food that EVERYONE didn't have to devote all their time to procuring sustainance, people could devote time to other things--pottery, bronze working, the primordial beginnings of the study of Science.

And there you have it--when we have free time. When we have the freedom to be bored and to fill our time with pursuits of our own choosing, free time can lead to discovery.

Now, if we can only get people to turn off the tv and put down the Xbox, that tradition may one day continue.