No arse/face jokes please, this is a serious point. Use of the words I/we/you refer to society rather than anyone individually.
There are alot of discussions surrounding fulfilment and overall happiness at work and in general. Granted, some of those things that make work miserable are down to the way employers treat their
slaves workforce... But what about the rest? I know we all would like to believe that we work to live, but factor in the pressures of trying to keep up with the Joneses and it invariably ends up the other way around...
We simply have to have the latest phone or car or kitchen. Not to mention drink the right coffee or eat the right brand of organic tofu ands so on. In fact pretty much everything we spend our hard earned on is either buying life's must haves or servicing the finance to do so.
Borrowing is such a normality that we haven't even realised what harm we are inflicting on our youth by way of crippling student loan debt...
Currently more than £16 billion is loaned to around one million students in England each year. The value of outstanding loans at the end of March 2019 reached £121 billion. The Government forecasts the value of outstanding loans to be around £450 billion (2018‑19 prices) by the middle of this century.
These debt encumbered millions, bearing in mind not all of them complete their studies, spend their entire working lives being targeted to buy things they don't need in order to impress people they don't like, and because by and large they are clinically depressed from constantly slogging away to be 'normal', they end up trapped in this endless cycle of consumerism. Which does the world no good.
Remove the normality of this debt cycle, and people would not only spend their time actually enjoying the fruits of their labours, but also the labours themselves, thereby becoming a far happier and more fulfilled society, without the need to constantly buy crap 'because you deserve it'.
This in turn would help the environment by generating less consumption of resources and less unrecyclable waste.
So rather than making misguided grand gestures as a political pawn of the environmental brigade, perhaps Greta, and society as a whole, could be starting a paradigm shift in a far better way? After all, people tend to be more worried about servicing their bills than polar bears and plastic beads...
Incidentally, I am not suggesting that existing student loans should be wiped clean, but rather that we stop adding to the debt. How this might be achieved is a whole different issue, but could reasonably include commercial sponsorship and PAYG.
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