What Do You Want?

Photo Credit Unsplash

What do you want? What will make your life better? Think about it. Think long and hard. Examine your life. Imagine how things could be worse. Imagine how things could be better. What did you imagine? What aspects of your life would you want to change if you could? What aspects are working great for you?

With all that in mind, think about what exactly the government can do to help you improve your life. The only restriction is that these have to be improvements for your life. You can not take away rights from others. To fully participate in this exercise it will be necessary for you to stop worrying about what you believe everyone else has, and instead start focusing on what you need. Taking things away from others, won’t improve your life. So why waste your time on that?

You must also focus on the good in your life. Be aware of everything that you already have that makes your life easier, happier, better. It’s easy to take for granted the advantages we have. It also makes it easier to lose them because we aren’t actively engaged in keeping them. Think about roads, sewers, electricity, clean and accessible water. Most of us take these things for granted, but they didn’t just magically appear one day. People fought for them and built them. Imagine your life if you could no longer rely on having easily accessible clean water (for drinking, food, bathing), your health if human waste was just allowed to go anywhere, your comfort if faulty, dangerous, or even unreliable electrical grids were all there was to use. The need to remember these things is to ensure that we don’t one day lose them. It takes effort for these things to exist and there will always be morally corrupt people out there finding ways to degrade the quality and possibly even existence of these very basic necessities. We must fight for them if we want to keep them. 

Now go back to the things you would like that could help improve your life. I imagine a lot of people find bills, work, childcare, healthcare costs stressful. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had better infrastructure in place that could help improve these areas? Take for example healthcare costs and forget about the fear of socialised medicine, instead why not just start with basic common sense ideas. For example having a set price for medical supplies or procedures. Why shouldn’t the costs of seeing a doctor be transparent? Even if the costs remain too high, it would at the very least take away the stress of surprise medical bills and that would be a start. Now using that example think about all of the stressful areas in your life and what could be done to make them better. This is where your focus needs to be. This is where if you demand it, you will see improvement in your life.

But why can’t you restrict others in order to improve your own life? Because generally restricting others will not actually help you. Here is an example: lots of people are against raising the minimum wage. Some people argue that there are a lot more difficult jobs out there that don’t get paid enough, so therefore minimum wage shouldn’t be raised for these unskilled, low level jobs. Now lets think this argument through. If you have a low salary but difficult job, how is restricting minimum wage increases going to help you? Your salary will still be low and your job will still be difficult. You are no better off than before and most likely worse off. Think about it if your skilled job’s salary eventually ends up being lower than an unskilled minimum wage job, then how many people are going to keep doing the skilled job at such a low salary? If you could get a less stressful minimum wage (but higher paying) job, wouldn’t you? You would and this makes the job market more competitive. Eventually the skilled job’s salary will have to increase in order to attract employees. Keeping low level jobs at a very low minimum wage, does nothing to increase the competitiveness in the job market. So fighting against raising the minimum wage only ends up hurting other low salary workers in the end. So again, your focus should be on improving your own life and not trying to restrict others. You gain no benefit by trying to restrict others.

Hopefully you have come up with some ideas that will help to improve your life, but this is only half the battle. The other half is demanding these improvements actually be made. This is why it is so important to maintain a democracy that represents the interests of the people. Anyone in power not trying to make things better, who is not interested in improving your life, but instead are stuck on restricting or stonewalling, should not be allowed to stay in power. Vote them out. Find others that will do the things that you need done and get them elected. There is no reason why we can’t expand our infrastructure to encompass things that would improve our lives. Remember electricity, sewers, clean water, didn’t just magically happen, we made them happen and we can do the same for so much more!