Everyone can benefit from a week in Slab City
A recent article in Time US features a couple who ran off to Slab City as the recession caught up with them and found it impossible to maintain their cost of living. Slab city, an abandoned military base in the California desert, is inhabited by people from all walks of life, the latest being people like the couple featured in this article who are trying to escape the system.
So how did it come to this ? In this day and age with all our worldly advances and comforts it seems that only the privileged few are benefiting while the rest of us are drowning. The middle class section of society is shrinking by the minute leaving a great divide between the rich and the poor.
There was a time when a college or university degree could get you a decent income and provide a comfortable life for you and your family. What is the price of a comfortable life today? Two or maybe three jobs, working eighteen hours a day, eating TV dinners in a coma, with nothing to say to your spouse? Is that even enough to pay the bills and mortgage at the end of the month?
The time has come to get off the hamster wheel and that is exactly what the couple in the Time article have done. They have made a radical shift in priorities, cut their monthly cost to a fraction of what it was before and solidified their relationship in the process.
If it takes a trip to slab city to reassess priorities in life then its certainly worth it. The lesson to learn here is that a person stripped from his earthly possessions and comforts to the bare minimum can get by just as well, if not more so. Living in a material world ruled by advertisers, this is hard to imagine, but there are people who live this reality every day.
If we are to survive this economic crisis we don't need to go to such extremes, we do need to ask ourselves this question. Are we biting off more than we can chew ?
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