Your life plan, written by politicians

Why emptiness is a preferred solution

When people ask, “do you see the glass half full or half empty?” the inquiry is offered as a measurement of optimism versus pessimism, the favor given to the former rather than the latter.

But what if this is wrong? What if the real usefulness of life is found in the world’s unfilled spaces, gaps, and openings? What if nothing actually is something, and is the most useful of somethings?

Herein lies some of the trouble that crafty politicians foist upon their constituents, often without the full awareness of either, to the detriment of humanity. Time is also fillable; emptiness, they believe, is to be avoided, and politicians have taken great care over the years scheming to fill a person’s life, steering them away from emptiness. Such policies persist from cradle to grave.

Photo by manu schwendener on Unsplash

At an early age, often between 3 and 5, politicians make it so that parents are either directed or coerced to send their children to government-run or government-influenced schools where students’ days are filled with compulsory activities and lessons. This continues almost unabated for the next dozen or so years. Children often leave school with homework, so for some number of hours of each afternoon and evening, attention demanded by the government education system extends into the home.

By the time they reach their teenage years, the government tells youngsters to set their plans for college or career. In early adulthood, around age 18, they’re told to execute on the plan, continuing their education or engaging in a trade.

Of the 168 hours in each week, the government says 40 are to be used in fulltime work. Working more than 40 hours or less than that are subjected to special rules and requirements regarding taxes, compensation, and benefits. Minimum (and sometimes maximum) rates of compensation are also set by politicians and enforced by their bureaucracies.

A government might mandate some number of minutes off each day for lunch breaks and bathroom breaks, so many days or weeks off per year for vacation, and some number of months off for childbirth or bereavement.

Policies are also put in place to maintain that the central purpose of life is to work, largely according to the centralized preset schedule, until retirement age, at roughly 65. Along the way, the now-adult children have children of their own who are then indoctrinated into the same compulsory education and work system that reinforces and repeats the cycle.

But what if this weren’t so? What if the government’s plot of a person’s life was to offer no direction and no plan, empty of influence of manipulation, or any kind of preconception of that a person’s life should look like? What if people were given the option to fill the vast empty of life with their own designs, purposes, and knowledge?

What if, in the sum total of humanity, some opted to begin formal education at 2 or 10? What if they were to plan their own retirement, at 40 or 70 or never, or work 35 hours or 55 hours a week, with 10 weeks off or no weeks off, based on their own mutual agreement with their employer?

Emptiness has its usefulness and helpfulness. The empty mind that is able to reach a meditative state is considered healthier and more useful than that of the cluttered mind that struggles to rest, darting from one idea to another. The empty canvas has unlimited potential; it might be filled with the most exquisite portraiture ever, the next Mona Lisa, or it might be filled with the Crayon scribblings of a child’s imagination, equally valuable to her dotting parents.

The empty house and the empty glass find their purpose not in the existence of their exteriors, but in the empty space inside. The glass might be filled with water that quenches the thirst or dirt that feeds a flower. The house might be the place where families share meals, where a person sleeps comfortably at night, or where the budding entrepreneur hatches a new innovation in his garage. The potential in the empty space is endless.

And so it is with each person.

Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.

Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.

— Chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching, translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English