Thursday, August 4, 2011

Are Africans lazy or Americans crazy?

There is a fisherman in a small coastal town in Mozambique. Every morning he wakes up early and goes fishing. After he catches three large fish he goes to the market and sells two of them, and uses that money to buy the things his family will need that day. The third fish he keeps for his family to eat. It doesn’t matter that there are more fish in the ocean, and that he could probably sell more if he wanted to. The point is that he doesn’t need to. After selling the two fish, he goes home and takes a nap.

There is a businessman in urban America. He works twelve hours a day at a stressful job with a complicated title that no one understands. He doesn’t remember which of his children play which sports, and he has no idea what subjects they like at school. He talks to his wife in person for ten minutes a day. He buys iPads and giant TVs and expensive clothes and luxury cars and other things he doesn’t need to make his family think that they’re happy and have a good life.