Here is a passage from a children's book called "Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH." I think it encapsulates the experience of a first world person:
"“…It was a comfortable, almost luxurious existence.
And yet all was not well. After the first burst of energy, the moving in of the machines, the digging of runners and rooms - after that was done, a feeling of discontent settled upon us like some creeping disease.
We were reluctant to admit it at first. We tried to ignore the feeling or to fight it off by building more things - bigger rooms, fancier furniture, carpeted hallways, things we did not really need. I was reminded of a story I had read at the Boniface Estate when I was looking for things written about rats. It was about a woman in a small town who bought a vacuum cleaner. Her name was Mrs. Jones, and up until then she, like all of her neighbors, had kept her house spotlessly clean by using a broom and a mop. But the vacuum cleaner did it faster and better, and soon Mrs. Jones was the envy of all the other housewives in town - so they bought vacuum cleaners, too.
The vacuum cleaner business was so brisk, in fact, that the company that made them opened a branch factory in town. The factory used a lot of electricity, of course, and so did the women with their vacuum cleaners, so the local electric power company had to put up a big new plant to keep them all running. In its furnaces the power plant burned coal, and out of its chimneys black smoke poured day and night, blanketing the town with soot and making all the floors dirtier than ever. Still, by working twice as hard and twice as long, the women of the town were able to keep their floors almost as clean as they had been before Mrs. Jones ever bought a vacuum cleaner in the first place.
The story was part of a book of essays, and the reason I had read it so eagerly was that it was called “The Rat Race” - which, I learned, means a race where, no mater how fast you run, you don’t get anywhere. But there was nothing in the book about rats, and I felt bad about the title because, I thought, it wasn’t a rat race at all, it was a People Race, and no sensible rats would ever do anything so foolish.
And yet here we were, rats getting caught up in something a lot like the People Race, and for no good reason. And the worst thing was that even with our make-work projects, we didn’t really have enough to do. Our life was too easy. I thought of what the scientist had written about prairie dog ancestors and I was worried.
So were many of the others….. we realized that finding the Toy Tinker’s truck, which had seemed like such an enormous stroke of luck, had in fact led us into the very trap we should have avoided. As a result we were now stealing more than ever before: not only food, but electricity and water. Even the air we breathed was drawn in by a stolen fan, run by stolen current.
It was this, of course, that made our life so easy that it seemed pointless. We did not have enough work to do because a thief’s life is always based on somebody else’s work."
Busy with PDC. That said, this link might prove useful: http://www.nwedible.com/2014/08/can-you-seal-a-pond-with-clay-kitty-litter-2-html.html
