Self-indulgent autobiographical prattle

I never had an inner child, even when I was outwardly a child. I had an inner middle aged, neurotic adult.

At ten years of age, I stood in the back yard, frozen with the fearful realization that I had no career path picked out. How would I ever pay for retirement?

That question remains. Experience has broadened my perception of what happens throughout the course of life, so the idea of working until I drop holds no more terror than the concept of dropping all by itself. No natural organism retires. Why should we be different?

Retooling the basic principles of human existence we could develop a system in which we take advantage of our numbers to lighten each individual's work load. No one would bring home disproportionately huge rewards, but everyone would get some work time and some free time. Place no limits on inventive and creative thought and work, since these generally carry a level of enjoyment beyond a daily grind kind of job. For the more mind-numbing kinds of occupation, keep the shifts and the schedules endurably short.

Of course the whole thing falls apart at the administrative level. Right now we make the rich the custodians of our major blocs of resources. Then we try to figure out how to pry some of it away from them when we need it. In a broader-based, more uniform prosperity, the representative government would end up controlling resources, supposedly for the betterment of all of us. Even if control fell to citizen groups independent of the elected administration, those would take on the quasi-governmental position now occupied by corporate boards. More directly responsive to the rank and file citizen, these controlling entities might succumb to pressure to make a different kind of bad decision than the typically narrow, greed motivated ones for which corporate boards are known today. Pristine holdings now reserved to the wealthy and their friends could become grubby, abused public spaces trampled by recreating masses with inadequate environmental knowledge and ethics.

The problems just keep multiplying from the simplest concept meant to make things better.