In the Harry Chapin song “Cats In The Cradle,” the narrator sings about how he would devote time to his son when life got a little better, only to find himself growing old and with a son that is too busy for him, having grown up just like his father. Without wishing to devote a great deal of time on this particular song, I would like to talk about a concept that the song brings out that is useful in a great deal of aspects of life, and that is the way that a great deal of life consists of traps where our behavior to better ourselves only gets us caught up in traps that we cannot escape from. This can be true on an individual level or on a larger level of society or civilization. As I have at least a little bit of experience with this particular trap, I thought it would be worthwhile to discuss even if it is a fairly gloomy subject to think about.

One of the great tragedies of human existence is that we are not particularly skilled at seeing the long-term ramifications of our behavior. I do not wish anyone to assume that I am better than anyone else at this important but difficult matter. The truth is that I am pretty terrible at this particular matter myself. I spent one somewhat long and very personal blog entry not too long ago [1] in talking at length about one particular aspect of my life where I have fallen spectacularly into exactly this sort of trap. To repeat myself briefly here, as a child I knew that given my particular gifts and personality that education would have to be my ticket out of grinding poverty. Unfortunately, a lot of other people also made that decision, and I have not seen the sort of opportunities that would make my own decisions pay off, and so I am in at least as serious a trap with education as I was growing up without one. Of course, the end of the story has not been written yet, but we cannot simply assume that hard work and excellence will always pay off in this life. If this life was all we had, it would be an intolerable existence.

Sometimes the nature of the trap is not always so obvious. Even for those whose labors may bring success may find themselves in an elegant trap where their apparent efforts to better themselves only entrap them in a course of action. Let us assume that someone has managed to work hard and wisely as an entrepreneur and build up a business over the course of many years of excellent work. During the slow growth of that business, the businessman will have spent long hours of work at modest prices in the hope of future success, and will probably have married and started a family, giving more people whose concerns must be taken into consideration and more ways to spend money. Perhaps there will be expenditures on houses or cars or vacations or other possessions, or money spent to educate children, perhaps via homeschooling or a private school. Let us say, though, that this person’s business has reached the point where there are now more than fifty full-time employees. At this point the desires for bettering one’s standard of living have led to the point where increased regulations may make the businessman feel particularly trapped by his success, and cursing government bureaucracies and their impositions.

Sometimes this trap is on a far larger level than just the individual. It was a discussion of the agricultural revolution that prompted this whole discussion, and the agricultural revolution is a perfect example of this elegant trap. What provides more food per unit of land leads to massive demographic growth and the impoverishment of people in terms of the quality of life and the trap that the same sorts of grinding behavior are necessary even if it makes us more vulnerable and trapped in futility and difficulty. Once the decision has been made to depend on farming as opposed to hunting and gathering, a change back to the old ways becomes infeasible without massive demographic collapse, which no one would willingly accept. The same is true of our current industrial society, as there are simply too many mouths to feed, so we simply try to make the best of what we are doing in the hope that working harder and making improvements to the way things are will allow us to get out of the trap that we have found ourselves in.

Unfortunately, this appears to be a vain hope for the most part. Doing the wrong thing better may only increase our problems by forcing us to work harder and limit our options and make ourselves more vulnerable to diseases or the vagaries of international trade simply to survive as is. Businesses may try to escape from regulations by changing their behavior in ways that drastically hurt the people that work for them. People may seek education to provide more opportunities for themselves, only to find they have only increased their indebtedness in search of opportunities that largely do not exist. People may find rewards for their labor only to find that those rewards only embed them deeper in responsibilities and duties for others, leaving them just as stressed and frazzled as before, their obligations increasing to match their increased resources. Such is life in a fallen world.

[1] http://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2013/04/27/the-miseducation-of-nathan-albright/