“I recount my thoughts after leaving the desert. ‘Walking through the wilds freed me from worries and fear, but this is not real freedom. You need money to be free’.”

— Ma Jian, Red Dust

The years I spent in Xinjiang,
my desert;

the situation I find myself in,
my freedom?

As I was watching the London marathon on the telly yesterday, I wondered what drives to people to run 42,195 meters in up to six hours or more? Many of these amateur athletes are charity runners; the proceeds of sponsoring go to all sorts of good causes. But the big race is far from charitable on their joints, and some runners cross the finish line rather more dead than alive.

Could it be that through the selfless act of running hard to raise money for charity, the charitable runners are also working hard to achieve esteem and self-actualisation, the highest levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? Charity running is then both a selfless and a selfish act. I’ll argue that our society is to blame for this selfish aspect, rather than the charity runners themselves. I’m guilty as charged.

The media pack that can be downloaded from the London marathon website is a veritable source of information, it nicely picks apart the demographics of the amateur competitors. Sadly I couldn’t find the amount of money raised for charity in recent years, but it tells us that charity fund-raising wasn’t always at the forefront of the London event. According to Wikipedia, more than 40 million British Pounds were raised in 2006. The number of people that ran for charity has steadily grown over the years. This year is stands at almost 4 in every 5 runners that raise money for a good cause.

It can also be found in the media pack that the economic background of most amateur runners is a white-collar, middle-class one. Secular, western nationalities are disproportionally represented among the foreign runners. What makes these people put on a tracksuit after work and tire themselves out? Why do they go around friends and acquaintances on weekends to beg for sponsorship money for their efforts?

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a model in psychology that puts needs-fulfilment in a hierarchical order. It’s often depicted as a pyramid; as needs at the lower levels are met, so higher-level needs become more pressing. Only after needs from the physiological level – like food, water and sleep – have been secured, do people seek to fulfil needs such as employment at the level of ‘safety’, or that of sexual intimacy at the ‘love/belonging’ level.

Traditionally it wasn’t until late in their career that people sought to fulfil needs from the highest levels of the Maslow hierarchy. As they were approaching a pensionable age, people took on more socially relevant positions within the company, or engaged in voluntary and charitable work in their free time. These days a larger proportion of the population receives higher education, and 20- or 30-somethings already find themselves knocking on the doors of esteem and self-actualisation.

Their jobs don’t provide an outlet for these needs and desire, not at this stage in their career anyway. So these 20- and 30-year-old recruiters, consultants, account-managers, these white-collar workers seek for other means to fulfil their needs, to find that their hard work pays off not just for themselves, but also for the people around them. Training for a marathon and charity running satisfies this desire. It allows people to realise their needs from the highest levels of the Maslow hierarchy, it makes them feel very good about themselves.

I’m not cynical about all these charity runners though, far from. I’m very proud of all the people that raise lots of money for charity. But I also think it’s very sad that western society insists on raising the average level of education year on year, but fails to provide enough jobs at the right level for all these charity runners. Traditionally it was employment and career progression that allowed people to fulfil more and more of their needs, but sadly that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. I’m not cynical about charity running, I’m cynical about the Lisbon treaty, and about the West as a knowledge-driven economy.

I look at myself as a case in point. I’m looking for a job that doesn’t just pay the bills, but that is ‘relevant in some way’ as well. It’s why I volunteered to set up a press office for kids at the local primary schools, and it’s why I recently ran the Bath Half marathon. I intend to run a marathon at the end of the year, and I’m open to suggestions for charities that I can support through running.

I’ll provide you with an example, to support my recent reflections. So I publish an article I recently wrote to accompany a job application. It’s an adaptation of an earlier blog posting from my hand. Notice how some of the changes in style have occurred in the 2½ years that separate these articles.

One-child pension plans
Adapted from “One child pension plans,” 7 June 2006.

China’s population is ageing, which is in no small part due to the one-child policy. This policy has shaped Chinese society in several interesting ways. One such consequence is called the “little emperor theory.” But children in today’s China, even those from a wealthy background, don’t live the courtly life this name implies.

In city-dwelling, new middle-class families both parents now have jobs. Children are often brought up by their grandparents. Since these new Chinese families realise that neither their companies nor the great socialist state will pay for their pensions, they look at their children for their future income: one child, two parents, four grandparents.

And so, children needn’t have to ask for anything. Guardians, especially grandparents, who have experienced great hunger and poverty during the cultural revolution, don’t want their children to experience any of that. Obesity is fast becoming a problem, also in China. Taking your child to KFC, weekly rather than monthly, is seen as good parenting. A crying child is a badly raised child!

This practice has raised a whole generation of spoilt brats, little emperors who expect their every wish to be fulfilled at the blink of an eye. At twenty these children hang out in internet cafés, not able to take responsibility for their own lives. But that’s not to say that Chinese teenagers have an easy life. Personally I’d never swap places with them.

Because those little emperors pay a high price for their luxury. As the children have to foot the bills in the future, and pay for their parents’ pension, so every parent thinks their child is the next Olympic gold medallist, the next political or corporate hot-shot. Yet high-paying jobs don’t come easy in a market that has many, many more people than it has jobs. University is the surest ticket to a steady income, but again places are scarce, especially at the better ones.

So parents push their children to study hard. Going to school seven days a week is the norm for children whose parents can afford it. After school they’re sent to private institutions to brush up on their English, their maths, their chemistry. Bribing teachers is commonplace, even though it’s illegal. In the evening it’s homework. Most teenagers sleep barely six hours a night. They do their homework until well after midnight, and get up early again to make it to school on time.

In the West we think childhood should be the happiest time of your life. In China it’s adulthood that children live for, and so they are told by their parent. I think that’s understandable, I can appreciate all the money spend on schooling, and the little sleep these children get. Compared to most of us it’s not an easy life that this children have ahead of them.

Yet sometimes their stories break my heart. Children come home from school, exhausted, hours of homework await. To their parents it’s still not enough. That’s when it dawns that mum and dad don’t really care for their child’s health or happiness anymore, waving it away as something of concern only after a university education. That’s when they send me a text-message, the foreigner, the only sceptic about all of this. They’ve come to realise that their parents see them not as little emperors, but as a one-child pension plan.

Migrating my blog proved useful in more ways than one. It gave me an excuse to re-read all the articles I have ever posted to it. I realise now that I should have done that a long time.

The style, the focus, the choice of topic, it’s all markedly different now from when I wrote my first blog article, back in 2004.

I started of by writing about myself. My blog served as a diary. But as the months went by my articles became more reflective. Eventually the narrative shifted away from me and onto the world around me.

Off course with this change in focus came a change, in my mind, in the audience. Where I set out writing for friends and family, I ended up writing for a general audience, reflecting on the society I found myself in.

But if the focus of the articles changed, I still judged the world around me by my own standards. Not man but I was the measure of all things. Many grand ideas I’ve seen reflected so, for good or worse, in my own writing.

As my world view became more, for lack of a better word, contemporary, so did my ideas become more polished. I vividly remember certain events – people I met, discussion I had , books I read – that changed my mind on grand issues. I connect these events, in retrospect, to changes in the direction of my blog.

Just as my writing became more polished, and my choice of topic less unassuming, more politically engaged, et cetera, my articles shrunk in size.

At first my articles were clever because of the way in which I interwove many different narratives. Drawing such superficial connections, I notice now, is almost inversely related to how much I really opined on the matters at hand.

And so five years have passed. Even the lulls in my writing may be telling. They may coincide with great changes in direction, of my writings, of my opinions.

My blog, my diary, therefore, serves as a record of my development, in style, in mind. A difficult realisation perhaps, but also a valuable one. Migrating my blog taught me a lot about myself. It won’t be another five years before I take that opportunity again.