Can Pokemon teach us anything about the good life (and I don't just mean Nebraska!)?

After a summer of relaxing and vacationing I have gathered a bunch of ideas and I am ready to start blogging full time (by full time I mean once a week!) again. Today I am just running through a thought experiment, I don't have any data or facts to back up what I plan to propose but I do now that it does exist out there (Read E.F. Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful"). One of the activities that kept me busy this summer was bringing out my old Game Boy Color and playing Pokemon Blue again. It's an old game - about 10 years old if I recollect correctly, perhaps more - but it is a classic and a lot of fun to play. Like many of my favorite games as I play through the games I tend to focus not so much on the plot or even the game play (This is why I am not very good at most of these games), but rather the created world in the game. I am always thinking about what kind of economic system these lands have, where the infrastructure is, what makes the inhabitants of different regions different, basically I lot of questions regarding the geography of the land. Sometimes I find aspects of the game world that I think are intriguing and would be beneficial if implemented in our own world and that is what I want to think about today.

In the pokemon world - what I have always loved about the games is that their world is more technologically advanced then ours (they can for example resurrect extinct animals through fossils) yet as you play the game the world you inhabit is not some futuristic technological haven but rather has more in common with America around the turn of the century . There are very few cars or motorized vehicles (although they do exist and have a modern design) and most people get around by walking. The connections between towns (which are unrealistically close in the game through limitations, but I am accounting for that) are short and people can easily walk from one to another not on rural highways but rather on bucolic country trails. TV's and computers abound but no one's life seems to revolve around them (I admit I am extrapolating just a bit as that only person in pokemon you really get to know is yourself and the game doesn't let you sit and watch TV all day, however since a the vast majority of NPCs in the game are outside training pokemon or going about their business I feel it is a reasonable assumption). Scientists in the game are making amazing technological discoveries yet the vast majority of the inhabitants continue to live relatively simple lifestyles.

Now compare to the real world where a great many people (In America for sure, which is my sphere of experience, but I am reasonably certain this is also the case in Europe and Japan) live lives seeped in technology. - driving cars, texting, watching tv, riding elevators -These devices are supposed to make are lives easier but most people seem to think that life is getting more hectic as opposed to less hectic. As a culture and society we also seem to be losing important basic skills for relating to each other and the world as technology takes over the responsibilities that once were common to normal life. While I don't want to come across as a Luddite (I do use quite a bit of "technology" every day - I mean I am writing on this blog which is an amazing end of a remarkably large and complex technological process - but I am suggesting that we should have as our goal a life which relegates technology to its appropriate limited facility. As an easy place to start, turn off the ipod while you walk down the street. At first it might seem hard to not be jamming to your favorite tunes but eventually you (well I did at any rate) might begin to notice the sounds of the city or even better the sounds of your own head thinking.

Another aspect of the pokemon world that philosophically intrigues me is the connection between mankind and the natural world. In pokemon it is represented by the connection between humans and pokemon and their importance in the culture and lifestyle of the pokemon worlds. In Nebraska and much of the United States farming was the often the primary connection between society and nature but in other areas timber felling or fishing serve the purpose and these professions (along with the natural environment) served as the basis for which unique and human cultures could develop. This connection between man and nature (I know "man" is not politically correct but I am a traditionalist when it comes to English - "humankind" just isn't euphonious enough for me!) serves as a way to bring both stability to life (nature is pretty unchanging or changing so slowly that it seems unchanging in one's life time as compared with society) and is properly humbling (those who understand nature neither fear it nor think that it is all sunshine and lollipops either and respect it as a force that brings both life and death, joy and sadness - a proper humility). This, in it's own way forces all of us to see the necessity of being good stewards and caring for nature that we could in may respects completely destroy if we put our minds to it (or conversely put no thought into it what so ever.)

Now it is always worth noting that a fictional world is.. well... fictional and as such doesn't always have to follow the rules. Just because it works in fiction doesn't necessarily mean our society can actually function in such a way - and it may very well be that our society will never function in the intriguing ways of the pokemon world - maybe technology and simple living are just not as compatible as we would like (it seems to me that the drive to develop new kinds of technology might be severely hampered if our culture stopped looking for ways to make their lives "easier" which is essentially what I am in some ways advocating) but I have a lot of faith in the human intuition which seems notice that something is wrong with the current state of affairs and that living simply and using technology with a daft (I'm using this with its Old English meaning) touch are ideals to shoot for even if we can't actually achieve them as they are represented in the pokemon world.