I recently took a business seminar for acupuncturists. It was good, but one thing I’m still reeling from was the presenter’s unabashed enthusiasm for business. No bones about it, he was good at it and wasn’t afraid of expressing contempt for people who had a smaller practice out of choice.

Or, in his words, “Why would you be in this business to fail?”

He said that he interviewed other acupuncturists in his home state before starting a clinic, and found that most of them saw between 5 and 10 patients a day, which he found shockingly low. He was genuinely bewildered and even seemed kind of angry about it, and said, literally, that this was due to their “narcissism and ignorance.”

At ten patients a day, by the way, you could make a decent middle class living.

But this comes from a guy who runs the largest acupuncture clinic in the United States, by volume, and grossed almost $3 million a year, and his clinic probably sees around 600-700 patients a week.

This is a guy who initially got his workload up to 120 people a week, but then got frustrated because he couldn’t get it any higher.

This is a guy who started out as a hardcore meditator in the sixties, but, in a classic case of reformed hippie syndrome, eventually turned around, made a fortune in the oil business, then started doing Chinese medicine.

Now, I’ll admit to having a lot to learn in the realm of business, and I’m sure there are a lot of lessons that I could learn from becoming a great success. In the face of this guy and his successes, and the attitude he wields, I guess I have to ask, though, whether it’s something I want.

Actually, it kind of reminds me of that time when I had taken tai chi for a couple of months, then attended a weekend workshop with a very good tai chi master, and subsequently quit tai chi. I quit because I saw my future if I stayed on the path and somehow, it didn’t feel worth it. Nothing wrong with the master, in fact he seemed like a really good person, not just good at what he did but very decent as a human being. I just realized that I didn’t want to dedicate my life to learning to beat people up.

I feel a little that way with this guy. He is without a doubt a modern master of the acupuncture business. The guy even has a PR person on his clinic staff. He hired lobbyists to lobby the state congress on behalf of the acupuncture field. My state needs a guy like that. A rich, motivated, and competent guy like him.

And yet, I don’t want to be him.

I don’t want to be him because, I’m realizing, I don’t have that kind of drive, that kind of passion.

For me, the practice of acupuncture misses something, and it misses something even more if I consider seeing dozens of patients a day.

The one thing that most contributes to meaning in my life is awareness of deeper perceptions and higher vibrations. I just don’t see that having any place in a clinic where I see a patient for a few minutes at a time. And sure, maybe not every patient needs that kind of attention. I could stand to go faster and have more patients that way. But still, therein lies my ambivalence.

I would resist having a hugely full practice, because I’m not that happy—not with my profession, but with the stock-photo, stenciled life I’m living, that excludes the range of mysterious and strange phenomena and experiences that do not fit into people’s perceptual schemes. And daily, even in a setting that I built, I have to conform to other people’s perceptions in order to maintain contact.

I don’t want that. I’ve got somewhere else I feel like I need to go, and all this work I’m doing, it ain’t taking me there.

And there’s a broader objection, one built around the pressure to do more, more, more. More is better. It really smacks of an almost Calvinist zeal to proving your moral status by the volume of your business.

Max Weber, in his book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, quotes a Puritan named Richard Baxter, saying,

“If God shows you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way (without wrong to your soul or to any other), if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be God’s steward, and to accept His gifts and use them for Him when He requireth it.”

The stance is essentially that:

As a performance of duty in a calling [wealth] is not only morally permissible, but actually enjoined. The parable of the servant who was rejected because he did not increase the talent which was entrusted to him seemed to say so directly.

This is entirely at odds with the kind of lifestyle detailed by those such as Marshall Sahlins in his classic essay on hunter-gatherer living, “The Original Affluent Society”. And obviously the primitive ideal is one that has strongly influenced me and still resonates strongly.

A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.

The most obvious, immediate conclusion is that the people do not work hard. The average length of time per person per day put into the appropriation and preparation of food was four or five hours. Moreover, they do not work continuously. The subsistence quest was highly intermittent. It would stop for the time being when the people had procured enough for the time being, which left them plenty of time to spare.

This brings up the very broad question of how to live. But answering that question is really obviated by the fact that those choices have already been made for me, and are very difficult to change.

Which society do I live in? One in which the classic 9 to 5 workday is now considered to be a luxury. One in which things are not valued if they do not lead directly to greater and greater financial reward, because the state of our collective finances is so awful that only obsessive discipline with them can sustain us. One in which the ethic of hard work consumes us, and is but masked by the massive engines of entertainment and escapism—which are all too easily proven hollow.

Yet this is the atmosphere in which I was born and grew up, and in which am trying to eke out my existence. I know of no other way to live and to conceptualize my life, and I don’t know how to even begin.

So this fellow at the seminar, speaking at times with the zeal of a preacher, and with the certainty of an evangelical, struck all the nerves in me that have been, and are, vulnerable—made vulnerable by my continuing, profound ambivalence about how to live a righteous existence in a world that doesn’t seem so right at all, and by my fears of being myself a reformed hippie, a former dirty dude dressed in military issue olive drab, who made it through a year of primitive living, only to go on to have the respectable job with the six-digit income, the nice house, the 2.5 kids.

This obviously taps into a deeper and broader issue, one having to do with the implications of living in the midst of mainstream society, without the security of an ideology or practice to attach to—something I gave up when I dissociated myself from Teaching Drum and let the primitivist ideal mature into something with more shades of grey. And it has to do with who I am and who I want to be, as an individual, in this type of society and this kind of world.

In a culture that is very heavily centered around business, who am I in relation to my business and the economic aspects of my self?

Who am I? And where am I going?