That is a scary thought, losing control. And yet I have turned it into an imperative for you. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately it is an imperative.
That is a scary thought, losing control. And yet I have turned it into an imperative for you. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately it is an imperative.
I generalize my experiences by using the pronoun “you”, but have found more self awareness, connection and possibilities by using “I”.
After a couple of things go wrong in the course of a day I label it a bad day and write it off. What if, instead of a bad day, I had a bad minute?
I have spent about a quarter of my life living outside of the United States, mostly in Germany. Until recently I have frequently referred to myself as stuck somewhere over the Atlantic, feeling neither American, nor European. Surprisingly that changed over the year and a half, ending in January, 2020, I spent living in Berlin. While I was there I missed the idealistic strivings of my fellow Americans, their empowering belief that the status quo can be changed through their labor.
The goal is to perpetuate life. What can be done to achieve that goal in a world where the same actions can lead to different results? If you play first person shooter video games the title should have already hinted at the answer. Spray and pray refers to a “tactic” where you hold down the “trigger” (mouse 1) and hope you hit your target(s). This is contrasted with carefully aiming and only shooting when you have a target lined up.
This is not the answer I wanted. Maybe that is why it took me so long to find it. When I first gained enough awareness to seek something greater than myself to guide my desires I was looking for something real (unchanging) that clearly identified action(s) to take. While not as specific as I would have liked, where I landed is better than the shifting, subjective landscape I have until recently been existing in.
When it came to community there used to be an impression of permanence. Whether it was staying at a company for your entire career, spending your life living in the same town, or committing to a marriage in a time before divorce. There was not complete stability, but there were fewer options and they were harder to execute on.
Be explicit before drawing conclusions. When we do not want to risk ourselves we use innuendo and implicit language. A statement, or question can be covered up when it is not explicit. It is possible to pretend that the implication or innuendo was not intended because it is plausible you did not see it.
In recent history the United States has been the best place to get the best durable goods at the cheapest price because it was the biggest market. The size of a market is determined by the number of people who are potential buyers, or sellers of a product. The United States did not have the most people, but it had the most people with the ability to buy the most durable goods.
Data privacy is a start, but we need to go beyond just having some control over our data to owning it. Internet data is used to control access to information, whether it is through personalized advertising, a personalized feed, or a search engine. These all display content based on your and other user’s data.
Technology is enabling fewer people to accomplish more. That said population growth and the proliferation of new products and services has kept pace, so overall employment numbers have not changed much. The industries they are in shifts, but that is not novel.
I tend to go down rabbit holes thinking about things. Distilling experiences to try and understand it and extrapolate from them.
I find Elon Musk exceptional, even amongst successful business people, due to his seeming goal.
It is easy to fill our time. Between social media, news feeds, and video streaming we can always find something to consume. Afterwards, though, it is usually hard to remember something in that endless stream that mattered to me and another day has disappeared.
Growing up is surviving the paradox. It requires experiencing and then accepting that your world is bigger and more complicated than you can control without that reality breaking you.
Sometimes the best thing to do is let someone down. We are all finite and while disappointing people is painful lying to someone by setting the wrong expectations is worse.
This is a massive topic on which I have no answers, but is at the core of modern life and most of my writing.