I had plans.
Nothing big. Just sit in a café after lunch with a cheap cup of coffee and write. I got the coffee and began to write, when I got a call from Smallsteps, about twenty minutes later than normal. There were issues. Her friend had lost her bus card, so Smallsteps and another friend had stayed back looking for it. When it didn't show up, she called me to see if her friend could come to our place, using Smallsteps' card. No worries. But since I wasn't that far away from them, I skulled my coffee and picked all three of them up and was going to drop each home. Except, silly me said, if you check with your parents, you can all come to our place and play together.
That was the end of quiet time.
I should learn to keep my mouth shut.
However, these girls are a nice group and not only that, all of them speak English as natives, which is a rarity for me. They normally play in Finnish, but we can have proper conversations together and make jokes and stuff, which I can't do with Smallsteps' other friends. This is both a good thing and a bad thing for Smallsteps, because well... dad jokes.
While I didn't get to do what I was planning, there was an unexpected upside, because I spent about an hour talking with father of bus card girl when he came to pick her up, and he is a Brit who has been here for well over a decade already. He is working in an IT consulting company and we have a lot we can talk about and some overlapping insights. And while he is currently employed, he can see where it is heading and it scares him.
While he framed it as a mid-life crisis, he was asking what we should do once these last few jobs disappear. Is retraining really a viable solution when whatever one learns is going to be replaced by automation also? What happens to society when there is 20-30-50% unemployment? What do his kids need to learn now?
I think many people have these kinds of questions and many more, but don't have the time or will to really think through the answers for them. As you know from my writing, I see a pretty dystopian world ahead, but the optimist and idealist in me wishes that wasn't the case. If I had my way, the world would use the advantages of not having to do the busy work that automation can take care of, to spend time solving the real problems we face, like climate change, clean energy supply, cleaning up pollution - all with the underlying goal of continually improving human wellbeing.
As a species today, we are incredibly wasteful with our resources. You might be thinking I am talking about throwing a way food and the pollution clogging skies and waterways, but I am mostly talking about our human capital - our bodies and brains. They are both incredible evolutionary machines, yet we don't apply their capabilities well. We don't use our brains to solve the real problems we face, we use them to find new and innovative ways to be entertained. We don't use our bodies to make real changes in the world like cleaning up the environment we live in and rely on for life, we just sit around on the couch, watching something that doesn't grow us at all.
The only thing growing in the society we have created, are waist lines, mental problems, emotional instability, and unemployment queues.
We often think of employment as a way to make money so we can live, but I think that we should have 100% employment all of the time. People should be constantly employed on improvement projects across the board, not for the money, but for the purpose. Money muddies the waters of purpose, because it becomes the meaning of work itself, so people will willingly do what they don't want to do or what doesn't add any human value to the world, for money. If there was no money involved and the only reward was the feeling that you we are working on the right things in life, 99% of the jobs would disappear and nearly all current companies collapse.
That is because the 99% are working for the benefit of the 1% in exchange for a salary. If that salary would disappear, the jobs don't provide enough real-world meaning to attract people, and what they make wouldn't sell anyway, because people will have more important things to do with their time and personal resources.
People would be healthier, fitter, and their eyes brighter, because their daily life would be something rewarding at the core human level, and that is always a compelling prize, and an addictive feeling. We want to feel good, which is why so many poor substitutes are successful, because they make us feel good for a moment, but it fades quickly. So we buy more feel good product, and then try another, and another, and the supply chain fills up with demand. Even though so little of what we do each day, really makes a positive difference for society.
Even doctors who are "saving people's lives" are usually saving them from issues that are almost completely preventable, and are only issues because of lifestyle and behaviour. If all of that saving from nonsense resource could be put into generating improved health, what a difference it would make.
We have used all we have available to us, to get to where we are today.
Walk and take a look around. Breathe the air. Take a drink from the nearest stream. Is it clean? Turn on the news and see what is happening in the world, talk to your friends and family about their current feelings, experiences, and where they see the future. Watch kids interact with each other, and parents interact with their children. Look at the stock markets hitting new highs, while average people burn out and break down, and the bottom 20% are getting so disillusioned they are resorting to extreme violence.
We waste the resources of us, the resources of the world, and the potential we have to make a great world.
The future?
There is always one, whether we are here to be a part of it or not.
Of course, I didn't bombard this poor guy with all of this. Instead, I suggested he start an OnlyFans account and create a niche for himself.
Taraz
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