My wife is working from home as she is ill, which I find a little crazy these days. In the past if you were too ill to go to work, you stayed home and rested. Now, there is an unwritten rule that you are meant to work. Also when kids were ill in the past, it meant staying with the sick kid, now it is sitting them in front of a screen while continuing to work.
Isn't remote work awesome?
Anyway, at some point and not during a meeting, she said she was having network issues, which has been thankfully pretty rare since I changed service provider a while ago. So I asked her if she had restarted her computer yet, while I checked my own connection - it wasn't working. Son I reset the router, and it worked again. The reset took about a minute to happen and then all is good. But I wonder if I hadn't been there, would that have happened. Unlikely. Instead of resetting the router, my wife would have connected to her phone connection instead and problem solved. But at the same time, this has happened many times previously, so why couldn't she troubleshoot it herself?
When there is someone else to take care of it, why would she?
This is normal in the workplaces, where people suddenly become useless toddlers whenever there is the slightest issue and are unable to take care of themselves, or take responsibility of anything that is not directly in their job description. Something they would take care of in the home suddenly becomes an insurmountable roadblock in the workplace, or outside of their capabilities. Even simple things like putting a coffee cup into the dishwasher is beyond many people. Instead, they pile them up in the sink until someone finally gets frustrated enough to do it for them. I find it pathetic.
But I think that it speaks to how we have changed as a society. In the past we used to have broader job roles in the workplace and had to take care of more, as well as had to fill in for people who were ill, or help people out that needed a hand with something. Nowadays, there is the expectation that everyone has to take care of themselves in a very narrow role, but anything outside of that role falls into no man's land, grey area. And since it is everyone's responsibility, no one has to do it. Perhaps employment contracts should include clauses like "make sure you put dirty dishes in the dishwasher" and "keep the toilets clean".
Does common courtesy need to be contractually agreed to and signed upon?
Social contracts used to be enforceable through social repercussions, but now that we are so disconnected from each other, and so self-centred, that people don't care what others think of them. There is very little social "shame" in much of society now, so people throw litter on the ground, don't pick up after their dog, shout and scream at strangers, and generally behave like they are the only ones who have right of way. And when everyone believes they have right of way and entitled to do what they want, it causes a lot of conflict.
A network effect is the state of something becoming more valuable the more people use it, like a social media platform. But socially, we are creating a state of network defect, where society is becoming less valuable the more people use it, because they aren't putting anything of value into the network. I believe that while the money is still spinning for now, social networks are losing their value the more AI content fills them. It looks like a lot of activity, but for individual users, it will start to become increasingly useless, meaning the network is losing utility.
I think society is losing users in the sense that many people feel that they no longer have to add value to the network, so the network effect of building a strong society is becoming instead, dysfunctional. Society is contracting in utility because people are abusing the network. Entitlement is a big part of the abuse, where people expect to get what they want without having to do anything much for it. Much like how social respect is earned, people no longer feel they have to earn the advantages of being in society, and as a result, society is collapsing. This is being driven by all the various corporations and their tools that empower people to be increasingly selfish, but at the end of the day, the conditioned user still has some chance of changing their behaviour.
But just like leaving dishes on the sink, once the first is left there, it is increasingly likely that the second will be, and then the third has an even higher chance. Pretty soon, the space surrounding the sink and in the sink is filled with dirty dishes, and no one wants to go through the arduous task of the clean-up.
Society is becoming increasingly cluttered with the filth of humanity, and the more there is, there more there will be, until like extreme hoarders, we are buried under trash, surrounded by rats, faeces and dead bodies. And by that point, we will know that we have failed, that the problem is too big to solve, so we may as well keep on creating trash and sitting in our own filth.
Someone else will clean it up.
Taraz
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