Dear Jessica Brennan,
I heard a speaker today. The intention was that he would motivate the group he was speaking to, but I didn’t feel very excited by the end of it.
He was telling us all about how the world is going faster and faster, and it is no longer okay to try to catch up, or even to be ahead of the curve. Now you have to be inventing something beyond the curve. I started to tense up.
He listed statistics as long as my arm about how five year olds today are going to have jobs when they grow up that we haven’t even thought of yet. I felt nervous.
He said that now if you go to university to study a particular discipline, by the time you graduate, you will need to upgrade. I could feel my heart rate quicken.
He talked about social media and how each platform has lost its cool-factor almost before it gets launched. Most of these newly uncool platforms, I hadn’t even heard of. I felt sad and left behind.
He said, we should be disrupters.
It was almost lunch time and I started to feel nauseous. “If this anxious stomach doesn’t calm down, I might be really disruptive,” I thought.
I decide to tune him out. I wondered if I would recognize what was on my lunch plate or if in the time that had lapsed between morning break and noon, there had been an entirely new protocol created for nutrition. Maybe the servers would be robots, or maybe we wouldn’t need to eat at all.
I don’t doubt that he knew what he was talking about. I’m sure in business he’s a genius. But in life I don’t think you can apply the same principles. Your business might need this but your adrenal glands do not. Your nervous system does not, nor do your friends and family.
“I’d like to go to the park with you kids, but… not time. I need to start anticipating that you’ll be in university in fifteen years taking a soon-to-be-obsolete-subject I’ve not heard of yet?” Hmm.
Will we become a species that never settles into anything again? Will we ever master any craft, or will we just abandon it and speed on to something else? I imagine us all popping anti-anxiety meds, clawing over top of each other, pushing everyone out of the way in order to maybe get a moment ahead, only to wash back into a sea of angry, sleep deprived jerks. It’s not really that unlike the 80s, just faster clawing and more jerks. This motivational guy was really depressing.
Love Mum
xo
Can we not just relax and enjoy the moments that life has to offer. It’s good to think of the future, but for some people the future never comes, so be sure to enjoy today for what it is. 🙂