Elsewhere

This culture confuses excitement and fulfillment. Fulfillment can’t be mass produced and sold in 30 second increments. It’s not quantifiable. Excitement is much easier to package and monetize, and because it’s not fulfilling, getting a little just makes us want more. We are bombarded by it and our appetite can never be sated and the means become the ends and we end up spending all our time, money, and energy chasing the next high, the next new thing. We’re a nation of addicts. Viva la capitalism.

Part of conscious capitalism is vigilant defense of your mindshare. Just cuz they’re sellin’ don’t mean you have to buy, or even pay attention. Your time, and especially your attention, are the most precious things you own, and the 21st century has made our culture the battlefield to harvest those things from you as much as possible.

The first step is awareness.

listening to music will not fulfill you
watching tv will not fulfill you
watching movies will not fulfill you
playing games will not fulfill you
eating food will not fulfill you
empty sex will not fulfill you
sleeping all day will not fulfill you
buying stuff will not fulfill you

creating will fulfill you
sharing yourself with others will fulfill you
travelling and learning about people will fulfill you
developing trust and nurturing intimacy will fulfill you
making things better, in some small way, wherever you go
will fulfill you

it starts with yourself
but it doesn’t end there
there is always more to do, more to learn, more to give
life is growth and change
things will settle down when you die
until then
seek fulfillment in life
when you are fulfilled, excitement is just a novelty, not a need

it can be harder to rest easy
than to stay on the edge of your seat
as I grow older I find that I favor
the savory over the sweet

Numbers are used as justification when there is no personal relationship.

Think about that for a moment.

If I trust that you’re going to give me correct change, I don’t even count it when you give it to me. Why bother? I trust you. And I trust you because I know you–we have a relationship. I trust that, even if you miscounted and I find out later, you would quickly correct the mistake, with little harm done.

When some stranger gives me change, I count it. We have no relationship; both his competency and his ethics are suspect. Guilty until proven innocent, you might say, but really, most of us have been burned enough times to accept this reality of everyday life. There’s a fine line between openness and naivete.

This concept scales indefinitely. We monitor the finances of corporations because we don’t trust them. We quantify our achievements so that we can prove to some stranger in the human resources department why we deserve a raise. We don’t need to prove that to our boss; she already knows us. But she needs to prove it to them.

With each degree of separation, trust drops dramatically. I trust you, and I might trust your friend, but I might double check them anyway; and their friend, I wouldn’t trust much more than a complete stranger.

Think about how much time and energy is spent on numbers–justifying, proving, defending to people we don’t know. Entire industries, professions, and disciplines within professions are dedicated to it. How much efficiency could be gained if there was a trusted personal relationship instead?

I don’t have any answers or moral message here. I know that life usually gets more complicated than that. Just something to think about.

Dear God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I first remember learning this insightful, elegant prayer at a young age from a wooden inscription hung above the door of a neighbor’s kitchen. It’s been stuck in my head ever since.

Something quite interesting and significant about the second of the prayer’s three parts is the implication that we should change things when we can.

It makes me think of some of my new friends in Austin, including Steve Harper, Asha, and MagnumVox–a self-described “change agent.” That’s a good term. We should all consider whether or not we are acting as change agents, both personally and professionally. (OMG, sorry, but perfect moment to plug Steve’s The Ripple Effect again.)

When I was a boy scout, whenever we’d go camping in the wilderness, our motto was, “Leave it better than you found it.” Pack out any trash you find (even if it’s not your own), don’t trample or otherwise vandalize the area.

Once, in my early teens, someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up. My response was something like, “I hope I never grow up. I hope I never stop growing.”

***

Growth and change are an integral part of life. Life is growth. Without growth, and change, we’d still be a bunch of random chemicals floating around on a primordial planet.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that there is some end-state, some point in time at which everything levels off and they can just comfortably cruise through the rest of life.

Any such security is an illusion, and temporary at best. Just ask anybody who’s lived through the uncertainties and surprises of the past century. The only constant is change.

Would you prefer to be reactive or proactive in dealing with the inevitable changes of life? Which one do you think might bring you more success and happiness?

If you choose to be proactive, you are choosing the path of creativity, in which you attempt to anticipate external changes and also create the changes that you want to see. But in order to create, you must have a vision of what you want, and your vision will be informed by your desires, which are dictated by your values.

That’s a long-winded way of saying, if you want to do more than just survive–if you want to prosper–you must first get down to basics and really figure out what you are about.

Without moral traction, you’re just spinning your wheels. The scenery might even change, but when the screen falls away, you’ll realize you never actually moved.

**

Humanity is a continuum. We inherited this reality from the generation that came before us, and they from the generation before that. Our children will inherit the sum of what we inherited plus the changes we make to it. To proactively manage that change so we can leave a positive legacy, we should:

1) Accept and engage the reality that we have inherited (serenity)
2) Use our vision and creativity to “leave it better than we found it” (courage)
3) Continually grow and refine our awareness to find the best balance between the two (wisdom)

***

As a mental “cheat sheet”, just remember: VISION, ACTION, and FAITH are the fundamental pillars of successfully creative behavior. This is my own personal paradigm which I’ve developed within the last year or so. I’ve been wanting to blog about it for a long time. Consider this a teaser. It might not be tomorrow, it might not be next week, but… sometime soon. I’m a little busy with the ACTION part of it at the moment.

Here I use the term technology in a very broad sense to mean any skill, technique, or body of knowledge which is intellectual rather than instinctual and improves human productivity; for example, language, religion, and agriculture were some of the earliest technologies; internal combustion engines, democracy, computers, psychology, and quantum physics are some more recent examples.

The promise of technology is to give us the tools we need to transcend mere physical survival so we can focus our time and energies on higher purposes (which are, as of yet, undisclosed to us, except in subjective beliefs).

We are in a race against time, however, to improve and refine our technologies to the point where they are indefinitely sustainable. The resource consumption and infrastructure necessary to support our current technologies cannot be sustained — and we are already feeling the negative consequences in very tangible ways (hurricanes, heat waves, etc.).

But this is not to say we should abandon technology; in fact, we couldn’t even if we wanted to. We’re simply wired for it. We passed the point of no return when we developed opposable thumbs. The trick is to advance to the point of sustainability before we burn ourselves up.

What should we be working on to reach true sustainability? Art, spirituality, politics, science, culture? All of the above, of course, because they are all technologies with complex interactions.

Personally, I’ve got a special preference for information systems and digital media because I think it’s the most unique tech of our time with the highest return on investment as it accelerates improvement in all other technologies simultaneously. I also have a penchant for spirituality and personal growth technologies that allow individuals to maximize their positive contributions to the world.

“Life in the so-called space age“, the semi-ironic sub-title of this blog (and lifted from a rather good and underrated album by God Lives Underwater, who apparently lifted the phrase from the booklet of Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration — fun trivia!), reflects this theme of a technology-centric life, working to get us a little closer to technology’s ultimate promise — while trying not to kill ourselves in the process.

I heard someone mention it on TV the other day — “Youth is the engine of the world.” Apparently this phrase can be credited to Matisyahu, though I haven’t heard his music yet. (Just added it to the list of things to check out, though.)

The truth of the phrase has stuck in my head. Teenage angst is not just a hormonal thing, it’s also the result of innocent idealism crashing into the vagaries of the real world. It’s the purest reflection of the values we teach children conflicting with the values we are actually living, before “maturity”, with its practical goals and responsibilities, catches up to them. It’s vitally important to pay attention to teenage culture as it’s often a truer commentary on the state of our society than anything else. (Marilyn Manson understood this too well.)

All of the following things, in my brain, are connected:

• The independent spirit and authenticity of entrepreneurship, as witnessed at South by Southwest
• The civic-mindedness and involvement inspired by Second Life (see Eric Rice’s blog for more on this)
• The concepts of free culture and intellectual property espoused by Lawrence Lessig
• Open Source software
• Creative Commons intellectual property licensing
• Social software and democratic media, ala blogs, del.icio.us, shadows.com, ad nauseum

It has long been my belief that we need new paradigms–social, spiritual, economic, and political–to deal with the demands of the information age without losing our humanity, and I think it’s starting to happen. A movement is coalescing, though still embryonic. These are exciting times.

The Los Angeles Times is running a story about USB flash drives, containing secret U.S. military intelligence information, sold at an Afghanistan bazaar.

As I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, I wonder just how accidental this “leak” really is. Strategically placed information–and especially disinformation–is a powerful art. Also see this Los Angeles Times article about the political art of information leaks (free reg. required).

I’d like to think that our proud nation’s intelligence elite are a little more knowledgable about asset management and security than this would lead us to believe…

Trusting                                    Cynical
[------------------------|------------------------]
“Naïve”                                    “Clever”

Where are you on this scale?
How about your friends, family, the blogs you read, or the people you admire?
How would you describe the middle–the balance?

Signs, synchronicities, serendipity, fate, destiny, yada yada. Some people poo-poo these concepts because, they say, it is a selfish and egocentric worldview. “The world doesn’t revolve around you, you know.”

I say, the world revolves around all of us. I believe that the universe is big enough, complex enough, and crazy enough, that every single person, fish, and rock has a destiny, a plan, a story, all of which are interwoven to create this fabric of reality that we experience. And some courses of action are more in harmony with the universe than others; if one is open to and aware of the signs and synchronicities occuring around them, one can sometimes discern, and, with practice, develop an instinctual gut feeling for navigating the forks in the path that every decision in every moment brings.

No, I can’t prove it. But can you disprove it? Enter: faith. It’s a lot more fun than nihilism, I’ll tell you that much.

Everybody is all excited about April 5, 2006, 1:02:03 A.M. because of the consecutive numbers in the date-time string (in the subject of this post). “It will only happen once in our lifetime!” they exclaim.

Bullhonkey, says I. It just depends on the notation you use. Europeans think that we’re talking about May 4, 2006 (rather, 4 May 2006). And as a coder and data manager, I represent that date-time as 20060405010203. Nothing too special about that.

Personally, I’m looking forward to 20060708091011 (August 7, 2006, 9:10:11 A.M.). Or maybe 20060504030201 (May 4, 2006 3:02:01 A.M.). Whatever.

I guess what bugs me is that the American date notation has never made sense to me. Since the month falls between the day and the year, logically, why do we note it first? My theory is that it dates from agriculture and farmer’s almanac times, when the month–and season of the year–was the most important piece of information. But just because it’s a standard doesn’t mean it’s right. So phooey on that, I’m starting a grass roots movement to get American date notation into the 21st century–or, at least, in-line with everyone else in the world. Who’s with me!?