Several people have commented on my comment that one day I may stop posting on the website. They’ve also commented about the girlfriend thing, and how negative/apathetic I’ve been in general.
That’s not like me at all. I just need to pick better times to write….things have actually been pretty good lately, and getting better I think.
I think the website will be around for a long time to come. Everything waxes and wanes. Habits, people, work, etc do take up time though. Its always fucking time. Why can’t we ever seem to get a handle on it?
I went to Chicago last week to get certified to teach a class on India, how their world view differs from ours, and how that can affect the workplace. I mention it because one of the points is that Amercans have a very linear view of time, Indians have a more circular view.
We speak about time as if it were a quantity, to be hoarded, spent wisely, parselled, and optimized. What we do now is dictated by what we were able to get done yesterday and will have a profound affect on where we end up tomorrow.
For Indians time is the liquid through which their lives move. It is amorphous and situational….it is not counted, but experienced. The past is important, but the present is forever recurring, and does not bear on the future like for us. Cause and effect can become decoupled in India….what you do today having little effect on where you might be in a few years. It is all determined by situation and relationships outside of your control.
We consider Indians horrible at time management when the fact is that WE are the ones always complaining about time. You’ll never hear an Indian say they are rushed, they don’t need to check their schedule (because they don’t have one), and they are never too busy to stop for a second and smell the roses (or the sewage in the streets, as the case may be). So I guess they seem to manage time pretty well….we are the ones obsessed, but never able to get a handle on it.
And then there is work…I got promoted, but didn’t really care. I got a decent raise, but it only served to offset the benefits they took away from me last year. I’ve actually wandered a good bit about work lately…read some bits of books about some of my favorite subjects (human motivations, incentives, and organizational values), thought laterally while stuck in traffic, researched how much it would take for me to retire today….dreamed up some weird scenarios to get that done, looked into some franchises so I could own my own business and get out from under the finger of the Man, researched some schools to go back to……applied for some jobs, but I will still get nowhere on that because I have “no relevant experience”. Screw those bastards. They are wrong and I am right….they just don’t know it yet.
I am still supposed to “make work better”. That is what all the things I’m good at tell me I should be doing. It is a powerful and scary idea to know what you are supposed to be doing with your life.
I think everyone should, at some time…hopefully soon, be forced to write down in a paragraph or less what they believe in and what they want…short and sweet. The shorter the better, so you can repeat it to yourself….like self-hypnotism. At first it might be long, but keep re-writing it until it makes perfect and obvious sense to you. You don’t even have to do anything with it…..the simple act of writing it will make it come true eventually. I would say it is the one of the single most important things I have ever done.
So I might go back to school too….not because I think I need it, or even to get a job (although I would certainly use it for that), but because I want to think about organizational (company, church, govt, NGO, etc) development and how organizational values and structure force people to behave in certain ways….how we are reaping what we’ve sewn…..how people are neither better nor worse than they have ever been. The situation changes and people do what they must to get by. Change the rules of the game and people will play it differently. And I really believe I would enjoy thinking about that for a year or two….to really start to get my thoughts together.
If anyone is interested in any of the things I mentioned above….get in touch with me.
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Very profound thoughts.
That would be wonderful if you decided to go back to school. You research and thesis would be interesting and worthy. We never had a PhD in the family.
Interesting thoughts about the concept of time with the Indians. They may have it right.
Or it works for them.
You want to pay for school then? Usually tuition is free and sometimes you get a small stipend, but you’ve still gotta live.
I stumbled up your site by someones suggestion. They knew I use findingeden as a handle, alias, or whatever you want to call it. Your postings are interesting, you seem like somewhat of a kindred spirit, not that that is a good thing necessarily, but perhaps it is. It seems like you have a mind to question the systems and functions around you, which to me is good. I think it was Socrates who said the unexamined life is not worth living. As I go about life I get the feeling that these ol’ time thinkers were and are right, most people are asleep. People seem to refuse allowing themselves time for any sort of introspection. The markets just respond to a demand, so if subconsciously people don’t want to think about their lives then the economy begins to produce all kinds of shit to appease the people. Now we have every kind of sedative and electronic divise to overstimulate us then sedate us to the point of nirvanna. We have reached Nirvanna, nonexistence.
You are different, only because there is something in you that perceives around you what others don’t want to perceive; they don’t want to perceive because it means they must respond, they must DO SOMETHING with what they see, and doing something is hard. It is far easier to keep living in mediocrity and a numbness than to feel and have to struggle for something REAl. Its like coming off of a drug, it sucks. People don’t quit heroin not because it is great and life is good on it, but because heroin opens people to some relm where you see things more as they are apart from the vails of our material egocentric society, AND you feel euphoric while seeing it. However the down side I have observed is that as you start to come down you can begin to see all the great selfishness and ills that our society brings. It leaves people not wanting to be onthe drug cause they know it kills them, but unable to live in a world asleep to its on state of being. Really getting high is just a way of trying to deal with seeing the reality of the worlds true state and being unable to find a healthy way to cope with what one has seen. It is hard to be awake and still walk in a society so asleep.
Anyway, keep examining.
I have recently gone back to college at 24, because I want to think and persue the thoughts that come to me. In a sociology class I was just looking at the differences between Japanese and American businesses and the society in general. The Japanese seemed the opposite of America, selfless, group oriented, bound to common goals and lifestyles, but that way has failed the people just as much as the egocentric western buisness ideals have failed all the stock holders of Enron, and the 60,000 GM employees who just lost their livelyhood. It is frighteneing to think about who dictates what society will think and so. I encourage you to explore your thoughts on orginizational values and structures. The world needs thinkers.