​Coming To Attention!

 

Life comes at us from all directions. The nitty-gritty of daily living demands our primary attention, earning a wage, satisfying the boss, meeting a partner’s needs, raising the kids when it’s your turn to show up and be a parent. Then there is the job of keeping up to date with all you need to learn just to do all that. It’s a wonder we take the time to eat and sleep. When do we pay attention to what is going on all around us outside the narrow horizons of our lives? Shouldn’t that be an important element, what we do to impact the larger picture, in determining our fate even though our direct effect on events is often very small? And yet what is going on around us can have an impact on us that can be very large.

I am in a very different place right now, having in many ways opted out of the typical “rat race” at this stage of my passage. Being retired allows me a perspective on the position most of the human race is in making their way through life. I marvel at how people in the midst of all that can handle it. It’s no wonder that some of us get “shell-shocked”. It’s a tribute to the resilience of humans, faithfully putting one foot in front of the other without giving it so much as a second thought. I can empathize with many of you finding the going a little rough. I have had my share. There were times, even years, when I never lifted my head from the tasks before me. I now begin to appreciate that it is a wonder so many of us survive the process with a whole skin. We were just programmed to keep on keeping on.

Looking back, I realize that from time to time I must have lifted my head from my focus on the trail in front of me. Every few years I radically changed my profession, and went off in a different direction. I must have come to attention, and concluded that, for one reason or another, circumstances in the wider world were dictating that what I was doing was no longer appropriate for me. That tells me that coming to attention and surveying the landscape around us is absolutely an imperative part of living the lives we lead. Yet, doing the familiar is so comfortable, so hypnotic, that some real discomfort must appear to awaken us from our trance.

For me, I always had an interest in what was happening in the wider world. I didn’t much read books during my working years, but I was a news junkie. There was always something in the news that was enraging me. Being Jewish, I came to the scene with the attitude of an outsider. Feeling picked on by the general society, with an indoctrinated background dictating right and wrong for me, there was always plenty of stuff in the news to enervate me. So perhaps I was not typical, and my antennae were always tingling. Maybe that was why I was so ready to jump from one thing to another when I encountered discomfort.

Fast forward today and to what is going on in the present scene. Things are happening so quickly to change our societies that it is breathtaking. Every day I realize that I am becoming more and more obsolescent. I have an interest in the stock market so I am always on the prowl to find new ventures where my attention might lead to profit opportunities. A week does not pass without my discovering whole new areas of business venture already well established. Where was I when all this was happening? Asleep at the switch was where I was.

What about our working people relying on their jobs of longstanding to carry them until retirement? We all know what happened in the rust-belt areas of America, jobs that went and never came back. We know that innovation is threatening the status quo now over wide swathes of our economies. Politicians and business leaders talk about efforts we must make to mitigate these effects, and bring back jobs. And every day we hear of thousands of job losses, most recently from the impact of on-line buying, and ride-sharing. But we have yet to see any concrete action to respond to these events because we do not have the answers. What I have been hearing more of is that basic income payments will be required for those displaced, putting large numbers of people on the dole. Who is going to pay for that? Some of those people coming back to the job market after COVID are insisting on higher wages as the price. Labor costs have risen.

Well, now, what about our young people? What do we tell them? Everybody cannot be an engineer, an electronics expert, an internet whiz. These days all our young people have to come to attention in the face of the rapid change we are facing. They need to have their heads up all the time. They may not have the luxury we enjoyed of getting an education and just going with that. They will have to be re-training all the time. They will have to be aware of how the changing waves of innovation are altering their prospects on much shorter time horizons than we enjoyed, or their parents enjoyed. Our social engineers have not even begun to draw up the plans we will need to cope with our presents, much less our futures.

AH-TEN-SHUN!

 

--

 

 

--