People are dangerous.
People hate change.
But people hate pain.
And if people hate both change and pain, but change is inevitable, does that mean people gonna hate forever?
It’s absurd. But it’s real. And I’m wondering if this is in part why there’s so much rage these days.
We’re changing at such a clip that people can’t get a handle on their hate. So it causes them pain. And anyone who’s seen that video with the Mentos and the Coke knows how that turns out.
Anyway that got me thinking about stuff like bad bosses and how you’re told to do the best job you can but you can’t because you’re prescribed an infuriatingly inflexible framework that takes into account whichever illogical KPI is in force that day, while neglecting stuff like what prospective customers want in their lives.
While we’re at it, why won’t Substack let me embed LinkedIn posts.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6811603243102167040/
In my pitiful podcast at the top of this missive I talked about how most people deride your different. They fear it. Because it infers change may be imminent and as we all know, they hate that.
But if we don’t do different, we calcify. Atrophy becomes our watchword. And who wants to wake up every day like Bill Murray.
I’ll be the first to admit that 2021 is terrifying. I agreed with a care worker on the Jeremy Vine show that none of us know the long term effects of these mRNA vaccines. That tomorrow an algorithm could be born that will destroy our world.
But you know what? We ourselves change a bit every single day. And altogether, every seven years (I don’t suspect for one second that fact is really sciencey but I do believe there’s something to it.
So why should we stress ourselves when it’s happening anyway. We have no control over it. Like visiting a foreign country, a long way away. You don’t not travel because you don’t have your hand on the throttle, or whatever pilots use to get off and back on the ground.
Change is brilliant. Boredom is not. And if we didn’t change all the time, what would everyone have to meditate about?
If change didn’t happen, we wouldn’t have a skyscraper built in literally a day (and literally a few hours more).
So I think my manifesto is pretty clear. Find your support network. Be at peace with the world. And with soft eyes, watch it change.
Build your tower