stability // speed // seniority (learning curves)
I did a little lap around Brigid's Mantle today AKA the Chillest Labyrinth du Monde AKA our backyard, and maybe it was the grass overgrowing the path's border stones, or the grass overgrowing the central firepit, or the grass overgrowing the Opera House,,, but I started feeling overwhelmed.
I got to thinking about learning curves, and how my marriage failed not strictly because of lack, but because we took on too much too quickly -- new vows, new careers, new parenthood, new state, new climate, new responsibilities as first-time homeowners -- and didn't account for the learning curves.
(...or how there's a meta learning curve in learning how to field learning curves as a team...)
The grass grew faster than we could mow.
I think about this a lot in the context of generational gaps & technological development.
In the wisdom cultures I admire, one consistent trait is a high esteem if not ritualized deferral to the Elders. It makes sense beyond the (worthwhile) notion that later years of life should include something to look forward to ::: our seniors actually have the most data. They have real life experience. They've survived disillusionment. They've seen stuff play out over time.
But when we're constantly tweaking the essentials of society -- how we communicate, how we shop & pay bills, how we track time, what words are ok or verboten -- it's not setting our elders up for successful leadership, and that to me is the loss of an unspeakable asset for the culture as a whole, nevermind for each of us who plans to one day be old.
The assumption behind our current techno-utopian economy is, If we can make a product or process 'better', do it and do it as quickly as possible before somebody else does.
But better for whom?
Usually a) people who stand to make money off constant release of new features / expanded bureaucracy, and b) consumers who have the biological bandwidth to absorb serial learning curves without cognitive fatigue.
This is how youth culture, capitalism, and "high" tech go hand-in-hand exalting a materialist logic that, ironically, discounts the reality of the body ::: being that, humans have developmental stages, and in youth our nervous systems are mainly gathering information about what planet we're on -- exploring, testing boundaries, flexing our fitness -- but for neuro-efficiency reasons, this stage doesn't last forever. Sure we're always learning and it's on us to stay adaptive, and yes some people are genetically gifted and seemingly forever young, but outside of intellectual idealism, nature does have limits. Or at least, reliable trends.
And typically, at some point as we age, our bodies expect to feel like, 'OK, I'm oriented in this world, now I'll be an adult in it' -- but it's nearly impossible to embody that when the agreements of the culture are perpetually changing... At an exponential rate... In reverse correlation to our speed of bioelectric processing. Or Qi, or whatever it is we know we're using up as life goes on.
So for me, the benefits of 'innovation' that we laud don't yet account for their exclusionary downsides (though I do believe we / the youth are sincere in our desire to leverage tech & democracy in the creation of a more just & inclusive society), and that needs to change, because what we are hemorrhaging here is wisdom itself.
Novelty, novelty, novelty!
I get it. I get the appeal. I'm a TV baby, I want my flash-bang-boom.
Especially in a world where every molehill has been mapped from space & most magic is flash-boiled for shelf life, I want some dopamine dumps, too. I like to feel smart & connected using the latest lingo and I -- well, actually I don't like downloading the newest apps or updating my software every ?? weeks ... I honestly feel all the benevolent digital elaboration is inducing a new strain of (emotional) dementia that we're just calling 'anxiety' and normalizing as part of the human experience -- when really it's specific to cultures that presume complexity = supremacy.
So I grieve for the legitimate authority that can't grow under this canopy of constant change.
I grieve for the pysche of children born into timelines where no one seems to know what's going on.
I grieve for the Gen Z's who haven't yet realized that old people are not 'others' -- they are us at the end of our lives. Us when we naturally long to lead, and leave a contribution.
I'm not sure if this energetic traffic jam can be corrected through self-restraint. I sometimes wonder if we'd like regulation in our tech market that considers the psychoemotional 'side effects' of these products, or at least some standardized timeline for evaluating their impact overall. Such legislation could be seen as holistic leadership, or it could be seen as fascism.
Anyway. I walked by Ballymor and saw that this last storm finally blew down the overarching branch that had been holding up the others. I'm honestly surprised it lasted this long -- when I first dug it in, I expected it to fall after a day. And then it started to amaze me, and then I started to assume it'd be a bummer when it finally fell. But actually -- it looks just as good leaning on the ground.