Myth of Job Retraining

Obviously, each person is born with a particular set of genetically endowed skills and inclinations.  Equally obviously, each person is then shaped by environmental circumstances largely determined by luck (such as native birthplace, or language, or class.) Obviously a person changes over time from experience, fortune, and aging.

Society requires work, which is provided by individuals providing necessary skills to tasks in return for reward _ social, economic, or personal.  Generally,  some work is more important and harder to find people with the correct skills to perform.  The capitalist creed is that such people should be rewarded with more wealth than others who cannot do it.  Economic inequality is seen as a necessary part of that system in which the common good is accomplished.  The individual who does special work must be properly rewarded.

Imagine a static utopia.  Everyone has found their correct place in economic and social society.  The skills of each individual match the tasks which must be done.  Probably, that is a pretty long stretch to begin with, but just pretend it could be so.  Now imagine everything changing.  The highly skilled grow old or die _ a miner who once loaded 16 tons cannot get out of bed, the Olympic star is hobbling around with a cane.  Now imagine that the tasks keep changing, and the coal mines are closed, and the Olympics are reserved for one or two freaks of nature.

Imagine, for that matter, a baseball team.  You have players at the various positions, each of them in the prime of life and valued for special abilities like pitching, fielding, or hitting.  There are older managers and trainers, helping the players to be better; accountants and publicists who assure money comes in from the paying public; owners and suits who keep everything working; lots of “plain old workers” who variously perform security, ticket taking, beer sales.  And, of course, umpires, highly specialized with their own traits and backgrounds.  What happens if a rules change makes, accountants and umpires obsolete?  Can they be moved into the outfield, onto the pitcher’s mound?  Will they become owners or managers?  Or will they get a job at a tiny fraction of their previous pay as beer vendors and gate guards?  Can they be retrained as a pitcher, even if the rules change to allow more pitchers to be used?

Nobody can be “anything they want to be,” even when young.  Special traits _ intelligence, athleticism, beauty, health _ are required for certain jobs.  More than that, nobody can remain what they have become forever _ intelligence fades, the body thickens and slows, beauty rushes off, and health becomes problematic.  The clumsy cannot become agile, no matter how hard they work at it.  Even if there is a great shortage of short men or tall women, striving will not make it so for any individual. 

Reward in a capitalist system is not linked to society, but to economics, which in some magical way supposedly helps society via an “invisible hand.”  And perhaps it is so.  But it is not a completely sane human social system except in a padded ivory tower.  Society runs on a lot more than the exposed edges of its monetary exchanges _ love, trust, honor, and idealism, among many others.  That is obvious, but usually ignored in economic textbooks.  Idealism is only applicable after the invisible hand selects the happy few whose gifts match the job skills rewarded.

As for those poor umpires (and any other older person who watches their jobs vanish) _ retraining is a nasty hoax.  Turning a turnip into an airplane is almost impossible.  Lecturing the turnip that it must become an airplane is simply cruel.

-

I only had to retrain a couple of times in terms of a career.  One was into teaching, which required not only a great deal of social learning and specific child-centered knowledge, but also required a healthy dose of empathy and involvement with groups of people (parents, for example) who were only indirectly related to the daily tasks.  The second, almost diametrically opposite, was computer programming which (those being the early days) I had to learn on my own, but which involved a strange logical single-minded mental attitude, little involvement with anyone else, and a dedication to tasks which were lonely and seemed so strange as to be almost incomprehensible to outsiders.

Each career, in its own way, required constant reevaluation and retraining and ongoing learning.  There was always something new in early childhood education, and computer programming evolved so quickly that it was commonly said that one year was as twenty five in the outside world _ what you knew today was one hundred years obsolete after four years went by.  Each career was demanding and ferocious and took a lot of time, and those who survived developed ways to find strength in whatever rhythms existed.  Nobody could say that switching from one to the other could be made casually.

From experience, for me, I would say each was equally hard.  Yet, in the beginning especially, computer programming was rewarded much better than teaching, for few knew how to do it, few could quite grasp the intricacies required.  Yet by the end, teaching _ protected by unions _ was more valuable as a career than programming _ but not so much if you were young and trying to start.  Nothing, in other words, was simple.

There is no moral here, really.  I retrained at thirty, early enough that a switch in careers was rewarding.  To change equivalently at the age of sixty I think would be impossible.  And in both cases, the universe changed in any case _ work itself, when I was young, was done in a kind of dedicated box, where you left home at home and devoted one hundred percent of your working hours to your job.  Now there are no boxes, and people work from home but also do much irrelevant to their jobs when they are at employment.  That change in the very meaning of job, for me, was something with which I was never comfortable.

Simply, then, from my own experiences, I believe job retraining is possible and necessary when you are young, but much less so when you are older than, say, forty.  I also think that if you are lucky and find a lucrative career when you are less than thirty, you may be able to ride it to a satisfying financial conclusion as you age, but if for one reason or another you miss, or if the need for your particular skill dries up as you grow old, there is absolutely no chance to find something equally economically advantageous.  The idea that a person from forty on is the same as a person from twenty to thirty is the real myth here, and one that should always be kept in mind when discussing job loss and reemployment.

-

 

In Gotham’s fair city

Where the young are so pretty
I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone
As she called on her cell phone
For deals that she had known
Crying “Stocks and financials,
Sell high and buy low.”

(chorus)

“Sell high and buy low, sell high, and buy low,”
Crying “Stocks and financials, sell high and buy low.”

She was an advisor

And no one was wiser
For so were here mother, and father before
And they lived in a penthouse
Quite free of rent house
Pushing  “stocks and financials,
Sell high and buy low.”

The crash took their money

And it wasn’t funny
And Molly could not find another career
So she wheels a wheelbarrow
Through streets broad and narrow
Crying “Hot dogs, knishes,
Come buy, I sell low.”
-

 

-

You’ve no doubt been told that you will have many careers _ three or five or whatever _ and blandly figured ok, so what.  Once upon a time the myth was that you were stuck with whatever you tried first and that was no great thing either, since it is so easy to make a mistake in choice when you really don’t have enough information.  There have been many unhappy professionals stuck in careers they did not much like, it’s kind of refreshing to know there will be other chances.

But the chances, unfortunately, are never equal.  If you hit the gold ring on your first profession you are in great shape.  Your youth and energy and ability to learn and sheer enthusiasm will take you far, quickly, and you may in fact become a master of the universe in your small working universe.  The second career _ less so.  You are no longer quite so young, quite so energetic, a little more cynical.  Not only are there others there ahead of you (who made the right choice earlier and younger) but you have probably accumulated a few obligations of your own over time leaving you less able to pursue advantage with the monomaniacal intensity needed for success.  By the time of the fourth or fifth change you are completely worn out, less capable, and probably won’t be hired by anyone anyway so you need to rely on your business.  Unless you are somehow well off, that leaves only very grim prospects.

The other thing is that within a career there are supposed to be careers, only open to the initiates.  If you get into, say, a technical profession like software or engineering in your twenties, it is assumed that you will transition at some point to either independent consultant or internal manager.  The glide path ought to be fairly easy.  Likewise if you try teaching and become a principal, or flip hamburgers and open a franchise.  This is the myth of apprenticeship and natural progression within a career.  You will find that myth is no longer true.  The rulers seem to always come from outside these days.  And the new rulers hold only contempt for those who have slaved away in one place over time.

The disturbing facts are these:  It is true you will need many careers over your life, because careers themselves are changing, appearing, and vanishing with disturbing frequency.  But, first of all, changing a career is increasingly impossible as you get older.  Secondly, a new career (from your late entry point) will rarely pay nor offer opportunities on the scale of your last one (that is, if you are flipping hamburgers at twenty it is quite reasonable to think that in twenty years you may own the joint, but that is not true if you are doing so at sixty.)  And, finally, no matter what career you pick the jobs once available are increasingly filled by either machine and computer mechanization or cheap relatively unskilled labor where only the best of the best get rewards (basic clerical bookkeeping all but disappeared in the computer revolution, and it is probably that the same thing will happen to surgeons as operations continue to be more routinely computerized.) 

So the nasty basic truth from all this is simple.  The new myth that you will probably go through many careers is quite true.  But the old myth that if you screw up the first one you are in deep shit for the rest of your life is almost equally valid.

-

Jonathan Swift famously proposed that the Irish eat their children, thus solving two problems at once.  We could use him today.  What shall we do with the economically useless?

The economically useless are those, of course, who contribute nothing to the accounts of civilization.  They have always included children, the old, the incapacitated.  They now also contain the untrained, the wrongly trained, the excess whose jobs are now done with machines.  Shall we eat them?  Or will they eat everyone else?

We should stop looking at industrializing England for examples of what to do.  The age of computers is potentially an age of plenty, our models should be the south sea islands and other “primitive” civilizations where the abundance of resources were beyond the capacity of inhabitants to use them.   For most people, there is little joy in work, and for society as a whole, little need for them to work hard.  Certainly some things need to be done, but they can be done efficiently and happily, like the fishing expeditions of the islanders, not like the grim commuters and grimmer corporate titans of today.

Everyone becomes economically useless, eventually.  We die, we grow old.  We may “contribute” by becoming consumers, but it is a grudging contribution.  The wealthy increasingly look for tiny fragments of separation _ eating peacock tongues while the less fortunate eat cake or nothing at all. 

As machines and computers provide wealth, income should go not to those who happen to own machines and computers, not even (as our happy fables go) to those who invent machines and computers, but to the society as a whole.  Adam Smith’s invisible hand is irrelevant.  The world increasingly must consider who gets what, not what gets what.  Such is morality in the new age.

Are you truly economically useful?  And are you adequately rewarded for it?  And what happens when you, or your children, can no longer be so?  These are the questions we should be asking, with more thoughtful answers than Swift’s interesting idea.

 

-

 

H2O

H2O is the uncontested basis of life on Earth, possibly in the universe.  Science describes it by chemical symbols for hydrogen and oxygen, which are its essential parts.  Special bonding provides further physical properties described by valence and state under various conditions of pressure and temperature.

Yes, H2O is water, but only by an effort of translation, like most of science.  Water is something that shows itself variously in brooks, lakes, seas, icebergs, cool drinks, hot coffee, washing bodies or vegetables or automobiles.  Water is what people know, just as the ancients and early man knew it, a slippery and mysterious substance, powerful and weak at the same time, essential and dangerous.

H20 has a different beauty than water.  The aesthetics involved require elegance of mathematical equations and a difficult but rewarding rational and intellectual perspective.  It is not the same beauty as the waves on the shore or storm clouds building on the horizon.  But it is just as real.

That is perhaps why there is a significant disconnect between H2O and water.  H2O, after all, is a chemical, an artificial description of something with real presence in the world.  A glass of water and a glass of H2O may be the same, but carry massively different connotations for most people. 

Consider, then, H2O as the chemical of life.  The universal solvent that can suspend salt as ions, or dissolve other salts.  The power that can push boulders, or erode canyons.  What humans are mostly made of, and the primary consideration  in environmental decisions.  Not too much, not too little, not too hot, not too cold _ the liquid state is necessary.  In science, this is all tied into all the other elements and chemicals and the physics of the universe and the harmony of all is quite profound.

But, H2O is not quite what folks dream of when thirsty, nor seek when dirty, nor long to plunge into when hot.  It can, therefore, represent the complex contradictions and overlays that so confuse modern thought.  Science is a wonderful and powerful thing, but even so it remains somehow separated from the daily experiences of consciousness.

-

My education in the fifties and sixties tended to make me a science guy, for back then the united states believed that hard physical knowledge would be the key to preserving a non-totalitarian world.  Most of the time, it was easier for me to understand the beauty and meaning of H2O than of water.  Chemical equations and repeatable test tube experiments were the only important truths available.

 

Part of the upheavals of the late sixties and seventies was a reaction to that world outlook, which I think was at least partially responsible for wars like Vietnam which we thought could be organized as easily and rationally as Hydrogen and Oxygen.  The counter-culture was an opposition to seeing everything as variations on H2O, and rediscovered water.  I found water in art, in the beauty of seas and waterfalls, which had nothing at all to do with valence properties.  I added my chorus to those who saw clean water as an important human heritage,  and reclaimed our waterways and lakes as more than vast sinks for the universal solvent and its loads of industrial pollution.  It was a different way of thinking.

Maturity has brought me the opportunity to consider both, which gives both complementary and contradictory outlooks and overlays of knowledge and experience.  I understand the beauties of chemical analysis, the clean charts of what H2O can and cannot do,  the magical way it fits into the rest of the scientifically known universe.  But also the equivalent wonder of clouds, and a warm shower, and a cooling iced tea. 

I think those who tell us to simplify our lives are wrong.  We were never meant to be monomaniacal specialists of one point of view.  Even the ancient hunter or skin-scraper would think many thoughts and have many experiences while performing a main task.  We need to know about H2O, when it is necessary and appropriate, but also to revere water, which is everything to our existence.

-

Mathematic model H2O

So different than what we know
As water, complex and serene

Covalent bonds which come and go

Dissolving  salt in eon flow
We watch, not sure of what we’ve seen

Clouds or ice or steam and snow

Waves reflecting sunshine glow
Here and gone as soon as been

Praise for science to find it so

Tell us why and how, although
It’s really water that we mean.

 

 -

You are no doubt one of the modern crowd.  You want food organic and chemical free.  You cringe from fabrics which are not natural.  You fear fumes in the air, tastes in the water, stains in the environment.  And, to some extent, you consider yourself both practical and righteous for doing so.

That is a new thing, of course.  In the fifties chemical concoctions were ranked as major achievements _ clothing made from polyester, plastic Tupperware, food that did not spoil immediately.  Everything modern was modern because it concerned the new chemical wizardry.  Since that was so recently so, it is hard not to believe the current aversion to everything chemical is not simply a fad.

After all, you are nothing but a bag of chemicals, starting with H2O.  Everything you contact and do concerns chemicals, even down to the chemicals firing neurons in your brain so you can think.  To ignore and fear chemicals is to ignore and fear yourself.  People who claim to be eating “chemical free” are simply ignorant and dumb.

Yet, worry about modern chemicals is meaningful.  An excess of anything is a problem, and there is no doubt that for several decades chemicals were far too casually used in massive quantities for everything.  But if you retain ignorance about the real role of chemicals in your life, you are simply prey to anyone who comes along claiming anything.  You will end up poorer, and probably sicker.   So when someone tells you about chemical evil, think a little, research a little, and then try to make a more informed judgment rather than the easy knee-jerk response.  After all, even that knee-jerk involved the chemicals dissolved in the H2O that is really you.

-

Superficially, the ability to turn H2O into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity, and to turn them back to H2O generating energy seems a bedrock indicator of our scientific understanding and control of the universe.   After all, it ends of eons of conjecture about the nature of things, the four elements, the mysteries of ether, the alchemical dream.  Everything modern would seem to be described in the simple fact of our physical mastery, and its complex but complete relation to everything else we can discover in the physical universe.

There is certainly something comforting in knowing we can reconstruct at so basic a level.  No matter how polluted a bit of H2O may be with other chemicals, by means of a simple and straightforward procedure we can make it absolutely pure, even in cases where simple evaporation and filtration would fail.  It gives us a kind of fallback hope that things can not be all that bad if we can do something so marvelous at will.  And yet, that hope is really from the standpoint of our very existence, an illusion.
 

Water (not as H2O but as our commonly encountered life requirement) is everywhere and abundant on Earth, necessary for us to survive.  It resides in streams and oceans and the air and our cells and the lifeblood of all plants and animals.
 

The quantities  of water required  for our existence are far too vast to be decomposed into elements and reconstituted.  The systems of weather and circulation and ecological pattern are far too chaotic and complex to be controlled.  If we lose our water, we will lose ourselves, we will become extinct, along with most of the rest of what we treasure on this planet.  The knowledge that water is “really” H2O could become totally irrelevant and useless.
 

Our hubris makes us think we can fix anything and reverse and process.  That is especially true if we have scientifically dissected bits and pieces of the puzzle.  We think, “oh, anything left is just a matter of scale.  We can figure out how to do that.”  But we can’t.  We are locked in a dream of science that is not real, a dream founded on the dance of electrons and models of H2O, when we must wake up each day for a drink of water,  and be immersed in the rest of the complex hydrosphere where we evolved.

- 

Now, when I was young and first learning chemistry,  a long time ago, the way atoms moved was almost romantic.  Water, for example, was Mr. Oxygen and the Hydrogen twins, a relatively sedate plump gentleman around whom whirled the two flirty and frivolous thin girls (I said it was a long time ago, way before there was political correctness or women’s liberation and anyway, my mind was free and pure.)

Mr. Oxygen would go about his business and the twins just tagged along sometimes here, sometimes there tied by electrons that were kind of like ongoing conversations between them.  The conversations, according to Heisenberg were unpredictable, and this certainly conformed to my knowledge of twins, or, for that matter, girls in general.  If it got very cold, they slowed down and crawled under blankets and turned to ice, and if it was extremely warm, they would rush about on bicycles to get the breeze, becoming steam.  It was all neat, tidy, and certain.  The rest of the elements interacted simlarly, but it was H2O where everything made a kind of absolute sense.

Now, of course, nothing makes absolute sense.  Mr. Oxygen is a complex guy, composed of indeterminate particles and energy clumps, some of which might be here now or anywhere at all in the universe either in the next moment or simultaneously.  Like me, as I age, he is not quite all there.  The twins are all over the place, and exchange freely with other Hydrogen women, trading places throughout the mix, and in fact acting more like swingers than the sedate innocent things I once visualized.  And, in fact, nothing might be there at all and it might only be our illusion of the strings in the substrate matrix that provided the model of the periodic table in the first place.

So easily do hard facts, and imagined models constructed to fit the patterns, slip into metaphysics and a certainty that I could understand the universe.  When I was young,  those many eons ago, I was certain and sure, not only of chemistry but of everything else, and all the world made sense and was perfectly obvious, and anyone who did not see that (and agree with me) was either stubborn or stupid.  Now I have graduated to being stubborn and stupid myself, and I am not certain of anything at all, nor of the use of fables and imaginings in figuring out life. 

So I ruefully let the image of Mr. Oxygen and the Hydrogen twins slip away, like memories of the other picture books I loved as a child, and realize that the world is a complex and unknowable place.  As my parents and the other adults always knew, but as I, like all children, had to discover for myself.

-

 

H2O could represent our symbolic and rational model of the physical universe, elegantly based on mathematical precision and confirmed by exact experimentation.  As such, it is an immense and proud achievement for the human species.  Not only is chemistry invoked, but it also stands at the cusp of our understanding of elements, and the particles of which they are composed, of how energy relates to mass and how energy itself may be chemically applied or generated in the form of convertible electricity or heat or light. 

Beyond that H2O begins he basis of our conception of the universe, cosmic time and the unfolding of stars, deep space and the elements of which stars and planets are composed.  It is at the center of biological investigation, including the evolutionary trails and connections that place us firmly into the ecology of the Earth.  There is little limit to the wonder such contemplation can provoke.

And yet, for all that, H2O is incomplete.  It is not yet water.  It is not yet liquid as we know liquid, cool or moist as we know cool and moist, gentle or agitated or serene as we attribute to rain or stormy seas, or lakes.  There are vast elements of the human experience that deal with water, that depend on various concepts of water _ aesthetic, practical, daily _ that have absolutely nothing to do with chemical composition and everything to do with culture.  We know water as other animals do, as our pre-scientific ancestors did.  We still encounter water, mostly, as we go about our lives and without water we would be less than we are.

This simply illustrates the danger we encounter in specialization.  We are wrong to think that by naming a thing we know the thing, that by mapping a model we trap the reality.  The reality of human experience is water, and our reaction to water, and our interaction with water.  Whatever our rational minds may tell us, whatever our machines may be capable of doing, water is usually more relevant to our being than the flat label of H2O.

 -

 

Staying Disconnected

Nowadays,  hikers in the most isolated and remote places can be instantly tracked by use of a satellite phone.  Everyone lives in the instant always connected, so much so that there is fear when contact is lost.  People have become used to _ addicted is another term _ a constant stream of information from email, cellphone, and various feeds like twitter.

Not long ago, most people sought independence _ from childhood or past or parents.  The goal was to stand alone, to meet the world directly.  Some would travel and lose contact for days, or years.  Of course, some others, as always, never moved more than 20 miles from where they were born.  But wanting to be always part of something immediate seems a change in the American attitude, a diametric opposite of being self-sufficient.

Going somewhere remote or dangerous without means of contact is of course an act of either incredible heroism or deepest stupidity.  What might happen, and how would help be called?  But there are parallel extensions even when personal danger is not involved.  What might happen to the world,  or interests, or family if connection (and possible intervention) is not maintained?  What disasters might be missed, what opportunities lost?

Of course, nobody can affect most of the news _ wars and starvation and disaster in far off (or even not that far off) places.  Mostly nothing learned matters in day-to-day life and decisions.  And the trade off is that if connection must always be available, whatever enterprise requires it is more fragile than it should be.  Even the ancient emperors knew the value of delegation and power autonomy.  Everyone ends up in a kind of modern neurosis of false importance.

In the really old days having a key meant someone was powerful.  Then locks became numerous, and fashion and custom directed that the most wealthy would carry no keys at all (a job for servants) and you could always tell the person with the most keys was the lowest in social standing _ often the janitor.  Maybe connection fads will eventually trend the same way.  Right now, the novelty has not yet worn off.

Soon enough everyone may be tracked habitually anyway, always known, always capable of being found.  Such a condition is beginning already.  Society will adapt, probably by ignoring worry.  After all, if the powers that be want to get you, they always could.  The concept of privacy is more a chimera than real.

Perhaps it would be well, nevertheless, for more folks to try to disconnect a little bit, to become important within themselves and to themselves.  Nothing to pay attention to by the cosmos, inner being, and meditation on beliefs and existence.  There may be strength in being disconnected.  A short vacation from the constant chatter may be rich, useful, and invigorating.
-
I have always been jealous of my own time, always aware that although it seems infinite it is truly limited, and now that I am older I am even more keenly so.  I hate interruptions to moments when I am engaged in profound thoughts,  or enjoying and experiential immersion.

Yes, engagement with the world is necessary, and interaction with society is required to remain sane.  That means that I cannot go around forever with my head in the clouds.  There are chores to be done and things to accomplish and necessities to remaining alive and other tasks that are just expected to be done.  The complex patterns of human existence and life itself do not let anyone retreat into coma and continue for long.

But it is still possible to value those moments when you cannot be interrupted.  Not long ago, that was when you were away from work or on vacation or even doing certain chores.  You could go out of touch for a while and nobody thought anything of it.  I have resisted the trend of constant connection for a long time, I continue to be happy when I am off the map.

Lately, I have begun to be infected by the bug, a little.  When I am the only person spending hours alone in Manhattan or in a state park with no cell phone _ well “What might happen?  How would I get help?  What if….”  It is folly to go somewhere to die because of lack of aid.  And yet _ in all those places I go there are people.  If I get hit on the head and robbed, my only real protection during and after the event are the people around me.  Likewise if I get hit by a bus, or fall with a heart attack on a trail.  It is only in isolation from everyone else (who are, naturally, themselves wired into everything) that I would be in real danger _ and where I live, there is no isolation from everyone else, ever.

-

Ringring, buzzbuzz, chimechime, tweettweet,

In restaurant or home or street
What has happened or could be
Important news affecting me
Far off or near entrancingly
Already past and obsolete
But I must know or possibly
Be lost in flow and fall behind
While others reap and treasures find
Gain advantage purse and mind
It’s late, must rush, oh dear, I see
Too old, I guess I must delete.

-

You probably like the concept of always being aware of what is going on.  What you don’t know might hurt you.   Like all animals, the more aware you are of your environment, the more likely you are to remain in control of it, to use its signals to survive and thrive where others may fail.

The first question, however, is whether any of this constant connection actually makes you more aware of YOUR environment.  The world and cosmic environment is in some ways an illusion _ you can know the exact instantaneous price of a stock and the exact instantaneous news from Japan and yet be hit by a truck you are paying no attention to as you cross a busy intersection.  Much of what comes pinging in on the electronic network _ even from your friends and relatives and employment _ is pretty remote from your actual momentary surroundings.

The second question is whether any of the people you think depend on your constant updates and analysis are actually helped by your constant intervention.  It is important to grow, and the first rule of any robust organization is to make no particular individual indispensable.  Having a single chokepoint for all decisions _ from your spouse or your children or your friends _ puts them in a particularly fragile position _ and if you depend too much on them you are likewise less solid and real.

Finally, there is the question of choice.  If you happily drape the chains of constant interactive communication about your shoulders that is one thing.  If it is forced on you by an organization or by a group or by a nagging feeling of guilt that you might be missing something, that is simply a horrible curtailment of your freedom.

-

The variation in how much people feel they need to interconnect socially provides an illustration of the rich fodder used for imaginative (and probably imaginary) anthropological evolutionary speculation on the origins of human traits.  Of course, it is always obvious that women in most societies seem to be the tribal center, and cluster more or less together, while men spend more time roaming alone or in packs.  So women are typically more social/gossip oriented and the question is mostly whether this is a role forced on them by the social and physical pressures of childbearing, or whether this is an innate wiring of neural difference between sexes. 

Even in those roles, however, there are extremely wide fluctuations, especially when age is taken into account.  There are old hags that like to wander by themselves, and old misanthropic men who do likewise.  There are young men and women who prefer to be by themselves, hunting or doing crafts in a dark workshop somewhere.  There are young men as well as young women who spend each hour surrounded by fellow workers or bar companions.  But _ and here is the interesting but _ all that variation seems to be easily ignored as story telling from the presumed experts comes into play.

Then there are explanations that men evolved to be more alone because they had to leave the tribe to find food.  That women had to band together to protect the young.  That a lone explorer or scout could be valuable to the tribe by finding and communicating information about the environment.  That a socially dangerous individual could become bonded into group strength.  And any of these can have long stories, illustrations from studies of “primitive” societies, extrapolations from the meager siftings of campsites, references to “animal cousins” who seem to have similar behavior.

The thing is, people have always found it possible to explain anything.  The species is composed of master story-tellers.  If not to each other, than each to themselves.  Stories are satisfying, and seem to provide an easy and rational explanation for mysteries.  That does not, of course, make them historically or scientifically true, but they can still be usefully satisfying.  Why people like to be connected as they do _ and why some people at certain times resist being connected _ are just slotted into whatever grand narrative happens to be handy today.

The human race is defined by having few controlling instincts.  Instincts guide learning, but learning defines culture.  Instincts are buried deep in drives that _ by the time they wend their convoluted way to surface behavior _ have no resemblance from one person to another, and no finite explanation for how they become manifested.  So some people love to be connected and interrupted; some people hate to be connected and interrupted; and everyone adjusts to what is necessary and learns to make the best of it _ regardless of what was shaped over eons past and deep in the cauldrons of our infinite neurons.   The fascinating fact is that everyone does actually adapt, and the tribal mob does actually manage to integrate and accommodate individual variation so well.

-

Anne-Helene and Elise spun their webs in the French countryside, which except in travel brochures nowadays looks a great deal like countryside anywhere else.  Of course they spoke spider-French, but since you know neither spider-French nor spider-English, it will all be the same to you.  Anne-Helene was a thoroughly modern spider, keeping up with all the trends of the outside world, while Elise liked to concentrate on the dew of the morning and the clouds overhead and the life generally just around her.  But they had grown up together and were great friends.

Their webs reflected their interests.  Anne-Helene’s was vast and connected to just about everything she could find, including other webs.  It swooped over the yard in great sheets, trying to be ready for anything at all that might wander in.  If she learned something from one of her connections, she would incorporate a new thread to keep track of what was going on over there, as if it might affect over here.

Elise, on the other hand, wove more tightly and in a more restricted space.  She tried to cover one area, and cover it well, so that no insect that came into it escaped, but also so that only insects she actually needed were caught.  In her spare time she sat, and watched, and dreamed.

There were times when Anne-Helene needed to share her food, for the bugs might shift away from the place Elise had prepared.  She constantly told Elise to be more aware, and more open to understanding the effects of what she was learning, about pesticide application in the meadow, changing climate, industrial agriculture.  But Elise only shrugged and said “Eh bien, there is nothing we can do about that, my friend, so why concern ourselves.”

Eventually there was a great storm, with high floods and strong wind gusts, trees falling and destruction everywhere.  Anne-Helene’s huge masterpiece was ripped to shreds and scattered elsewhere.  As the insects returned from their secure hiding places, Elise’s strong little net captured enough food for them both.  And then she said “You see, it is sometimes good to concentrate on what is within our power to do.”

Being French, they developed ongoing and fabulous philosophies based on their convictions, published them and became the leaders of new intellectual movements which caused arguments for centuries to come.  The obvious fact (to anyone who was not French) was that they were both right, and the world of spiders needed both giant fragile webs and tiny strong ones.  Also, being French, they never let their differences get in the way of having a nice drop of wine together in the evening.

-

Being connected may be a hallmark of civilization.  Just as cities allow more connectivity and specialization, and thus foster culture, so might a person become more of a part of society by being  joined to the community.  The  only real question is should there be limits.  How much connectivity, if any, will break a normal human pattern of self-introspection and necessary internal autonomy.

Getting lost in trivial news feeds or updates from outside any reasonable environment may actually be no more than passive entertainment disguised as important data.  What, after all, is the difference between knowing the every thought of celebrities as they eat lunch while walking down the street as opposed to just sitting on a couch and mindlessly accepting that by watching a talking head one is “doing something.”  Only time will tell.

In the meantime, for some people, there is a grand freedom in letting it go, fully disconnecting, escaping from civilization.  That no longer requires trips to Everest or the Amazon or camping in the wilderness (because the tendrils of electronic connectivity reach everywhere), but simply turning off a few switches, leaving a device behind, and roaming nakedly alone for an afternoon or a day.  Perhaps it should be enjoyed while it is still possible _ the future may hold mandatory and permanently implanted connectivity as a necessary requirement of a civilized lifestyle.