50: Trust and Curiosity

What a curious time in life. Those of us at the end of the baby boomer generation, we are all at this point: we have understood that our life time is finite - the limit of the time horizon is now in sight. Those of us who had kids are growing out of the parent role, the jury still being out on whether or not we managed to steer the next generation to where they need to be for themselves and for the world.

Those of us who had passions and professions are in a review period. Can we go on working this hard for another decade or more? Or maybe the economic system has changed, and our business models and value systems don’t work anymore.  But how figure out what is next, how to reinvent ourselves?

Some of us are utterly lost. What do we do after kids and without that business model? If you haven’t had kids, how do you create something that lasts beyond your time? Too late to build a house or write an opera?

And then, our parents are getting old, or sick or dying. Many of us are inheriting wealth we didn’t earn from this much more successful generation before us.  Others are sandwiched between fledgling children and aging parents, or inheriting an economic or real estate mess, apartments full of books. What if your parents became demented before you could forgive them for their screw-ups?  Now they need you and you haven’t even found the peace to love them. I am seeing it all around me.

I see a lot of desperation, sadly, especially among men.  Self-hatred. The feeling of having wasted time, either having done the same thing for too many years, or doing too many different things without real focus or depth. Unemployment,  boredom, doubt, loss, alcohol. Teenage kids glued to little screens, farther and farther from the reach of our love.  Do we still matter for anyone?

The good news: we know what we know, we know what we are able to do, and we know what we don’t want. For some of us, long-term partnerships have not survived this life phase of contemplation and change…. and we rediscover who we are just by ourselves. Not too bad. The big dream has died, but the little dreams live on.

We have 15+ years of productive time left. Enough time to do something different, learn one new thing, try one new system, change location. A few (lucky ones), manage to fill the remaining time, keep riding the same professional wave to the end, chin up, and gather applause on the way out. 

More good news: those who don’t have self-doubt, and are not lost or desperate, not on a wave petering out, actually may now reach a calm sense of positive expectation, resting on two pillars: trust and curiosity. I think, at this point in our lives, we cannot ask for more than to base our lives on a healthy mix of those two sentiments.  Trust in ourselves and in our abilities, and our judgment, and in the basic goodness of the world.  Curiosity about what gifts will come our way, and who will be there with us to enjoy them, and what we can make out of them.  

My gifts are so many now: my children, who are turning into amazing sensitive and sensible people, my parents, who get older and weirder, yet I am learning to love them and enjoy them in new ways, appreciating every minute I have with them. My work, which is ever changing and rich with learning and a team that is growing together and working in sync, in ways I didn’t even know existed.   New and old friends who provide comfort, companionship and love, and with who I can look into the darkness and into the light, as we hold and support each other. Stepping out into the night, breathing the cool air and hearing the rustle of the trees, feeling that I have had it good. 

50. I couldn’t think of a better age.

Uneasiness

P.S. to the last post on dysfunctional governments: The Italian government didn’t dissolve, apparently reason prevailed and Berlusconi’s former allies are starting to defect from his agenda. Also, this week Italians were dealing with the aftermath of the terrible drowning deaths of hundreds of African immigrants near the Sicilian coast.

The Germans are still negotiating (the terms of the coalition for their new government). Everyone is sort of bored with the whole thing by now.

The US government is of course still shut down, and now threatening to plunge the world economy into another financial crisis by defaulting on its debts. Contrary to the smug observations that the world isn’t ending without the government, innocent little children are affected. So now US billionaire oil philanthropists are being lauded for stepping in by throwing 10 million to emergency-fund Head Start. One step closer to plutocracy.

Meanwhile some people are questioning the overall functionality of the US political system, and wondering if a European style parliamentary system with less separation of powers might not be more efficient. I think the question is moot. What ails American democracy is not the separation of powers. Sure, this system is what makes the political process vulnerable to gridlock. But the gridlock occurs because those elected to office are now guided by those who pay their campaigns, and no longer by the electorate. As a result, they have forgotten their oath to uphold the laws (including the Affordable Care Act) of the United States. And instead they work to undermine them, make them unworkable, to then argue, correctly, that government doesn’t work. It reminds me of the strange logic of the virus that kills its host, and then perishes itself.

I do have to say that in a parliamentary democracy, in light of prolonged dysfunctional government such as currently in the US, someone would by now have issued a vote of no confidence, dissolved the existing government and initiated early elections to start over. If the elected people don’t have their shit together, lets’ fire them and start with new ones. It doesn’t always work, but it sure puts on a little pressure.

This P.S. ended up being much longer than planned. This post was supposed to be about something else: Discomfort and preoccupation with where the internet is going, increasingly evident in conversations on- and offline. As I observe this, I am grouping these collective feelings and thoughts into two larger groups:

The first is discomfort with social media and what techno-consumerism does to people. This video in a somewhat oversimplified, pseudo-scientific art school end of the year project kind of way describes how being “connected” makes people lonely, allegedly.

The second has to do with the invasiveness of internet tech companies, and the whole lack of privacy thing that just snuck up on us. We always knew that e-commerce companies were surveilling our consumer behavior, and sending us ads based on what we search for and what we like on facebook and what we read on twitter. Now we also know that the US government is surveilling every single communication we are having online.

The two discomfort groups are related: the interconnectedness of your social media platforms with each other, and with your email, with GPS and with e-commerce sites has already created a world in which nothing is private anymore, not what you eat, what you read, who you love, who you communicate with and what you say to them, what you purchase, and where you are and have been at any moment in time. Google will now show your name and profile in an ad next to an item that someone might purchase, if you have shared or +1’d that item. It sounds like a small thing, but is just an example of how you do one little thing online and it has reverberations in 17 different other virtual places. No conspiracy theorist or science fiction author could have thought of a more sinister system of observation.

The discomfort is shared by people from all arenas: 

Journalists - Roger Cohen, in one of the last issues of the International Herald Tribune (and btw, what is up with that - The International New York Times, really?)  last week wrote about his fear to lose touch with the “real” things and felt experience. "Echt" in German means real.

We have an "echt" deficiency these days. Everything seems filtered, monitored, marshaled, amelioreated, graded and app-ready - made into a kind of branded facsimile of experience for easier absorption. 

Funny. I read this in the "real" IHT, purchased at a newspaper stand in Certaldo, Italy. Now I can't link to it, because the newspaper doesn't exist anymore online. 

Frank Schirrmacher, editor of the FAZ also has written extensively about "das digitale Ich” - this other person out there, that is sort of you, but you are not really in control of it anymore. And its identity is relentlessly exploited commercially and for secret intelligence.

Politicians - the German president (and no, it’s not Angela Merkel, remember, parliamentary democracy… our president is the head of the state with no political power but a figure with high moral integrity and authority), Joachim Gauck, spoke about this new age in his much-quoted speech on October 3rd (the German National Holiday aka Day of National Unity). Gauck praised the innovation, progress and possibility of the internet. But he also warns we have not thought about the consequences enough. Then he makes the link to German history:

Ausgeliefertsein und Selbstauslieferung sind kaum voneinander zu trennen. Es schwindet jene Privatsphäre, die unsere Vorfahren doch einst gegen den Staat erkämpften und die wir in totalitären Systemen gegen Gleichschaltung und Gesinnungsschnüffelei so hartnäckig zu verteidigen suchten. Öffentlichkeit erscheint heute vielen nicht mehr als Bedrohung, sondern als Verheißung, die Wahrnehmung und Anerkennung verspricht.

Roughly translated: There is no line any longer between involuntarily exposure and self-exposure. Citizens’ privacy from the state, which our ancestors have fought for to combat totalitarian spy systems, vanishes. Public exposure is no longer viewed as a threat, but as a promise for being noticed and recognized.

Gauck goes on to say that your digital “twin” makes you transparent, calculable, exploitable and manipulable ( I know, that’s probably not a word).

Writers - Another,  manifestation of unease includes Dave Eggers recently released book “The Circle”, and many of the reviews and the reactions to it. Guess what, one person even quit all social media for an entire week after reading the book. 

And finally, another great American author, Jonathan Franzen, just published a new annotated translation of the works of Karl Kraus, influential early 20^th century satirist from Vienna. Franzen discovers that Kraus’ disdain with modernity back then mirrors his own angry rejection of techno-consumerism now. And does he go on about it in this essay published by the Guardian. And then he got a lot of pushback from online commenters.  

The historical perspective illustrates that this debate has been going on forever, is probably as old as humanity: on one side people worried that the manifestation of progress, modernity and the related new forms of communication specific to their time and age are the end of everything, or the end of whatever they hold dear - literature, silent films, letter writing, conversations over coffee, music that the composer is paid for, etc., etc. (These folks are often called Luddites, which is stupid, because they are not destroying anything.) And on the other side the people who engage in new forms of communication, profit from it, enjoy it and are part of, or born into the new culture. In 1964 Umberto Eco described the actors of this cultural division as the apocalyptics versus the integrated.

But then there are those of us who feel in between the two. Those on the fence. So Google “thinks” it is the best thing since sliced toast, that my email, google+, where I am located, and my blog are all connected. I think it is sort of convenient, when it works, but it’s also creepy.  Technology has moved forward, as many times before in history, but our ethical and moral thinking and subsequent rule-making has not caught up.

Being on the fence, I don’t have answers, only questions:

Does technology serve to reinforce what is already evil in our society and economic system? Or has it become an evil force in itself? Can technology, progress, innovation ever be neutral? (answer: no)

Is this time and age really as revolutionary as we think? Or are we freaked out/enthusiastic (take your pick) victims of "Gegenwartseitelkeit"? Who's not exited to live in sea-changing times. But how much of this great new world will still be significant 100 years from now? 

Or are we simply using new tools for the same ends?  Tom Standage  just published a whole book about the parallels between modern and historical social media. 

More pragmatically: Are the big shots of the internet – Google and the social media companies - going to address the privacy concerns of their consumers? Or are they going to barrel on, just losing the concerned folks on the way as they choose to drop out of the whole thing?  Or in other words, will there be a space in between, where you can take advantage of the internet as information source, communication and business tool, and still maintain privacy and control? Is the US government going to change its surveillance practices?

And on the other side, are people, the “users” going to self-teach a sensible practice of social media? Michele Filgate, the woman who quit facebook (which, I think, might just be slowly slipping through the bullshit filter of history, dropping down there with MySpace) and twitter for a week is back on, but she created some new rules for herself – to preserve her non-digital self, and her relationships.

I’ll quote the German president again:

Wie noch bei jeder Innovation gilt es auch jetzt, die Ängste nicht übermächtig werden zu lassen, sondern als aufgeklärte und ermächtigte Bürger zu handeln.

As with every innovation yet, we have to not let fear take over, but we have to act as enlightened and empowered citizens.

Goodbye facebook.

I deactivated my facebook account. I don’t want the shallowness of social media to define my relationships with people.

In conversations over the last few days, people have pointed out to me how it’s nice to “stay in touch” and see photos people post – I do not disagree. Maybe I’ll look for a photo sharing platform to post our images.

Staying in touch is not a bad thing either, but is it all that valuable or important? Do I really need to know what each of 372 people think, feel or do every day? That someone watched a TV episode, or baked a cake, loves her husband, found a good quote (that most likely the referenced person never said) or a cute photo and hates racists/stupid people/Miley Cyrus/Obama/take-your-pick? I really do NOT need to know all this. And reading your posts does not further my well-being, intelligence or who I am in the world. Nor does it connect me with the real you.

Before I disconnected, I had this really creepy sensation that we are all creating this pseudo-reality (and I was doing it, too), this image of ourselves that we present on facebook. We walk through our real life and think stuff like: Should I post a picture of our beautiful new trash cans (four different colors to distinguish the recycling categories) on FB so my American friends can see how real recycling works? Yuck. I didn’t want to think this way any more. The creepy feeling was that we are all involved in some collective mass hysteria, with pseudo emotions and pseudo political opinions, and we are all buying this bullshit from each other, by clicking ‘like’. Sounds crazy? Maybe, but I felt such deep discomfort, that I immediately disconnected, without thinking about it further.

Many people were surprised….but don’t be personally offended. I appreciate (note I did not say ‘like’ - the meaning of that word has been forever altered) each of the individual people I was connected with (the word ‘friend’ has been hi-jacked, too). No one in particular offended me… however I gotta tell those of you who change their profile pictures more than a couple times a year – you have a problem, and your narcissism annoys people. I hid your posts a long time ago.

So those of my real world friends who want to stay in touch can do that - and more (as in, actually have a conversation with me) through email and phone and skype. Those here in Berlin can come see me, too. I will build and mindfully nurture real relationships. I will continue this blog, because writing longer pieces provides the opportunity for depth of thought and good writing – something lacking largely from facebook.

I’d like to get some opinions on this from my readers and friends – not on facebook but in the comment function of this blog!