Cycles of Life
patrick — Mon, 2009-04-27 14:17
I'm sorry for waiting so long to type this up. I've been thinking about this for a while and something that happened this weekend prompted me to sit down and type.
Recently I was able to talk to an old high school friend of mine. We discussed what we'd been up to since the last time we'd talked and while it lasted longer than it should have (got to love questions for detail and then complaints about the discussion lasting too long ;)) we discovered that both of us had been going through some crap at about the same time. He thought my ordeal was worse, but on the flip side I wouldn't want his troubles.
The question he asked of me though was, did you ask God why you were going through all of that
. As Phillipe [Matthew Broderick] said in Ladyhawke, ...the truth is I talk to God all the time...
. On the other side of that I never asked about my ordeal - the part that bothered me wasn't necessarily getting fired, it was that someone I trusted stabbed me in the back due to their insecurity about their job. Either it was my fault for being too trusting (this isn't the first time something similar has happened) or God was simply reminding me that people are human.
However, I think what my friend was more worried about has been my erratic career
. I think the best thing my consulting career has taught me thus far is that no job is permanent
. And looking back to several times when my dad was worried about his own job, even government jobs are not secure
. Plus, I'm not sure that my goal has ever been to have a safe, secure, permanent job so it's not been something I've worried about.
We should all be familiar with the basic principal of the circle of life. We're born, we consume, we die, and are consumed. Everything in nature has it's part to play in the circle of life.
Let me diverge somewhat and bring another ray of light to bear on my thought process here. This is greatly generalized in order to take in the history of mankind as well as, on a separate level, each human.
At a young age baby's seem to have no perception of things not within their field of vision. In this way it is seen that the baby is the center of the universe and all things revolve around the baby.
As humanity grew older it realized (or at least some of us realize) that the world does not revolve around us. But we, as the gods' chosen, the divine, or that it's just plain obvious... The rest of the galaxy must revolve around our planet. While we as individuals are not as important to have everything revolve around us, our planet must be overly important and therefore this reasoning - it still made us feel as though the galaxy still sort of revolved around us.
Growing even older we realized this falsehood and recognized that our planet is just 1 of several planets that revolve around the same sun. Oh well, perhaps we were trying to be too self important. Everything doesn't revolve around our planet, but at least the rest of the galaxy revolves around our sun. Surely our solar system is the center of the galaxy.
And then as we grew even older still we come to find out how insignificant we truly are. Not only is our solar system not the center of the galaxy, but we're way out in the fringe of a flailing arm of a whirlpool as the milky way galaxy spirals through it's life. Oh well, at least ours is the only galaxy in the universe.
Oh, we're not the only galaxy in the universe? Well, at least ours is the only universe...
Space and time continuum, multiple universes, multiple dimensions, etc.
Our dimension is supposedly just an accident that occurred when 2 other dimensions collided. And yet in this dimension, even with the few galaxies we've already discovered in our universe, I'm quite sure there are several more galaxies we've yet to discover and most probably several universes each with it's own multiple galaxies within this sliver of a dimension.
Our sliver of a dimension is part of the circle of life and has meaning. It was born, it is consuming, it will die, and it will be consumed.
What people forget however is that the circle of life is also cyclical. Life requires the cycles of spring, summer, fall, and winter. Each year forms a circle and we're back to where we started the year before. This cyclical is easy to see because it happens in a short enough period of time that our short lived memories can remember that this cycle does exist.
However, there are larger cycles that we don't see or aren't normally aware of. 100 year floods and 1,000 year floods are larger cycles, are very general approximations, and most of us may only live to see 1 of these. Halley's Comet I saw when I was 11 years old (1986) and hope to see again when I'm 86 in 2061, a cycle of 75-76 years, which I will be very lucky if I'm able to share it again with my parents.
There are yet other cycles to our lives, some of which we don't necessarily see as a complete circle, but may refer to as pendulums. There is still a cycle to these as they repeat and can be predicted. Some of these cycles are overly drastic to a point where they require a complete paradigm shift.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.-- Albert Einstein
We are currently experiencing a drastic economic paradigm shift. People are panicking because their jobs, divinely
handed to them by overly large corporations, are in jeopardy. When the age of Kings and Queens, who divinely
handed out parcels of land and protected the peasants, came to an end people were panicking and rightly so. Such chaos and paranoia would follow in the wake of deposing a ruler (or the attempted deposing) that people would be killed simply because they were assumed to be associated in some way.
We've been living fat off the hog for the past 15 years (honestly, the dot bust was just a blip on the radar compared to the '80s and what's coming) that we've forgotten that we survived the '80s. Many of us, me included, were still just kids and didn't realize or understand the worries of the work force.
What will make this worse is that not only is this a cyclical down turn of the economy, but we are also facing a paradigm shift. And this will be a much larger paradigm shift than any we as humankind have seen in quite a while. As we're already seeing there will be consolidation of giant corporations and many will collapse. What makes this frightening is that it will be on a massive scale and without government intervention will happen lightening fast. I'm guessing that the paradigm shift (or pendulum swing) that we are facing will be similar to the paradigm shift to industrialization.
On the downside, the longer we prolong this painful paradigm shift the more we bankrupt the very financiers that will help us get through this. Also, many of those whose companies would have closed down in the early days of this painful shift (rather than being postponed until the middle of it) will realize the shift is needed early and be able to act. Early innovation will make the paradigm shift shorter and less painful.
If we prolong these dying companies by trying to prop them up they will eventually close anyways. At which point we will have such a large influx of unemployed in the middle of this painful process causing an even larger drain on an artificially created situation of limited resources (money). The economic trickle will make it even harder, but never impossible, to get funding causing innovation to stagnate and the creation of new jobs will slow.
Necessity, who is the mother of invention.- Plato
I hope you do not gather that I am predicting yet another Great Depression as I hope we do not fall that far. Where as with the Great Depression I see that giant corporations were few and far between as compared to today. During the Great Depression the average person had a mom and pop company - typically farming. The issue that made the Great Depression even more of a problem was a combination of famine causing farmers to be unable to pay bank loans followed by the banks foreclosing on these small business farms putting willing workers out of work. Thousands of these unemployed small business owners would converge on a single location that promised work for a small few.
Today the average person seems to work for a large over sized conglomeration or a medium to large sized business. I see this as an opportunity for all of those people who've been debating, thinking about, or wanting to start their own business, but didn't think they were ready. They will now be put in a position of necessity and many will see no other option than to make the leap of faith in themselves and produce. We will be lucky in that what we are facing isn't a famine of food, but a famine of money. This has been coming, we've seen the increase in start up home based businesses, and this has been predicted by several people.
The economic cycles are just yet another aspect of the circle of life.
- The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. by Albert Einstein - on quotedb.com
- PhilosophersNotes - Albert Einstein Quotes
- Quote Details: Plato: Necessity, who is the... - The Quotations Page
