My wife & I are sitting at LaGuardia airport after a couple of days in Connecticut with some friends. Personally, I am running on approximately 3 hours of sleep, so my thoughts may be a little confused and ramshackle at this point. That part is fine. As always, the important thing is The Work.
If you work with me professionally, you'll know me as a devOps engineer (note the camel casing). But that's just my day job. At night, I don my spider-suit and sling around Chicago as Knockoff Arachnid Lad. But really, I consider myself to be a writer first and foremost. And, thankfully or not, that's a job that I can never quite clock out from.
We are always telling stories. It seems to be a habit that made our species what it is today. Octopi have four times as many arms and at least as many brain cells as we do, yet each of their deaths is as final as the end of a Civilization in its entirety. They tell no tales, sing (gurgle?) no songs, write no poems and file no taxes, so far as we filthy land-dwellers are aware. Some cetaceans and great apes hoot and sing to their packmates, and that might make us part of a mega-mammalian family of intelligent tree dwellers and ocean swimmers. But their stories are, so far as I am aware, unintelligible to us.
🐋 🦧 🐬
Unlike dolphins, bonobos, and orangutans however; our species changes what they do generation after generation. This is a relatively new development for most of us. And even for those for whom it is a slightly older change, it hasn't been going on for long; maybe a few centuries or milennia for those of us whose distant kin were hammering our copper blades and digging up edible roots between the Yellow and Jordan rivers during the days of Zenophon. But even there, a family whose distant ancestors had been an early embracer of barley or rice farming had probably been doing just that for a good eight thousand years. Things move a lot faster now.
As my earlier readers may be aware, both of my parents sold (or currently sell) various goods and services on a professional level. My grandparents did a couple of different things: housewife or shopkeep for the grandmothers, haberdasher or steel engineer for the grandfathers. If I could bring one of them back to life to try and explain what it is I do a century after they were born, I'd need to explain a number of extra concepts that had not existed before 1984. And I like to think that would probably be the same for them: it makes me chuckle to imagine Robert 'Jolly Bob' Harter, who turned down a C-suite career at IBM to work for (now-defunct) US Steel, going back 2 extra generations to his pappy and mammy to explain to them the newfound wonders of the Bessemer Process and oxygen blooming. I'm sure they would react in a similar way: smiling and nodding at how far their brilliant grandson had made it in this crazy post-industrial world and wondering what force in heaven or hell had brought them all together to talk about such wild changes.
The drift of my argument is this: we have zero idea what the future will look like or how it will attack us. I'm a huge fan of science fiction, specifically the campy variety. The technophobia and neo-feudalism of Dune is particularly sweet for me: a nice reminder that certain things (like family dynasties and a distrust of black boxes) will likely never change for us. These big trends become harder to predict in the short term however: two years ago I could have cared less if someone sneezed on me. Two years from now it might bring an entirely new set of diseases.
Our control is limited, doomsayers are everywhere, and the future, as it ever was, remains uncertain. The sound of children laughing still rings out from every corner, and their futures will determine things that will play out long after I've been processed through the crematoria and laid to rest in some nice river near where I like to camp at Devil's Lake, in Wisconsin. In 1993, I was one of those children. Back then I had planned a future digging up dinosaur bones; little I knew, there's no money in that.
But, like everyone else, I'm a terrible predictor of the future.
Happy trails; tomorrow is payday!
~JWH