Specifically Incompetent

I’m not against progress. However, I am aware that some gains are connected to unfortunate losses. 

I don’t think many would argue that, throughout history, the division of labor, into many smaller and more specific tasks, enabled specialization and tremendous gains in productivity. Once we decided that not every man needed to be a self-sufficient island, quality of life rose by leaps and bounds. We let the farmers grow the food for all, which enabled doctors to devote their time to become better at dispensing care, and soldiers were free to improve their ability to protect us. Such developments have left the rest of us much more time to contribute in our own special ways, like watching YouTube videos and playing fantasy football.

But as specialization has gone further and further, our individual survival has become entirely dependent on the persistence of the social machine. I can tell you right now, if the manager at my local supermarket loses his keys and cannot open the store, I will perish within a week. I am not capable of catching or growing a single morsel of edible matter.

Worse yet, I think the specialization movement is accelerating. Here’s my evidence: Since most of the adults in my neighborhood are like me, earning a living at some hyper-specialized task that produces essentially no social value, we have enough time on our hands to don costumes and stroll the neighborhood with our kids on Halloween (only the farmers, doctors, and soldiers need to work dependable schedules). As recently as two years ago, I recall the mobs of children moving in an orderly and systematic fashion, up one side of a street and down the other, hitting each street in sequential order, and effectively canvassing the neighborhood. 

This year? I saw the little brats engaged in an exercise of ad hoc randomness, wandering from one lit up house to another, zigzagging, doubling back, and missing a great many houses all together. What do I blame? Google, of course. They have specialized "search" and reduced our dependence on organization.

The gains of “search capabilities” have come with the loss of ingrained, organized thinking and systematic intellectual classification. Prior to search, we had to keep track of information like which houses we had looted, and therefore, we approached Halloween festivities in a systematic manner. Today, kids are clearly not learning to store information in an organized way because they can just search for it.

Pretty scary Halloween for me.

What's Wrong with this Picture?

While I consider myself fairly well grounded and generally capable of keeping the world in perspective, I admit that I am not immune to certain petty aggravations. I have alluded to such petty aggravations in previous posts when I was annoyed at Starbucks and when I was bewildered by our national caffeine obsession.

I snapped the photo above yesterday, while feeling both annoyed and bewildered. Naturally, it happened at Starbucks.

I went in with my 12 year-old and our brief visit was, in part, a reward for her completion of a very challenging but successful year in school. I should note that I was feeling a little disheartened that she considered Starbucks to be a destination of such high interest. As we entered, my fears about the corruptive influences of hyper-consumerism and peer-pressure were just below the surface.

Once inside, I was forced to wait in a long line of fashionistas, ordering incredibly ridiculous sounding concoctions, that took a long time to make and were, by all logical measures, way over-priced. I began to feel disappointed in the collective intelligence of my community, impatient about waiting for something I didn't personally think was worth waiting for, and pessimistic about the bleak future of humanity. But I pressed on.

After we ordered and positioned ourselves at the end of the bar where the drinks are served, I snapped the picture above.  As you can see, there was a crowd of children awaiting expensive caffeinated drinks. It struck me as wrong on every level.

In all honesty, I don't feel like I can afford to frequent Starbucks on a regular basis. Technically, I have the funds available; I just don't think coffee that costs $4/cup is a good value, and I don't think one should make a habit out of low value activities. Starbucks is convenient and always available when you need a coffee, but how can a 12 year old afford to pop in daily on the way to school?

One of those silly drinks plus a pastry (the standard order I observed) costs about $7, which is $35 per school week. I'm pretty sure you can lease a Honda for that amount.  How can 12 year-olds who have never worked a day in their lives, afford more than me, a haggard old duffer who has worked 70 hour weeks for the past 20 years?

What is wrong with this picture?

The End of Society

The Roman Empire fell when wealth became so great, and so widely distributed, that the privileged lifestyle of an expansive upper class became too heavy for society to bear.  In retrospect, it seems clear that a majority can never live in idle comfort based on the productivity of a laboring minority.  It only works the other way around.

Alas, as the saying goes, "history repeats itself", and I think American society is about to collapse.  I base my hypothesis on the photo above, similar to one I snapped myself a few days ago at a local retail center.  It shows that, despite high unemployment, the wealthy masses have grown so unable to care for themselves, that we need a nail spa on every corner to provide us all with basic grooming.

The spa in this photo is like one of an ever-expanding multitude of similar outlets.  I dare say there are more nail spas in Orange County, California than there are Starbucks (and there are way, way, way too many Starbucks).

This truly boggles my mind...adults paying other adults to groom them...so many in fact, that we need these outlets on every corner...and they are always full of customers...can we get any more ridiculous?

The end is near.

Soccer Moms: Pillars of Modern Society?

They seem harmless on the surface.  In fact, they seem downright selfless. 

Soccer moms are almost everywhere, scurrying about, sacrificing their own interests to make sure Junior and Sally get to all those developmental activities.  They help their children identify and cultivate interests, develop skills and relationships, and grow stridently into young adults with a solid base of knowledge, grace, and confidence.

Perhaps we should all pause and thank the next soccer mom we see for her important role in raising the next generation of Americans.  Unless….wait a minute... maybe they’re not pillars of modern society but parasites on modern society.

Many, if not most of the soccer moms I encounter, are bright, aggressive, college-educated women who see themselves as the CEOs of their families.  Nothing wrong with that; I applaud their strong sense of conribution.  In the CEO role, their key goal is to secure maximum advantage and resources for their own offspring.  All the scheduling of activities and seeming sacrifice to get the kids to those activities are mere byproducts of their own master plans to help the family “get ahead”.  Great attention is paid to small details that can enable better seats at the school play, a free instrument from the band program, the teacher of choice in 4^th grade, or any other special attention or privilege that might be available to the cunning CEO. 

Unfortunately, some scarce community resources (participation in an advanced academic program, for example) are made available only in small portions.  The community sets them aside from the general pool and meters them out to those most deserving students with qualities that might, if properly developed, help the entire group.  Undoubtedly, some such resources get secured by the more capable family CEOs and cannot benefit other, more deserving recipients, for which the resources were intended.

We all want what is best for our kids and our families, but we also all live in communities where sometimes, what is best is to have a strong network of trusting neighbors and friends.  The all-out effort to achieve personal gain at the expense of the community is a direct affront to the notion of cooperation.  It’s not OK to put your own family ahead of every other, all the time, in every respect, regardless of what’s at stake.

Cavemen figured this out and gathered together in cooperative tribes. They learned to share resources and eventually, to divide labor into specialized tasks according to whom in the group was most well suited for each.  In the early days, survival of one and all depended on each tribe member fulfilling their role.  If Thog or Gruk acted selfishly, it would have been immediately obvious, and dire consequences would presumably have followed.

We’ve come a long way since then and today; any single individual’s contribution to society is an imperceptible blip, lost in the grand scale of a global economy.  But through it all, our keen ability to perform social accounting has stayed with us.  In fact, there is palpable animosity toward those who appear to be willingly “living on welfare”.   This speaks to our innate sense that we all owe it to one another to live civilly in cooperative groups where each plays a role, contributes to the greater good, and consumes no more than their fair share of common resources.

If you ask me, many soccer moms (certainly many of those in my neck of the woods), are way over the line in this regard.  I see them engaged in an anti-social routine of diligently exploiting the system, expertly capturing social favors, and ruthlessly hoarding public resources.  They do this each day, in full view of the children who observe it all from the backseat of the minivan.  These soccer moms are unwitting models of devastatingly selfish behavior, training a whole new generation of anti-social adults.