If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed my manic/depressive nature. I tend to be a pessimist and only really cool stuff that happens (or I learn) can change that for a while.
As such, I tend to see things in the worst possible light. Believe me, I’ve been worse.
This morning I commented (on facebook) about the flight of Ph.D.s out of academia and into industry. How lecturers and associate professors barely make minimum wage and rarely get the opportunities that their tenured colleagues get. A friend of mine posted that it’s always been that way and it’s not that big a deal. There were some other comments, but that’s the main point.
It’s not that big a deal and It’s always been that way are not excuses to treat highly educated, intelligent people like wage slaves. Indeed, those statements are not excuses for anything.
If we stuck with “It’s always been that way”, then we would still be huddling over fires in caves. We wouldn’t have the huge acceptance of LGBT people in our society (and yes, it’s much more than it has ever been). You wouldn’t be reading this one a computer.
One of the problems I have is that I have a huge imagination. Right now, I could spend hours giving you detailed plans for everything from bass boats to the classroom of the future. I have spreadsheet with the development plan for an arcology in East Texas. If I had any programming skills at all, I’d be working on several pieces of software that I desperately want. I have been called a visionary at work.
What’s killing me is that I can’t do anything about any of it. I’m not a vice president at work (and never will be), therefore my ideas aren’t worth listening to. It’s immensely frustrating. I sit and think all day long and then, at the end of the day, say “well, there’s another potentially great idea that will never see the light of day”.
What I’m saying (in a very round about way), is that doing things the same old way doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t work for businesses, it doesn’t work for people, it doesn’t work. We have irrevocably changed Earth’s environment. Even we stopped carbon dioxide production right now, there will still be significant amounts of damage that will take centuries to heal.
There are a lot of amazing things in our world right now. And, regardless of everything else, I’m very happy to be alive now instead of even 50 years ago. But just because things are OK now (on the surface) doesn’t mean that we don’t need to be thinking about how to make things better. About issues that need to be, at least, discussed. Not swept under the rug because it’s no big deal.
