A phrase I came across recently captured my ‘mood’ in both work and life spheres (links to my most recent posts) very crisply – nostalgia for the absolute. Coined by the philosopher George Steiner, it isn’t a coincidence that it reached me courtesy a Breaking Smart essay.
As I have mentioned earlier, the entire series has given me a lot of perspective, and it’s heartening to know that the kind of thought bubbles I have are more common than I thought. There exists a dichotomy however. My perspectives are largely ‘Promethean’ when it comes to tech (and the implications of its disruptive power) in the work context. However, in the larger life scenario, I think I am quite the ‘pastoralist’, more comfortable with sustaining changes to the prevailing social order.
It is possible that dynamic business scenarios have (in my mind) made a Promethean approach inevitable, and work being the source of income, I see it as a much safer option than (the chance of) redundancy caused by being pastoral. In other spheres of life however, while I might have acknowledged the approach in terms of my ownership and consumption, there is a much stronger tug towards a certain vision of a life. That vision seems impossible to attain without a certain amount of planning, a non-agile approach, if you will. Think home EMI, travel, entertainment etc. It’s probably the effect of starting out in an era with a certain worldview and living in an era where the environment changes its skin way too fast to hold on to it. “The more you long for stasis, the more the universe starts readying a new version.” (via) A Stoic approach is probably the desired state, but that’s easier written than done.
