Response to apathy

I wonder what others do when they hit this spot? Find other sources of drive and meaning? Endure silently?

My response to this is to remember why I go to work. It's because I need to pay the mortgage and give my daughter some standard of living. When I was a child I lived pretty much on the breadline which meant I missed out on things like school journeys for instance. It means a lot to me to be able to write a cheque to allow Katherine to go on holiday with her chums - so for these privileges I work. Having said all of that, I think of work as a real chore, customer calls, presentations, meetings etc YAWN.

Work itself, at the moment there seems to be an incredible amount of unecessary complexity which leads to no benefit. Like the analogy of "it takes the same time to cross London by road today in 2006 as it took 100 years ago in 1906". We make advances but get no benefit from the advance due to the way we use the advance.

I console myself that although things look bad we are living through a time of exponential technology growth. Remember the population chart of the planet? The one that had the knee in the curve? Well before the knee the growth looks almost linear, it's hard to tell that the growth is actually exponential (ie. get the next point on the curve by multiplying a constant rather than by adding a constant).

Although our industry looks like it's at best growing linearly it's not -- it's growing exponentially, the same as any evolutionary system -- and the advances we will see after the knee will take your breath away, and you are part of it my friend!

This doesn't really help I know, finding meaning in technology is not easy, I believe that technology will bring us a choice -- a choice to live as long as we wish -- but as a Christian you may not want to hear that !