“Fill Your Pocketbook of Knowledge”

1. 

   Without question, education is extremely important, but it certainly has changed in the new normal, the times that we are currently living.

   A friend of ours daughter is a UCLA graduate, standing in line to get a job with the TSA, she is extremely bright and articulate, and finished well in her graduating class, two years after graduation, she is a trainee security specialist, working for the government.

   Graduates today face the stark reality that a college education is no guarantee of a better job, or any job for that matter. Employers are seeking experienced people, that have a track record of successful employment. The level of risk with graduates lacking real world experience and expertise has never been lower in the current economic climate.

   The obvious point that education is extremely important, must be taken in the proper perspective, this country needs more than college grads, business majors, lawyers and such. At some point we need to put “extremely important” in the non-college categories, supporting our trade apprentice programs, rebuilding our manufacturing skill base so that we may continue to support the age-old concept of converting raw materials to finished goods.

   One of the most brilliant men that I ever have the privilege to work with, made wooden patterns that were used in a foundry to produce castings. He created millions of dollars worth of products with his incredible expertise and brilliance, he never went to college but it took him a lifetime become a journeyman pattern maker. The sad reality is that his job was eliminated, those beautiful mahogany patterns are currently made in a dimly lit Chinese wood shop.

   The real message here, is that education comes to people in different ways, let’s keep our options and our perspective in check.

Strategy Slam

A few years ago I was advising one of my clients to seek out the place of strategic solitude. He chose to take his wife to appeal for resort in Maui, the couple spent a week  out by the pool, golf, and fine dining. I met him for lunch right after his return from Hawaii, he looked tan, fit and rested. I enjoyed our lunch and finally asked him how his new strategy was coming along. With a sheepish look on his face, he apologized, and said he was going to work on it first thing in the morning. After witnessing his experience with strategic solitude in resort locations, I concluded that if the location is too beautiful, it become a distraction.

In my own experience, some of my best strategic solitude moments, came in one of my least favorite restaurants, Denny’s. Now I don’t want to come across as a restaurant snob, but I just don’t like being in a Denny’s restaurant. I would leave my cell phone and laptop computer in the car, and take only a yellow legal pad. Two eggs over easy, two strips of bacon, hash browns, and dry wheat toast, served on a white plastic plate a gourmet delight indeed.

 Not distracted by the food or the service, I had plenty of time to focus on selecting a new strategy for my business.

Birthday Tails

Eddie’s Birthday Party

I was six years old when I attended my best friend Eddie Craig birthday party who lived across the street. There are about 15 kids at the party and Eddie’s mom Edith was going a little crazy trying to keep everybody happy. Back in those days we didn’t have the clown bounce and super Mario Brothers to calm the sugar-based energies of fifteen six year olds. What we did have was a game called pin the tail on the donkey. The game consisted of a poster size print of a donkey without a tail, the object of the game was to take a paper tail with a thumbtack and with a blindfold, spin around and see if you pin your paper tail the anatomically correct position on the donkey. Edith had only eight tails and no one was willing to share a tail so a crisis was unfolding. Without hesitation she looked at me and said, Russ, do something! Make some tales, we need seven more.  Such a command from an adult to a six-year-old was overwhelmingly liberating. I felt that I had free license to rant through their house, using whatever paper, pins and scissors I felt necessary to perform my assignment. In short order I had seven beautifully colored donkey tails, complete with thumbtack that were brighter and better than the ones included with the party game.

 The interesting part about this experience was why Mrs. Craig picked me for the assignment.  This was the first time I can remember that I could be a “take-charge” kind of guy. Was it a natural instinct for leadership or just a gullible go fetch- it experience?

 I do remember that in most social situations in my childhood, I would inevitably be the leader of the club, or the one chosen to solve a problem. At the time I recall not of the leadership aspects of this experience, but the pride that I had displayed my obviously superior seven donkey tails.

Discovery and Awareness of Significance

–“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”  Marcel Proust French novelist (1871 - 1922)

People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself.  But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.  ~Thomas Szasz, "Personal Conduct," The Second Sin, 1973

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.  ~Henry David Thoreau, 1854

My mother said to me, "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general, if you become a monk you'll end up as the pope."  Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.  ~Pablo Picasso

A blind optimists retort to: Douglas Coupland:

A blind optimists retort to:  Douglas Coupland: A radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years by Russ Phillips

Douglas Coupland is a writer and artist based in Vancouver. For the canadian newspaper Globe and Mail, he wrote The ‘radical pessimist’s guide to the next 10 years’ a dystopian view on the near future. One of the the underlying ideas behind the guide could be translated as the observation that evolution continues, whether we like it or not. Our next nature might be as wild, unpredictable and out of control as ‘old nature’ once was. Read the original article here, or simply scroll down.

1) It’s going to get worse
 No silver linings and no lemonade. The elevator only goes down. The bright note is that the elevator will, at some point, stop.

 If you think that the greed and excess of the housing boom and mortgage madness was great, then getting worse is a wonderful thing. The elevator needed to go down, just like the housing prices. Remember when you have to qualify for a loan before you could get one?

2) The future isn’t going to feel futuristic
It’s simply going to feel weird and out-of-control-ish, the way it does now, because too many things are changing too quickly. The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn’t feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.

  The reality is there is no future and there never has been future, there is only the present. Things always change quickly, if that’s what we’re worried about get over it!. Is Mr. Copeland actually suggesting that predictability is what makes  the human spirit thrive!

3) The future is going to happen no matter what we do. The future will feel even faster than it does now
 The next sets of triumphing technologies are going to happen, no matter who invents them or where or how. Not that technology alone dictates the future, but in the end it always leaves its mark. The only unknown factor is the pace at which new technologies will appear. This technological determinism, with its sense of constantly awaiting a new era-changing technology every day, is one of the hallmarks of the next decade.

 To a large extent I agree with him, on this one. This is a great case for why governments are so ineffective in the era of technology that we live in. There’s nothing quick, innovative or creative about government programs to “fix our future.”

4) Move to Vancouver, San Diego, Shannon or Liverpool 
There’ll be just as much freaky extreme weather in these west-coast cities, but at least the west coasts won’t be broiling hot and cryogenically cold.

 People living in better climates, WOW! He really went out on a limb with this prediction, I think we all could add a few cities to his shortlist of places to move.

5) You’ll spend a lot of your time feeling like a dog leashed to a pole outside the grocery store – separation anxiety will become your permanent state

Separation from what? I assume the anxiety comes when we are separated from those things that we truly value like our independence, religious freedom and after-tax earnings.

6) The middle class is over. It’s not coming back
 Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? That’s where all the other jobs that once made us middle-class are going – to that same, magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel-agency jobs vanished, never to return. However, this won’t stop people from self-identifying as middle-class, and as the years pass we’ll be entering a replay of the antebellum South, when people defined themselves by the social status of their ancestors three generations back. Enjoy the new monoclass! The

Lighten up Dougie boy, once upon a time we lost the village blacksmith, the TV repair man, and the milkman. Jobs don’t really disappear, they just metamorphosis themselves in different places.

7) Retail will start to resemble Mexican drugstores 
In Mexico, if one wishes to buy a toothbrush, one goes to a drugstore where one of every item for sale is on display inside a glass display case that circles the store. One selects the toothbrush and one of an obvious surplus of staff runs to the back to fetch the toothbrush. It’s not very efficient, but it does offer otherwise unemployed people something to do during the day.

 I will keep this in mind the next time I visit the Apple Store, one salesclerk is a technical specialist, sends the receipt to my e-mail and packages my iPad in a bag that doubles as a backpack, haven’t quite seen that in Mexico yet!

 Try to live near a subway entrance 
In a world of crazy-expensive oil, it’s the only real estate that will hold its value, if not increase.

 What is really cool about the future is that 48% of us work out of our homes! The value for real estate will be based upon the quality of the school district, the number of good restaurants, not the proximity of the subway.

9) The suburbs are doomed, especially those E.T. , California-style suburbs
 This is a no-brainer, but the former homes will make amazing hangouts for gangs, weirdoes and people performing illegal activities. The pretend gates at the entranceways to gated communities will become real, and the charred stubs of previous white-collar homes will serve only to make the still-standing structures creepier and more exotic.

 I’m pretty sure that in 1906 the residents of downtown Los Angeles said the same thing about that awkward community called Pasadena, those weirdos are occupying some very expensive hideouts!

10) In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness

 The less we text, the more we talk, the happier we’ll be. Conversation nurtures the soul and the relationships that we all crave.

11) Old people won’t be quite so clueless
 No more “the Google,” because they’ll be just that little bit younger.

 If you really think that old people are clueless, you’re probably talking to too many young people.

12) Expect less
 Not zero, just less.

 Looking back, and looking ahead, less is not exactly a bad thing.

13) Enjoy lettuce while you still can 
And anything else that arrives in your life from a truck, for that matter. For vegetables, get used to whatever it is they served in railway hotels in the 1890s. Jams. Preserves. Pickled everything.

  Lettuce rejoice in the power of the salad bar, and the Teamsters union.

14) Something smarter than us is going to emerge
 Thank you, algorithms and cloud computing.

 Even if the “something” is smarter, it will still be an us.

15) Make sure you’ve got someone to change your diaper 
Sponsor a Class of 2112 med student. Adopt up a storm around the age of 50.

 Fecal incontinence is a choice, not a privilege.

16) “You” will be turning into a cloud of data that circles the planet like a thin gauze 
While it’s already hard enough to tell how others perceive us physically, your global, phantom, information-self will prove equally vexing to you: your shopping trends, blog residues, CCTV appearances – it all works in tandem to create a virtual being that you may neither like nor recognize.

 I think you’re talking about some very dense clouds, if we knew everyone’s global shopping trends, we would most likely be bored out of our minds sifting through questions like, paper or plastic?

17) You may well burn out on the effort of being an individual 
You’ve become a notch in the Internet’s belt. Don’t try to delude yourself that you’re a romantic lone individual. To the new order, you’re just a node. There is no escape.

 The last romantic lone individual is Lady Gaga, don’t ever just call her a node!

18) Untombed landfills will glut the market with 20th-century artifacts

 Somehow I doubt that there’ll ever be much of a market for a SpongeBob Square Pants cereal bowl over the next 10 years.

19) The Arctic will become like Antarctica – an everyone/no one space
 Who owns Antarctica? Everyone and no one. It’s pie-sliced into unenforceable wedges. And before getting huffy, ask yourself, if you’re a Canadian: Could you draw an even remotely convincing map of all those islands in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories? Quick, draw Ellesmere Island.

Newsflash, the Arctic looks tremendously similar to Antarctica as we speak! There’s also the issue of who gives a rip about the frozen tundra?

20) North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989 
Quebec will decide to quietly and quite pleasantly leave Canada. California contemplates splitting into two states, fiscal and non-fiscal. Cuba becomes a Club Med with weapons. The Hate States will form a coalition.

 I really didn’t know that Québec was part of Canada? I thought they all decided to leave the Canadian Club long ago.

21) We will still be annoyed by people who pun, but we will be  Ifable to show them mercy because punning will be revealed to be some sort of connectopathic glitch: The punner, like someone with Tourette’s, has no medical ability not to pun

 Those who deliberately exploit confusion between similar sounding words, apparently are creating mass hysteria in Canada. In the US we dealt severely with those who pun. It is the derivative of our word “punishment”

22) Your sense of time will continue to shred. Years will feel like hours

 The amount of time it takes to read this pessimistic outlook, is starting to reverse the effects of time shredding!

23) Everyone will be feeling the same way as you
 There’s some comfort to be found there.

 Once we defined the ability to understand how everyone feels, we might find comfort, but also exhaustion.

24) It is going to become much easier to explain why you are the way you are
Much of what we now consider “personality” will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.

25) Dreams will get better

 Better than what?

26) Being alone will become easier

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone."

--- Paul Tillich

27) Hooking up will become ever more mechanical and binary

  Let me know when speed dating becomes an Olympic sport.

28) It will become harder to view your life as “a story ”
The way we define our sense of self will continue to morph via new ways of socializing. The notion of your life needing to be a story will seem slightly corny and dated. Your life becomes however many friends you have online.

 I would say that it is safe to assume that books will remain as stories with a beginning a middle and an ending. Somehow all the crap on Facebook fails to hold my attention same way a good novel can.

29) You will have more say in how long or short you wish your life to feel
 Time perception is very much about how you sequence your activities, how many activities you layer overtop of others, and the types of gaps, if any, you leave in between activities.

  For those of us that are skilled at “sequencing” our activities  might be true, the rest of us will just have to take it one day at a time.

30) Some existing medical conditions will be seen as sequencing malfunctions
 The ability to create and remember sequences is an almost entirely human ability (some crows have been shown to sequence). Dogs, while highly intelligent, still cannot form sequences; it’s the reason why well-trained dogs at shows are still led from station to station by handlers instead of completing the course themselves.
Dysfunctional mental states stem from malfunctions in the brain’s sequencing capacity. One commonly known short-term sequencing dysfunction is dyslexia. People unable to sequence over a slightly longer term might be “not good with directions.” The ultimate sequencing dysfunction is the inability to look at one’s life as a meaningful sequence or story.

  Apparently Doug is never owned a dog, dogs are masters of sequencing they want to do the exact same thing every day, without fail. Nothing upsets of dog like a disrupted sequence of events. Sequencing happens.

31) The built world will continue looking more and more like Microsoft packaging
“ We were flying over Phoenix, and it looked like the crumpled-up packaging from a 2006 MS Digital Image Suite.”

 Prediction number 31, apparently is the result of excessive use of methamphetamines, there is no logical rebuttal or retort for hallucinations.

32) Musical appreciation will shed all age barriers

  In 1970 I took a class in junior college on music appreciation it failed to shed the age barrier for me. I wasn’t aware of the problem, but I think that most 14-year-olds will have problems viewing with the music of Lawrence Welk.

33) People who shun new technologies will be viewed as passive-aggressive control freaks trying to rope people into their world, much like vegetarian teenage girls in the early 1980s
1980: “We can’t go to that restaurant. Karen’s vegetarian and it doesn’t have anything for her.”
2010: “What restaurant are we going to? I don’t know. Karen was supposed to tell me, but she doesn’t have a cell, so I can’t ask her. I’m sick of her crazy control-freak behaviour. Let’s go someplace else and not tell her where.”

 Poor Karen,  no cell phone and limited menu choices, I’m not sure if humanity can handle personal abuses of this magnitude.

34) You’re going to miss the 1990s more than you ever thought

 “Behind the music” big hair and Bill Clinton singing with Fleetwood Mac, “don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” I’m starting to get misty already.

35) Stupid people will be in charge, only to be replaced by ever-stupider people. You will live in a world without kings, only princes in whom our faith is shattered

  This is not a new concept, the DMV has been a beta test to see what level of stupidity can be reached. With much success, we can see the future when our license expires!

36) Metaphor drift will become pandemic
 Words adopted by technology will increasingly drift into new realms to the point where they observe different grammatical laws, e.g., “one mouse”/“three mouses;” “memory hog”/“delete the spam.”

 Somehow the word pandemic and metaphor drift are difficult to understand the implied comparison between two unlike things that actually have something In common.

37) People will stop caring how they appear to others
 The number of tribal categories one can belong to will become infinite. To use a high-school analogy, 40 years ago you had jocks and nerds. Nowadays, there are Goths, emos, punks, metal-heads, geeks and so forth.

 The test ground for this lack of caring, would be Disneyland, judging by the casual dress of those attending the park, there is no standard and no grouping that makes any sense at all.

38) Knowing everything will become dull
  AIt all started out so graciously: At a dinner for six, a question arises about, say, that Japanese movie you saw in 1997 (Tampopo), or whether or not Joey Bishop is still alive (no). And before long, you know the answer to everything.

 Let me Google this and see if you’re right.

39) IKEA will become an ever-more-spiritual sanctuary

 I have always believed in particleboard and thin veneer, what’s the point?

40) We will become more matter-of-fact, in general, about our bodies

  Generally speaking, as a matter of fact our bodies continue to become straightforward and simple to understand.

41) The future of politics is the careful and effective implanting into the minds of voters images that can never be removed

 My image of “hope and change” has morphed into hoping that I have change in my pocket.

42) You’ll spend a lot of time shopping online from your jail cell
 Over-criminalization of the populace, paired with the triumph of shopping as a dominant cultural activity, will create a world where the two poles of society are shopping and jail.

  Prediction 42 is a mantra for why marijuana should not be legalized.

43) Getting to work will provide vibrant and fun new challenges
 Gravel roads, potholes, outhouses, overcrowded buses, short-term hired bodyguards, highwaymen, kidnapping, overnight camping in fields, snaggle-toothed crazy ladies casting spells on you, frightened villagers, organ thieves, exhibitionists and lots of healthy fresh air.

   We just spent $1.3 trillion on infrastructure projects, the snaggie tooth ladies were an-earmark in Nancy Pelosi’s district.

44) Your dream life will increasingly look like Google Street View

 see production 42

45) We will accept the obvious truth that we brought this upon ourselves

Douglas Coupland is a writer and artist based in Vancouver, where he will deliver the first of five CBC Massey Lectures – a ‘novel in five hours’ about the future – on Tuesday, october 11th 2010. This text was originally published by the Globe and Mail on Friday, October 8th, 2010

 Douglas Copeland, brilliantly demonstrates why Canada should never become our 51^st state.

Feeling Insignificant?

100 years from today, most likely no one, will remember what you did today, even if you thought what you did today was truly significant. This site is dedicated to capture, those insignificant thoughts, observations and events, that might be slightly insignificant.

On a recent business trip, I was taking my morning shower in a hotel room in San Jose California. They had a beautiful complementary assortment of  the usual shampoo, conditioner and hand cream. I grabbed the shampoo along with a bar of soap that was wrapped in plastic. The soap wrapper was apparently made of krypton type plastic, no matter what I did, it was impossible to remove the wrapper. As a last resort I used my teeth, to rip the plastic, alas, the soap was freed. I then proceeded to attempt to unscrew the shampoo bottle, with its stylish smooth plastic cap. Without those little serrations along of the cap,  it was impossible to open the small bottle of shampoo. Obviously the person to designed the bottle, had never tried to open it in a hot steamy shower. Even though you might think that the event was insignificant, this ritual no doubt goes all in hotel rooms across the country.