A Rain of Frogs

I am back from a self-imposed break. I needed a week away from the computer, a week away from all the noise of the world and the noise of opinion other than my own. Sometimes we need to silence the outside noise so we can hear the small voice inside.

It was very beneficial. I feel far more centered, far more balanced. It’s been a really stressful time lately, and I was very far out of alignment.

The weather here improved from the bone-chilling cold that caused ice to fall from the CN Tower – though still a shock from the temperatures my girlfriend is used to. Because it was warmer, we could go for walks, and have some meaningful face-to-face conversation. This is not the best time of year to see Canada, but it was still a wonderful wonderful week.

Peace. It’s highly underrated, I tell you.

Tough day today, he thought to himself.

It was so hard to focus on the positives sometimes. He knew full well that letting it all get him down was totally counterproductive, but try as he might, it was just killing him today. He needed to write it down, get it out, give it a tangible form. Maybe then he could put it in its place. He didn’t want to be angry any more.

He got out his beat up notebook, a trendy Moleskine, and began to write in his angular, stilted hand.

I am upset. Sometimes I am angry. Sometimes I am sad. But mostly, I am simply upset. Off balance and out of sorts. Like the ground is constantly shifting underneath me. Like I can’t find a solid place from which to begin even making progress. Like nobody understands that I am hurting.

He re-read the short paragraph. It didn’t make him feel any better having it there in graphite in front of his eyes, but it didn’t make him feel any worse. He decided to name the things that were upsetting him, and scribbled the word “Bad” on the page.

No money. No job. No education. I live with my parents – no longer have a house of my own. I have children that are cautiously affectionate, unsure of where they stand. A bitter ex-wife incapable of understanding that I left her, not the children. A bitter ex-wife incapable of mentally separating herself from the children. A family that doesn’t know how to be supportive, that doesn’t always know how to show love. A girlfriend a thousand miles away.

Thinking of her, so far away, always weighed on his heart. The times between visits were eternities in hell. Sure, they talked, and emailed, and communicated, and shared the highs and lows of each other’s days, but there was no hugs, no physical comfort. He still didn’t feel better, but he felt as if something were being done.

Catharsis, he knew, wasn’t always instant.

He flipped the page, and scrawled the word “Good!” across the top of the page.

I’m healthy. I’m only 33, well 34 in less than a week, I’m still young. I’m pretty smart. I’m not bad looking. I have a beautiful, intelligent, wonderful girlfriend – one that truly loves me and supports me – that wants me to grow. She won’t be a thousand miles away forever. I have children that love me. I have a family. I still have the boat, despite the ex’s best efforts do deprive me of even that joy.

He closed the notebook. Catharsis escaped him for the time being, but at least he had done something.

Today my girlfriend and I were discussing cultural differences between emerging market centers, like China and India, and existing market centers like Europe and North America. The discussion had been prompted by something I had read in a New York Times article about Toyota and its manufacturing philosophy.

She raised a good point, but one I didn’t immediately grasp (she’s definitely the smart one). She said that we labour under a false belief that computers will make our lives better. Further discussion clarified hat what she had really meant was that we labour under the false belief that technology will make our lives better. Better living through science. The computer is simply the very public face of this belief.

She pointed out that a typical North American reaction to a problem is to throw research and science at it. To compile numbers, build a simulation, test prototypes. All of these strategies were originally and still are intended to reduce man power or time. Time is, after all, money. This is a concept that is core to North American culture.

Other new emerging markets, like China and India, do not have the vast amount of research and science at their disposal that fifty years of western ascendancy has afforded, and have therefore been forced to throw other resources at the problem. Where western companies and those companies that follow western philosophies throw intellect at the problem, those emerging markets apply the resources they have in abundance. They throw manpower at it.

It is possible we are starting to see where that might be an improvement. There are few people working in North America who haven’t had their jobs affected by the introduction of the computer as a work tool. The computer was introduced to improve our lives – to save us from the tyranny of repeat calculations and mindless tedium. The computer made us feel important, like we were above things as mundane as work.

In the mean time, while we are all sitting around feeling self-important and getting paid far too much for our new lack of productivity, those emerging markets are becoming competitive. The manpower strategy is beginning to prove its worth in the global market, and we’re in a situation where we’ve all become overpaid, underproductive complainers who have been deluded by our culture of entitlement and overcompensation. Fooled into believing that the way we do it is the only right way.

We’ve fallen in love with our tools, and forsaken our products. General Motors will wax poetic about how cars are now manufactured in state-of-the-art facilities, but these facilities were not created and implemented to make the product better, they were installed to improve profit. The company focuses on its tools, and forgets that what it sells is cars.

What has that ultimate tool, the computer, really brought us? Certainly not increased productivity. No improvement the quality of our working lives. It has, as my girlfriend pointed out, simply made our work more frustrating and our lives more menial.

It’s no surprise we’re losing employment and market dominance to India and China. No surprise that the Big Three automakers in North America are hemorrhaging market share to Japanese auto manufacturers who don’t rely on market data to make decisions but instead go out and ask people what they want.

It’s no surprise that North America is losing its ascendancy in world markets, and having to protect its financial policy with military policy.

It’s a new world out there, and I think western society is poorly equipped to compete on this new playing field. We might have created the game and built the field, but now there’s a new breed of player.

I briefly toyed with the idea of posting the lyrics of a song today, but then decided against it. First, they weren’t lyrics I had written (they’d been penned by a guy I play with regularly) and second, it just didn’t seem to convey any message I was truly feeling.

I’m not feeling down or anything – I just don’t have much to say. I spent last week deathly ill, complete with fever, sore throat and delirium, but now I feel better. I just have nothing to say.

It’s a nice feeling.

I have been tagged by fellow 9rules member Edward Mills, who said some wonderfully flattering and embarrassing things about this site and then tagged me with a question as to why it is I blog.

So I have been officially tagged, and will answer. I don’t usually do so, but this meme strikes me as somehow… relevant.

There are a lot of reasons to blog. Probably more not to. But these are five of the reasons I blog:

1: Catharsis

It is cathartic. I release a lot of stress into the pixels that make up this site. A lot of emotion goes into the stories I write, even if the stories aren’t well constructed or packaged nicely. Life is full of untied ends, and my writing often accidentally imitates this. But it is the release or stress into the written word that draws me to post again and again on this site. It was originally created as a sort of safety valve for creativity, and it has proven to be so over and over.

2: Expression

Writing is a particularly expressive form of communication. When talking recently to my girlfriend, a gifted writer, I was comparing the art of writing to creating visual art or music. She pointed out that I tend to write the same way I draw – I paint pictures on the canvas of people’s minds. Adverbs, nouns and adjectives are my pigments, grammar and punctuation my oft overused and abused brushes. It is a unique way for me to express the thoughts and ideas and emotions inside.

3: Ego

Let us not forget the other side of expression. Ego comes into play for most bloggers. I admit it, I write on this site for a lot of reasons, but I do enjoy the attention. I love comments from readers. It makes me feel like I am touching people with my thoughts and feelings. Sometimes its hard, but every once in a while I’ll write something I am so proud of that it most certainly inflates my ego.

4: Development, professional and personal (and ego)

Obviously this site has had an impact on my professional life. It is a fairly uniquely designed blog in my opinion, and because I am a graphic designer, it has earned me some accolades among peers. It’s also earned some deserved criticism.

I’ve been able to post a lot of my thoughts about the design industry, about the practice of design, and about the future of design as I see it, and this has been good for business.

It’s also been a source of personal development. I wrote before this site, but I think my writing has really blossomed in this environment. Ego creeps in again.

5: Because

And finally, I blog because. Because it’s there. Because everyone has a book inside them. Because they have something to say.

Like some literary mountain, this blog stands on the horizon of my mind, something to climb, to be at peace with. To know. It’s got nothing to do with writing books, though I have plans to do so, it’s because it’s there. Because I can.

Because I have something to say. You may not like what I have to say, but I am not writing because you may or may not like it. I am writing because I have something to say, and I want to say it.

So there you have it.

And now, by the rules of this game, I am supposed to tag five someones.

So I tag…

Jorge, Jules, Hoi-en, Jon and Paps.

What are five reasons you guys blog?