"The way that can be spoken of is not the constant way."
Okay, perhaps I'm not really talking about the Tao, but it captures the difficulty I've had in writing this.
I do have some ideas I wanted to address, circling back to my previous post. Alas, every time I mentally started to write it, I would come up with something completely different.
...Not wrong, just starting points that would take the post in completely different directions. None of which felt quite right.
And it all fails to capture what I really wanted to address. So I started thinking about that, in particular. If I had to pick one thing, what would I address?
And it's not the relationship between freedom and property rights (the book that started this posits there is one, and looks at some of the debates between colonials and the original American inhabitants. I have to admit I have a hard time grasping their points, though I think it's because I'm so steeped in my own culture that it's hard to imagine another one. Native Americans had wealthy people, but somehow the wealth didn't translate into power over others the way ours does? Women handled the land and farming? But then... how did those women decide who got what? I'm not really sure I get how it worked. It does seem appealing though - and their shock at the callousness of colonial society is a bit of a wake up call. Like... maybe we don't have to have a wealthy 1% that callously ignores the suffering of the rest of society.)
I just rambled on about that even though I said it wasn't about freedom and property rights, but that's mostly because I want to think more deeply on it. After all, I don't think you can ever build a 'perfect' system, and most systems rely on a certain amount of wisdom that prevents its flaws from destroying it. But I do think some systems are... better. You can study the effects of specific types of political systems without realizing that the rules of the system do shape the end result. Like how 'first past the post' elections in a winner-takes-all environment allows someone with 35% of the vote to win, simply because they got the largest share. Or how that pushes us towards this terrible two party system where we are constantly forced to choose the lesser of two evils. (I do like the idea of mixed member proportional representation, but I would take ranked choice voting as an improvement... and I get tired of how certain parties keep arguing against policies, not because it's actually better for society, but because they're afraid that they'll lose if they actually had to win the support of the majority. Really a sign of a flawed ideology, but they'd rather dismantle democracy than admit their ideas suck.)
No... what I really wanted to talk about was the system.
About why so many people feel isolated, helpless, and lost. About why middle-aged men have such a high suicide rate. About what drives mass shootings. About all the signs that indicate our system is... perhaps broken.
Much of which is based on my own speculation, rules of thumb, and subjective observation. I won't be pulling out a lot of scientific studies to back this up.
To start with...
To start with, I want to share some of my own personal goals. I'm not so keen on competing against other people, don't really care about dominating at some activity.... I'm much more internally driven.
I want to be the best 'me' possible. The old Army slogan to "be all that you can be" honestly appealed to me.
The frustrating thing is that I can tell I have talent. Maybe that's arrogant? Idk...
The first thing most people say when they describe me is 'smart'. Or 'intelligent'. I've constantly been in the 99th percentile on standardized tests. I am normally one of the smartest people in the room. Even now, as a DevOps engineer dealing with all sorts of tech. (I once solved an issue the offshore team had been struggling with in just a couple of minutes, mostly because they were trying the wrong command and I had experience with and knew the right one, but it was apparently rather memorable.)
And yet despite that, I feel like I have struggled to get where I want to be in life.
I am now on my third career. Army officer, shipping supervisor... DevOps/Software Engineer/Whatever-label-you-want-for-this-tech-related-job.
I have been thinking about that quite a bit, because my current job is... okay I guess? Interesting enough, and I'm doing well enough, but it's honestly not what I had pictured myself doing. And it has none of the sense of service I had wanted... not like I had hoped to get if I could get into computer security.
But I'm also older now, and it gets harder to keep changing things up. To try to get where I want to be.
So where is it that I want to be?
Well, that has changed over the years. Quite a bit sometimes. But much of it has been about trying to use that talent in constructive ways. Like... I enjoy asking just the right question that spurs a team discussion that leads to a well thought out solution.
Does it actually matter whether that discussion is about how best to provide room and board for a unit from Alaska that's coming to our base for training, or what might be causing a problem with our application, or how best to assign our people so that we can handle that days number of shipments?
Not really.
I just like problem solving, and being part of a team that works well together to solve those problems, and ideally those problems would be 'wicked' problems that deal with complicated issues that can have a great impact on people's lives.
Well, okay... I like problem solving, but pontificating on it from my keyboard when there's no chance of it getting put into action isn't satisfactory either...
So there's also an element of difference making, which ultimately requires power of some sort.
In which I am sadly lacking. Or rather, I think I earn the respect of my co-workers and can generally make a difference, to some degree. Often not to the degree I would like... though I am well aware that most people could probably say the same. (also, I think there have to be limits on what you're willing to do for power, so I'm not sure if I just have never been willing to do the things it requires to get that power, or whether I've truly been shut out for all the systemic reasons I often feel like it is.)
It's more than that, too, though.
It's that I constantly feel forced to choose sub-optimal options because that's just how the system is. Like the Army... I get that in order to manage a large organization like that you need a method of assigning personnel. That you need to have your development pipeline, since it's not like you can hire generals off the street. And, naturally, there are some jobs that everyone wants and others that nobody does...
So in some ways it's inevitable that you will get assigned where the Army wants you, and not where you want to be.
But I also, personally, felt like it was such a damn waste.
Like... okay, it does make sense to expect officers to go through a certain career path. You have to be a platoon leader, then a company XO. You should alternate between staff and command positions, so you get experience in both.
At the same time... I never cared for or wanted to be a general, and it was very annoying to get told I couldn't do the things I actually wanted to because I had to follow this pre-built plan the Army had designed for officers like myself.
I had this feeling I could have been fantastic in human intelligence. Or even civil affairs. They fit my interests, I thought I had potential... but those things never fit with the Army's need. And then I was assigned to fill out a National Guard position for a deployment to Iraq - which was fine, everyone expected to deploy there at some point then - but it was for one of the most useless positions imaginable. As in, they were restructuring the way military intelligence worked and while our analysts were kept busy supporting the brigade, most of our military intelligence battalion staff was wasted. It's been almost two decades now so I'm not sure I'm remembering it correctly anymore, but basically they were restructuring to put military intelligence assets closer to the company level, instead of battalion. Which meant no longer having a military intelligence battalion supporting a brigade. And yet we were still assigned to that MI BN. The analysts at the brigade level didn't need our specific battalion supporting them, and they kept pulling our people for other assignments because of that.
Like, I don't mind serving or taking some risks... but don't waste me!!! Especially when that position meant I wasn't able to fill some of those other career progression requirements so that I could try transferring into the fields I wanted.
This is the kind of frustration I have felt often in life. And also heard from others...
Underutilization.
Wasted potential.
Wasted talent.
People are capable of doing so much more, and yet somehow only a few ever get the chance to do so.
I think, sometimes, that the people I have worked with... the solders, the workers at that shipping facility, the ones society somehow thinks should barely get paid, and that people up top will confidently assert are just being paid as the market demands...
I think they should get paid more, simply because every single one of them is capable of a lot more. And they are giving up on that potential in order to work these necessary yet often boring or physically demanding jobs. (Automation would be fine if we no longer needed people to do boring tasks that few would want, but only if we build a society where people can find alternatives... and unfortunately this system doesn't seem willing to put the effort into doing so.)
I wanted to circle back to that quote about human happiness, and about what way of living is best, for a couple of reasons.
One is that I have been pondering the appeal of the LitRPG books I've been plowing through, most of which fall into two categories - a transmigration/isekai story where someone from Earth winds up in a fantasy world with magic and a gamelike system where you can level up, and a 'system integration' type story where Earth is integrated into a gamelike system with levels (and either magic or sufficiently advanced tech to be a lot like magic).
Both scenarios have ordinary people who, through access to such a system, are able to level up and become powerful. There are some problems with them (as with any fantasy, people always imagine themselves the winners. And it's fun to think of what you would do if you're the most powerful person around... but that's about on par with fantasizing about medieval times because you always imagine who you could be if you were an aristocrat, and completely ignore the painful reality of that era for peasants and serfs and the like. Also, what's an exciting adventure in fiction would be an all too terrifying life in reality.)
I think the appeal is two-fold. First, that you can make a difference. Second, the relationships and friendships.
Because all too often modern society makes us feel like faceless cogs in the economic machine, and we're so caught up in the machine that it's hard to form meaningful relationships.
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