Life Path

I do not accept the mentality of career path thinking and any institution or organization set up to process people through gates of existence.  I do expect young students to view their toastmasters club membership as something that is a line to fill on an online resume.  It is not their fault, it is their education system that continues to partition existence in the ways of old. We cling to the past only because we are certain of it.

Even though I do not speak Spanish, there is a song that is famous in Columbia and it sings about the way of life.  A way of life here means as a life journey, exactly as my journey online is a part of learning journey.  I do not segment my learning journey, it is whole and not parts.

Trio America as a group does not represent the life as it was but the fundamental of reality of existence as it should still be today.  For some reason the industrialized mind did not have three singers singing one song but three songs for one life.  I personally call these three songs a requiem

The Requiem of Education

The Requiem of Work

The Requiem of Retirement

In contrast to Trio America, these three songs can be summed up by a Requiem for a Dream

A career path is the ultimate requiem for a dream - because even the American Dream was an invention of Hollywood and how we came to believe in such compartmentalization of life is beyond my own sensibility - other than somehow I managed to live a life path and not a career path - and that too entirely by acts of fate and the blessed accident of always being at the right places at the right time and hidden when life required the best course of action is the hidden.

This is the age of the life-time learner not career path dreamers

Welcome to the 21st Century to anyone who embraces and can see that our century is ours and not a century where we promulgate the ideologies of prior centuries or where we group together under the banner of spoon fed dogma and recite the lines of tribalism.  For sure the world of technology made us tribal just as Marshall McLuhan said it would - but for all those who celebrate McLuhan as the symbol of the digital age - remember what he said was a warning.  He was not saying we are going to live in a happy nappy global village, his prescient way of looking at the future was to get us to ask ourselves "what is going on?"

What are the implications for choosing life path instead of career path? 

The greatest is that we do not treat children as objects to process through as certification, and then teach them that they will be certified at each important milestone in their life until the one certificate they do not get to see declares them gone.  It is an empty and facile way of looking at the potential of children in an age where potential is everything.

The next potential is that as machines do the jobs of human beings that learning becomes that much more vital.  People don't want to live a life of leisure - they have got that already through the existence of television programming that serves to dumb society down - a willing thing for a worker to do because they are smart enough to know the limitations of the career path - except very few of us ever sit down to consider what it would mean if we described our life careering out of control.  A career is careering through life, a life path is living in the spirit of a full life.

Ultimately the most humane aspect of the life path is that there is no dumping ground for the retired.  If work makes life meaningful then what prompted millions to dream of the day their retired from that work? The retirement pasture is cool for those who can afford it, but as financiers help governments borrow money that simply adds to the debt figure - that says as much as anything what a government really thinks of preparing people for retirement. 

Retirement can still be a choice, a career path a choice for those set in their ways to see life that way, but a life path brings a new vision, a new meaning and a new way - and in vision, meaning and way this is 21st Century.  How challenging this is for me is knowing that while I am decades older than the majority of young college students in our Toastmasters club, I am the only one in that club that thinks this way, I am the only one who is preparing the rest of his days with a life path meme.  Even though those kids have been taught that a job for life is a thing of the past, they continue to cling onto memes of the 20th Century.

It is not their fault, for the 20th Century mind clings on to an even longer past - those that think in terms of accounting are linked to thinking that originated 500 years ago, not 50 years ago.  We have people who build the future on the philosophy of dead philosophers - as if a pre-20th Century philosopher had even a clue as to the kind of life that we live today as well as the transformational affects of accelerated change.

There will always be people that are born before their time and the last word here belongs to Marshall McLuhan, because his 1961 talk is most pertinent to my life, because he made it in the very year I was born, the very year Barack Obama was born and the year venture capitalist Fred Wilson was born - just because we were born in the 20th Century, it does not mean we are that, but there are today people who make 21st Century technologies with 20th Century minds.  Now that we all live in the 21st Century - we do not have to think about what life will be like in 50 years time - we simply have to think about WHAT IS - and "what is" is the air I breath as I type this.

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