This astounds me. The meaninglessness of it all. So much of crap that we do all the time pretending it's all a big deal, yet none of it is of much consequence. In jobs it does earn us our salaries, so at an individual level official crap still has some monetary value. Even that is all a huge waste at organizational level; created coz someone higher up had to show he was doing something and simply didn't understand what's really to be done. Crap trigger is always top-down. And crap flow is both top-down and bottom-up. Is that personifiably true as well?
But money does not really assign meaning to what we do. For an individual, meaning has to be something beyond money. It's something that justifies the act by leading to an outcome that makes the world a better place in some manner, however small. And that outcome has to be visible enough to be really motivating. Otherwise, it's again no real meaning. It's like those hundreds of slides created every week by millions of managers worldwide to send to their bosses every Friday - stupid status reports - knowing most of them won't be read or understood. But they have to be made, coz someone more powerful wants them, and that's his way of making sure the progress of work is on track. It does meet the purpose for some bosses to some extent.
There is an interesting issue with us which makes the whole concept of meaning look upright and upside-down at the same time. We want meaning yet we want to get crazy and excited. Challenges motivate us, but challenging work is frustrating. We prepare the most rational strategies, yet we don't follow them, coz we are only good at making them. We like to sleep. We like to eat. We also want to be slim. We like privacy, yet we want a social life. We want mobile devices, yet we want work-life balance. We like to drive but we don't like traffic. When on bike we hate cars on the road, when on cars we hate bikes on the road. And everyone hates those walking in between. And walkers hate everyone in return. We like going to expensive places, yet we want them cheap with discounts. We go to malls and not buy anything. We buy things coz everyone does. We wear ties, which serve no purpose at all. We hit humans and love God. We take credit for good job but dump work on others. We take work that can give us recognition. We bully the weak and complain getting bullied by the stronger. We watch TV serials which show routine life, but find our own routine lives boring. We are obsessed about nudity, although we're all the same bodies. We don't like the smell of our own shit. We can kill plants and eat them, but killing certain animals becomes sin. We are okay with killing mice and mosquitoes, though. We enjoy alcohol and drugs that dumb down our minds, yet we take pride at our intelligence. We make strange drawings on our bodies and feel proud about it. White ones want tan. Black ones want to be white. The middle ones want to be white too, and then seem tanned. A woman saying she needs a man only for making babies is awesome. A man saying he needs a woman only for making babies is sick. Well there's a background to it - men have a long legacy of sickness of lot of kinds over ages. Let's pass that. We kill in the name of God, yet we don't have a clue who that is. The winners write histories to show them as good and losers as evil. Everybody dies, history remains. For whom? We can die any moment. Reality is that we will die some day, yet we live like we have forever. We are lazy, yet we want to achieve so much in life, be on top of the world. We push tasks on Friday to Monday as if it would never come. We want promotions in jobs, yet we don't want to be accountable for anything. We get inspired by what rich people say while they are at a place much different from where we are. We admire global Maxima more than local Maxima, yet we talk about setting milestones. We hate our bosses and what they do, yet we want to be promoted while it will only lead us to our bosses' position. We are masters of contradictions, yet we talk about consistency. We admire children, yet we aspire maturity. Do we become nuts when we are screwed?
Such fucked up minds we are, and yet we talk of meaning!
