"Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student
gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for
a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.
A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best
thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive—to be a monopoly of one. This is not what young people do today, because everyone around them has long since lost faith in a definite world. No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball."
If the “new economy” or “knowledge economy” primarily rewarded education, rather than ownership of assets, then we would expect the greatest increase in incomes to have occurred among the top 30 percent with at least a bachelor’s degree. Instead, the gains from growth have been concentrated among those with income from capital—investors and managers with stock options.
In one study, in sixteen Western democracies labor productivity grew far more rapidly than average real wages and fringe benefits, but most income growth went to profits of owners and shareholders. Another study of thirteen advanced capitalist countries found that the growth in real wages, which had been 4 percent in the 1970s, was less than 1 percent between 1980 and 2005, while the wage share of income declined from 78 percent to 63 percent, with the rest going to income from profits, interest, dividends, and rents.6 The big money is not in “human capital” but in plain old-fashioned capital. The new economy is really a new version of the old economy—the managerial capitalist economy, not some mythical, immaterial “knowledge economy.”
Your options are constrained by what's available/ They are shaped by first choice.
İnsanlar duygusal olarak bunaldığında en basit sorunlara bile rasyonel çözümler getirmekte zorlanırlar. Basit bir stratejiye (örneğin SWOCS) sahip olmak duygusal süreci yavaşlatır ve sorunu çözmeye yardımcı olacak bir düşünce yapısı kazandırır.
S – Stop. (Dur.)
W – What is the problem? (Sorun ne?)
O – What are Options? (Seçenekler neler?)
C – Choose the best option. (En iyi seçeneği belirle.)
S – Satisfied? (Seçiminle mutlu musun?)
The phrase ‘Don’t put persimmons and pears on someone else’s jesa table’ means not to stick your nose into other people’s business. That doesn’t apply to me. We can’t see the full picture unless we step back, and it is difficult to swallow things that are piping hot. While people may be good at telling others to take it slow or to leave, they somehow hesitate when it pertains to their own relationships. We all need a consultant. When I was thinking of leaving the job I loved, when I saw potential after a job interview, or when I have to practise a nerve-wracking presentation, I can always trust my live-in consultant to explore my options with me and guide me towards the right path. Easily excitable, there are times when Hana gets way too ahead of herself, but I’ve always got my stubbornness to rein things in.
Everything the corporate juggernaut foists upon children -prefabricated play options, video games, mass-manufactured toys, gadgets, peer-centric online platforms, and saccharine and superficial television programs targeted at toddlers and preschoolers, along with the mainstreaming of glossy, soulless, porn-inflected depictions of sexuality available to teens and, increasingly, even younger kids- has detrimental effects.
