There was a time in human history when the concept of "starting over" was reserved for those who suffered a tragic loss perhaps through the fire that totaled everything they owned, or through earthquakes or other natural disasters, or war or other calamities.
For many people, the idea of "a life" meant that when you became an adult you started working at a job and then you worked that job for your entire adult life until you either retired or simply got too old to work.
If you were lucky, you had younger family who could take care of you, in your old age... likely in a sort of "trade" for looking after their small childen while they worked.
In our day and age things have changed radically!
For starters, the whole idea of going to work for some company, doing a particular job and working there your entire life has been taken completely off the table. These days, it seems like working in the same place for five years would be considered extremely long term!
Beyond that, "modern" people develop specialized skills — or they have a specialized education — to tackle a particular type of work and now we encounter a more recent paradigm that the entire industry oprfield that we thought we were trained for and that we would work in for the majority of our live... suddenly becoming completely obsolete.
And so, we find it crucial to reinvent ourselves and start over.
Sometimes it feels like we are presented with a new "starting line" several times while we believed we were actually in the middle of this "race" we might call life. And that reality reverberates across many aspects of society.
"Generational Wealth" is a popular buzz-phrase, but it is actually a harder thing to achieve in a world where the cycle of going from having nothing to being extremely wealthy and back to nothing and back up to wealth might be an occurrence that the average person experiences 3-4 times in their lifetime!
Imagine Michelangelo getting a couple of years into painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and then someone comes along and power hoses it all off and declares "Sorry, we've decided you need to use this new kind of paint. Please start over."
I am by no means a conspiracy theorist or a card carrying member of the "Tinfoil Hat Brigade," but sometimes I can't help but wonder whether this world we have created — seemingly by ourselves — in which everything has become so short term oriented is in fact a carefully orchestrated blueprint to keep everybody stuck firmly in place.
Less than a decade ago, there were lots of people who were very hopeful that Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology would provide a means for the average person to get back on terms and at least be back in the game. But as I look around these days, it seems like the majority of the crypto world has been usurped by good old-fashioned Wall Street Greed and the fragile hopes of that "average person" have been dashed by conventional thinking steamrollering the original intention of what we were hoping to do; hoping to change.
Of course it's entirely possible that we have always gone through cycles like this, even if they have taken different forms in the past. Even so, it seems like the periods between the ups and downs come faster and faster... perhaps so fast that it becomes almost impossible to effectively build anything.
The Industrial Revolution was allegedly — at least in its earliest forms — the promise of using automation to do away with some of the backbreaking work of toiling in the fields by introducing machinery. And whereas some of that might have happened we became slaves to clocks instead.
I am just a student of the human condition, and I'm trying to understand how we have supposedly progressed in the world and yet more and more people perceive the world to be a bleak and largely hopeless place... a spititual desert in which "me first and ONLY me" has replaced heart, spirit and deeper connection.
Yes, I know, this is a bit of a gloomy post... particularly since I have been away for a while (being "too busy" to have time for blogging) but these were just some random thoughts on this Saturday morning!
Thanks for stopping by, and have a wonderful rest of your weekend!
How about you? How often have you had to "reinvent yourself?" Thinking back to your grandparents and before, did THEY face as many forced changes as we do now? Does the world feel bleaker to you than it used to? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)
Created at 2025.02.22 12:22 PST
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