50 Hertz. Fifty cycles per second in a never ending
rhythm of technology and boy it hurtz. The drum beats on and we march to it; slaves
to progress and happily shackled to the oars. I thought that labour-saving inventions
were supposed to give us more leisure time, but instead of slaving all day
Monday over the washing, now every day is washing day. Instead of engaging in
the creative pursuits we all secretly believe we ought to we create work to
fill the time and avoid the perennially tricky business of creativity and
confronting our abject lack of it. It seems we need to work; maybe work really
does set us free and technology is the tool we use to manufacture our ‘freedom’.
Compared to times past we are vastly rich, so individual
transport means that every day, on every road in the land, people pass each
other to do the same jobs in towns fifty miles apart. It is monumentally
stupid, this human need to make everything more difficult; there has never been
so much paper used since the invention of the ‘paperless office’. The faster
cars get, the slower the average real speeds become. Nine-to-five is replaced
for many with every-waking-hour and always the relentless need to be in
contact. Social media has practically killed off actual social behaviour for a
whole new generation who think that their friends live in the shiny gadgets
they carry around in their pockets. The whole of human ingenuity has come to
this?
Even when we try to redress the work/life balance instead
of simple, wholesome meals we explore imagined continental fripperies involving
a hunt for exotic ingredients whose wasteful procurement and preparation is an
experiment in how far we can stretch our capacity to imagine the emperor is
actually clothed. Chicken, however you process it, turns out to taste much like
chicken. And for all the pizzazz and elan deployed, the back garden is a poor substitute
for the olive-treed taverna terrace and by the time we actually eat the booze
has taken its toll and our reward for all the effort is a gargantuan hangover as
we realise there is still work to be done before, er, work on Monday.
Thus I find myself, on Sunday, our traditional day of
rest, engaged in a mammoth orgy of feeding the beast that is education. Instead
of simply passing on from my head into theirs, by methods proven effective
through millennia, I feel the urge to use all this marvellous technology to
create wondrous materials of unimaginable sophistication to my didactic forebears
who would have queued up for a go on the hand-cranked Roneo machine in the
staff room. Today I can spend all my waking hours scanning and editing and
pre-preparing material that my charges will appreciate no more than if I made
it up on the fly and scrawled it on the board. The big difference is that now
it is the teachers who seem to do all the work. This, they call progress.
Keep it up fellas, we've get to get to work...
The same goes, of course, for all of life. Where once we
got up and got on with it, calling a spade a spade, if you will, now we have to
employ a progressive vocabulary which seeks to describe the mundane as the extraordinary,
the average as the superlative. All must have prizes and none must fail. Yet failure
is often the spur that kick-started the success of our wealthiest, the shame
that prompted endeavour and the price of sloth. So get your kids out of their
lazy pits and get them revved up and trying; the economy needs feeding.
Meanwhile it’s Sunday; put your feet up; I’ve got this
