Relationships vs. Transactions

Paul Allen’s review of CES mentions his worry that hardware and software companies are all turning into entertainment companies:

Neal Postman worried about the death of public discourse in the age of television. His book “Amusing Ourselves to Death? offers a very thoughtful warning. He suggested that those of us in the modern world could not sit through the Lincoln Douglass debates (which were several hours long) because all we can handle is small sound bytes.

What happens to logic, reason, conversation, and the human experience when media consumption fills almost every waking hour of every day. (I think many people are averaging 8-12 hours a day already.)

I�m not wringing my hands in despair; I�m just wondering myself as I contemplate the sweeping changes that I am seeing here at CES and trying to foresee where the world is heading.

I was not there, Paul, and I don’t claim to see the future. But, I do feel that at-least two forces are at work here.

First of all, I believe we are in the age Ralph Waldo Emerson called “the Age of Self-Reliance” where every person must choose for themselves the things they accomplish in their life. Nobody is going to hand you a silver platter laden with opportunities.

There will be many who keep complaining about their job and their boss and their families and the (insert social,political or economic system here) they live in, and–to wrongly cope with it–enter their entertainment-induced comas every night thanks to the never-ending supply of media. The problem here is that benefits will continue to shrink, and taxes and inflation will continue to rise, until people who don’t take care of themselves now won’t have the capacity to take care of themselves any longer.

“The school of Hard Knocks gives a great education”, my father used to tell me, “but always charges the highest tuition.”

That tuition, I believe, is climbing steadilly–mercilessly.

Second, because our media is spoon-fed, and we are constantly barraged with SPAM emails, 30-second-commercials, and a steady diet of sound-bytes, highlight-reels, instant-replays, on-demand, 24/7 shopping, round-the-clock customer-service, we naturally focus on the transactions in our lives rather than the relationships in our lives.

• It’s easier to say how many minutes your Cell-phone plan has than to explain the last truly exceptional, down-to-earth, change-my-life, valuable conversation you had with someone.
• It’s easier to quote the number of emails in your inbox than to quote the number of letters you sent to a friend in-need of encouragement.

At the end of the day, when we reduce our lives to a series of transactions, no-wonder entertainment comes to the forefront. We feel like we’re “giving, giving, giving” all day long. When we finally have some control over the things we do, we have nothing better to do with our time than spend it amusing ourselves.

Transactions remove the need for on-going commitment and responsibility. They reduce relationships from a tactile, feeling thing to a cold, sterile process. That is an existence, but not a rich or fulfulling one. No wonder we turn to media to lull our conciousness to sleep through the day and night — it’s because we can’t stand the screaming from our hearts that “living like this sucks”.

I know many men who, a few years ago, would have camped out all night on the concrete for the newest XBox game-system or whatever. Now, they have more-important matters to attend-to, especially the ones who want to call them by their most-important title: “Daddy.”

The up-side here is that people will burn-out faster than ever on the transactional-living-treadmill. That is good because they may then awaken to a greater sense of the purpose of their life. They may begin actually searching for the answers this time around.

My fear is that our current society prescribed medication more often than solutions. Many people will never escape this.

But I am optimistic. I believe more people will honestly search out truth. More of them will determine to have a meaningful career rather than a j-o-b. More of them will decide that, if the people around them are not important and really valuable to them, then they need to get around better people — as Les Brown says, “In your quest to live your dreams, there are some people you must count on, and others you must count out”

Above all, I believe this will actually drive people to not repeat the mistakes of our generation and take pride and give real value to family and community.

Why not start today?