dearest future me,

there may come a moment when you look back at your time as an SAP consultant and think "you know, it was an easy life ... it was easy money, really ... why on earth did you leave?"

let me remind you of today, which is like so many other days you’ve experienced over the past nine years. you are dreadfully bored. you were extended at this client for an extra two weeks to write a report which took you only two hours to compile this morning. also note that this report will either be blindly accepted or unreasonably rejected in just under an hour; the client will not have read the report before taking either action.

and now you sit here, trying to fill your time by surfing internet news sites, writing e-mails and the like, while nervously glancing over your shoulder every few seconds to make sure that no one from the client sees how bored you are or how little you are accomplishing for the $200 an hour they are paying for you. the last meeting your were in, the words "i don’t care, i don’t care ..." repeated themselves in your head as you listened to ... well, you weren’t really listening and it didn’t really matter.

and these office chairs are uncomfortable ... and they make you wear silly clothing to work ... and, oh, the boss is approaching ....

and at this point i felt the truth burning within me like a sharp flame, that there was some role for everybody but it was not one which he himself could choose, re-cast and regulate to his own liking. one had no right to want new gods, no right at all to want to give the world anything of that sort! there was but one duty for a grown man; it was to seek the way to himself, to become resolute within, to grope his way forward wherever that might lead him. the discovery shook me profoundly; it was the fruit of this experience. i had often toyed with pictures of the future, dreamed of roles which might be assigned to me - as a poet, maybe, or prophet or painter or kindred vocation. all that was futile. i was not there to write poetry, to preach or paint; neither i nor any other man was there for that purpose. they were only incidental things. there was only one true vocation for everybody - to find the way to himself. he might end as poet, lunatic, prophet or criminal - that was not his affair; ultimately it was of no account. his affair was to discover his own destiny, not something of his own choosing, and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. anything else was merely a half life, an attempt at evasion, an escape into the ideals of the masses, complacency and fear of his inner soul. the new picture rose before me, sacred and awe-inspiring, a hundred times glimpsed, possibly often expressed and now experienced for the first time. i was an experiment on the part of nature, a 'throw' into the unknown, perhaps for some new purpose, perhaps for nothing and my only vocation was to allow this 'throw' to work itself out in my innermost being, feel its will within me and make it wholly mine. that or nothing!

my next read

Critical Mass: how one thing leads to another
by Philip Ball

Publisher description:

Are there any "laws of nature" that influence the ways in which humans behave and organize themselves? In the seventeenth century, tired of the civil war ravaging England, Thomas Hobbes decided that he would work out what kind of government was needed for a stable society. His approach was based not on utopian wishful thinking but rather on Galileo's mechanics to construct a theory of government from first principles. His solution is unappealing to today's society, yet Hobbes had sparked a new way of thinking about human behavior in looking for the "scientific" rules of society.

Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, and John Stuart Mill pursued this idea from different political perspectives. Little by little, however, social and political philosophy abandoned a "scientific" approach. Today, physics is enjoying a revival in the social, political and economic sciences. Ball shows how much we can understand of human behavior when we cease to try to predict and analyze the behavior of individuals and instead look to the impact of individual decisions-whether in circumstances of cooperation or conflict-can have on our laws, institutions and customs.

Lively and compelling, Critical Mass is the first book to bring these new ideas together and to show how they fit within the broader historical context of a rational search for better ways to live.

Library subject headings for this publication: Sociology, Human behavior Philosophy, Physics Social aspects