Life in the Cloud

Life in the Cloud

Australia has roughly 48 million kangaroos, while the population of Uruguay is 3.5m human inhabitants. So if the kangaroos decide to invade Uruguay, each Uruguayan will have to fight 14 kangaroos. For this and even more relevant information, log onto the internet and join the race to nowhere, just beyond the southernmost point of our ironies, where we break news by the second and reach for live reels before feeling for the life pulse at the accident scene.

 We are putting up these massive mansions but at the same time having fewer offspring. I am just coming from a polite exchange with an entitled scholar and I realize how intently we are at accumulating degrees while simultaneously discarding common sense. There is so much advancement in medicine and yet large swathes of planet earth are experiencing their poorest health conditions in history. There has never been more garbage on earth than we have right now. How is it that we are sending people to do space tours and cheering them on by name, yet we don’t know the next-door neighbour in our apartment block? What can define irony better than that?

That can only be bested by the old adage of more money more problems; is higher income a harbinger of less peace of mind? For some reason IQ advancement is increasingly at variance with EQ development. We are actually believing in overnight success. Transaction-as-a-service is the name of our relationships nowadays, or instances. Availability domains in different area codes with multi-tenancy. Test for as long as you want, only pay for what you use, no contracts or commitments, stop at any time, and have multiple backups. Heck, even employers are moving workloads and workforces to virtual servers in other people’s premises in the name of cost-cutting, and transitioning everyone from open plan to remote work to nothing-on-my-end. And what is deferred gratification again? Must be an Old Testament teaching, no? Apparently if you’re unhappy with your job you can just stop going to it. Gratitude? That’s an alien concept that requires us to be happy with what we have while we work for what we want; it’s so pre-millennial, right?

The apple and serpent narrative in the Garden of Eden draws parallels to our quest to garner exceptional knowledge but no wisdom; Google’s massive servers have ensured that everybody knows everything. But most understand nothing. To paraphrase Bertrand Russel, the trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt. It is so much easier to shout people down than to improve our arguments. Then again, it feels so wasted to go into explanations when people only hear what they want to hear. Our social media connections grow exponentially with every engagement however fleeting, but are inversely proportional to the number of true friends who can pick our distress call on a rainy night. Yes the amount of data in the cloud is unimaginable, and it seems our innate wisdom will also soon be an imagination. We are busy increasing intoxicants in our fixes as the intake of water goes in the opposite direction.

There is so much human in every space, every cause, every initiative due to the rapid dissemination of information today; sadly with very little accompanying humanity. Because we forgot how to love what we do and are only interested in results and rewards; that’s what our KPIs and the shareholders of our lives demand anyway. We are so woke and noisy on non-issues until we are actually lacking sleep even when all is quiet. Is it any wonder that coins are noisy and notes hardly flutter? Somehow we take pride in repeated mistakes as well as infamy; it is the currency of fame and fortune. And have you seen the cost of good watches of late? Yet there is no time. Are you seeing how investments are going? No underlying fundamentals as hot air begets hot air, but FOMO gets us enlisted in droves.

Anyone who has ever invented or created anything of substance knows that the key to progress is having the courage to start before you’re ready, and trusting yourself to figure it out along the way. Or as we say in the start-up space, perfectionism slows progress, and procrastination kills it. Sadly these are not Cloud features. The immediacy of microwave life doesn’t allow us sufficient lag to zoom out and see the progress that we are making. The spell of luck is more alluring than the dopamine satisfaction of hard work; we are betting and gambling more than we are exerting deep mental effort, so the sustainable platform for future success, longevity and knowledge remains elusive. If only we could grasp that our individual path is presently more difficult because our calling is higher.

Dear Native, welcome to the Cloud! Would you like it with storage to go? Or more kangaroo tidbits? No? My apologies; tis the season of being merry on-premises with no promises.

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