so it’s time for a change, i hear. today is the day when a good portion of my friends begin their in-school practicums (practici?) and officially start their new lives as teachers. i, on the other hand, seem to have spent the day engaged in other pursuits. mainly contemplation of what it means to wait. waiting is a part of our day-to-day lives but perhaps it is something that we never truly contemplate. and with all of that wasted time in which to do so, it’s something that definitely deserves thought.

but i’m going to deal with that at another point.

there’s something else that i’ve been thinking about. newness. i am told every day (yes, really, in this industry it actually comes up on a daily basis) that so many things have changed. i’m tired of hearing about it. because it’s a myth. in the next little bit, we’re going to talk at length about the myths of web 2.0, internet openness, the death of privacy, and some other related issues. but let’s start with progress.

everyone knows that humankind is a progressive species. by definition, we evolve, as we are alive. but does that mean that we improve?

applied to a more everyday scenario, think of what has changed about life in the past ten years and what do you come up with?

let’s see if i have the whole list – computers, mobile phones, the internet, cars, television, music sharing, long-distance calling. we can add to that a list of things that haven’t so much changed as become more prevalent in our non-technical lives – yoga, organic foods, environmentalism.

we’ll start with the second list.

yoga’s been around since the beginning of time. alright, not the beginning of time. but about 3300bc is slightly before my memory ends so we can think of it that way. i know what you’re thinking. you don’t think that yoga is new, just the rise of its popularity. and i’ll give you that. to a point. but these at-one-with-the-earth rituals have been floating around a lot in the past half-century and, if we are to believe that history is cyclic, which it is, i give you one decade in particular to contemplate – the nineteen-sixties. that’s a time when everyone and her dog was a child of flower, consumed more marijuana than the modern artistic community as a whole, and danced to music that resembled an acid trip more than the blue man group does today. so tell me again about this rise of yoga, if you please.

organic foods. now there’s a concept. if you told a farmer from the first half of the twentieth century that we’d have a rise of organic produce, things grown properly, healthy diets, they’d give you one answer. all of them would. i guarantee it. “what do you mean? there’s going to be a time when this declines in between?” we simply fell off the wagon. welcome home.

environmentalism is beyond farcical. at least, the way that it is exercised in our modern world certainly is. you tell me. how much do you care about recycling? how much do you take transit because our cities are badly designed and how much do you take it because it’s good for the environment? or because you can’t afford a car? if we want to improve the environment, there are many things that we can do that will have enormous effect. let’s look at a list of some of them. if we all consumed no meat, there would be a massive shift in production of greenhouse gasses, transportation costs, and foreign trade. food quality would improve, waste would be de-facto eliminated, plant life would increase, carbon production would go through the floor, and people would be healthier, not to mention live in a healthier world. if all transportation were to be fueled by electricity and that electricity were to be produced by means other than fossil fuel consumption, we wouldn’t have to stop moving, only change the way in which that movement was powered. and improvement would be immediate. if we were to eliminate alcohol consumption and other non-essential activities (read, drug consumption, eating in restaurants, purchasing of music and videos rather than duplicating them), and give that money to clean-energy research, that would mean an increase of trillions (yes, i’m serious and conservative in my estimate at the same time) of dollars worldwide and an imminent delivery from that industry.

are you prepared to do any of those things? i will if you will. step up.

i’ll tackle the other list next time. ta.