People just aren’t good at thinking things through.Consider all the data on data.Everything is data-driven these days, as if there’s no such thing as human spirit.We do data all day at work and wonder why we having trouble making ourselves get out of bed in the morning.If we had enough data I bet we could come up with a metric for arousing the soporific before the sun rises.You could get the precisely correct amount of sleep.Awake to precision-measured caffeine.And get back to your data for another eight-plus hours.There—feeling productive?
I miss the humanities.There was a time when someone who didn’t give a fig about data could make a decent living pondering what it is to be human.Even birds and bees know how to count.Can’t we ratchet it up a bit?Use our vast imaginations to come up with meaningful employment?How you gonna measure that?Some things just can’t be quantified.How much joy is enough?Too much?Precisely how long is any coastline?Even if we could measure it down to the nanometer, could that capture how it feels to sit on the rocky shore and feel the waves breaking against the cliff beneath you?Even data has its limits.Those who want to make a living without it will be sucked into its black hole nevertheless.No light escapes.Only numbers.
Companies like Amazon collect data.Search engines like Google collect data.All of those autosuggests?They’re based on past searches.I’m surprised just how wrong Amazon and Google are about me.I was only searching dogs because I was curious about what kind the neighbor has, not because I plan to get one.
A wise man once said to a class full of wide-eyed neophytes, “If you want to get a surprise in your marriage just go home and tell your spouse you know everything about them.”There’s no better way, he intimated, to get a completely unpredictable reaction.Is that slap, or kiss, or knee to the groin driven by data?Where’s the passion in that?No matter whether you prefer Spock or Data, human motivation is emotional.There are those who actually enjoy looking at data all day.Dreaming about numbers and their hegemony over the workplace.Others of us grew up with the classics and we have romanticism deep within our souls.We nod our heads at Blake’s “dark satanic mills” and start to look for a coastline upon which to sit.Perched upon this rock with the crashing waves, I suspect, I’ll be better able to think things through.
