“There’s people making babies to my music. That’s nice.”
—Barry White, American musician, born September 12, 1944
More Things To Worry About That Are Completely Out of Your Control
As a general rule, we shouldn’t worry about what’s out of our control. We certainly should not worry about what’s none of our damned business, with “business” generously construed.
But what do we do with the stuff that is our business, again generously construed (like generation change and the imminent takeover of the oceans by giant, poisonous jellyfish, is way out of our control?
Dunno. Your move. Why don’t you come to DELA, have lunch with some interesting people, and stop worrying?
Events Today
Easthampton—12:00–2:00PM Don’t Eat Lunch Alone
Holyoke—4:30PM Expand Your Network Western Mass
Northampton—5:00–7:00PM Click Workspace Entrepreneurship Fall Bash
Easthampton—5:00–7:00PM Greater Easthampton Chamber Networking by Night
Northampton—5:00–8:00PM Northampton Area Young Professionals September Networking Social
Springfield—6:00–9:00PM SCORE Business Planning and Cash Flow
Reading
Dem Bones
“…Social systems around the world have become highly interconnected. Good innovations can now spread around the world in the blink of an eye, on the scale of history. Island biogeography suggests that such rapid inflows and outflows among the many social systems have moved and will move us closer to monoculture; at this limit this makes us a single global point of failure….”
Catastrophic Social Change
72 million Millenials pose challenges to the culture of workplaces and other social and economic institutions. They’re widely considered to be lazy, entitled, narcissistic, and restless by business superiors from the two previous generations (Baby Boom and Gen X). Sounds familiar, right? “Greatest Generation” bosses and parents had very similar reactions to the Boomers (I know: I was there), and Boomers looked down on the hapless Gen-Xers (ditto). The literary evidence strongly supports the hypothesis that the poor younger generation has never done anything right in the eyes of its predecessors since time immemorial.
Nevertheless, at 72 million strong, this is the largest cohort to join the workforce and society at large since the Baby Boom. So get used to it. The world will change in their image, just as the Baby Boom upended everything in the 1960s and 1970s.
“…Boomers and Gen-Xers need to be ready, Schewe said. ‘The point is, as an older cohort with a different set of values, you can’t just say, “they’ve got to bend to us; we’re not going to bend to them.” There are just too many of them, and their values are too pervasive and too deeply embedded to be ignored.’
Generation Next
Never Mind the Millenials. Have You Heard About the Jellyfish?
“….To understand why jellyfish are taking over, we need to understand where they live and how they breed, feed, and die. Jellyfish are almost ubiquitous in the oceans. As survivors of an earlier, less hospitable world, they can flourish where few other species can venture. Their low metabolic rate, and thus low oxygen requirement, allows them to thrive in waters that would suffocate other marine creatures. Some jellyfish can even absorb oxygen into their bells, allowing them to “dive” into oxygen-less waters like a diver with scuba gear and forage there for up to two hours…‘We are creating a world more like the late Precambrian than the late 1800s—a world where jellyfish ruled the seas and organisms with shells didn’t exist. We are creating a world where we humans may soon be unable to survive, or want to.’”
They’re Taking Over
The Last Word
“The older one gets the more one comes to resemble oneself.”
—Maurice Chevalier, French actor, born September 12, 1888