Life Path Value

Chomsky talks about the challenge between obedience/conformist and creativity/free-thinking as contradictions.  The irony is that human beings who grow up full of contradictions AND creativity are sometimes lauded by our society, as John Lennon was - or we find them in areas of life that were not designed to use their creative minds - and so we find a troubled human being, full of conflicts, angry at something or another - but not realizing that the system is responsible for their confusion and not their beliefs.

Marketing has developed in conjunction with modern media as the tool of conditioning, and we know that because we only have to study the father of PR to recognize the powers of persuasion and commercial propaganda.  That father was Edward Bernays and David Lessig uploaded a 3 hour documentary on You-Tube that puts a different light on things, and features the story of Bernays among other things in "A Century of the Self". Who has 3 hours to watch a documentary like this in a society where the attention span can be 8 seconds.  I know a group who do, and they are called learners.  The rest following the professional paths, of which the grand master is the career path.  It is now a given that the first part of our life is an education to get us ready for a career path and the last part of our life is where we are taken off it - either because we are too old, or we are told is the reward for being on it.  In the 20th Century we had no choice but to look at life that way, but as we enter the knowledge age, where machines are now taking jobs - why are we still looking at life in this highly demented way?  We are so wedded to the idea of the career path that we don't question what comes before it and what comes after it.  When our turn comes to come off it, it is more a rite of passage than an unnatural existence. 

Learning we are told is a lifetime activity now and the way we face work is not to expect the traditional career path.  We are told to expect 10 to 15 jobs in our life and to be prepared to adapt to constantly changing market conditions.  Yet we hang onto the idea of the "career path" while offering precautions that only the few may actually experience what was once meant by a career path.  If these transformations are real, then I want to focus on my life path because the paradigm of the career path comes from a different era of thinking.  Why are we then branding ourselves for an idea that we are saying is something we need to make constant adjustments for.  Life path value is learning based, and hence why I loved Fatima Williams quote.

In all accounts, we keep onto the idea of career paths because we are not set in our ways, and so we engage ritualistic behaviour to maintain the culture that was applicable to another time.  At the same time we are told we must learn more in order to keep up with changes, changes that are arising due to dissolution of traditional career paths.  This is a strange mentality.  Add to this education and marketing, an entertainment machine that leaves us consuming our attention on superficial things, rather than the long-term value of learning - and one begins to ask why we would be so stupid, to engage in those pursuits that produce learned helplessness. Guy Debord, a 60's philosopher had a great name for this constant barrage of shared entertainment, he called it the society of the spectacle.  That there is this spectacle around us.

When Guy Debord commit suicide he would not live long enough to see the advent of 3D glasses and Virtual Reality headsets.  Of course if these technologies were made because we have developed a great love of learning as a society, then technology is wonderful thing.  That there isn't a natural affinity or love for learning at scale, speaks volumes to the kind of society we are processed through.  When we ape the words of "personal branding" we are agreeing with the same masters voice everyone in the 20th Century heard.   We are not questioning the spectacle but are so conditioned to think that there is no other way of living - that we do ourselves a favour to live branded lives.   We cite words like "successful" as if we are the machines, rather than us who are the makers of machines.  The deconditioning lecture that Marshall McLuhan shared with students in 1969 is worth listening to - it is very prescient for its time, considering it was delivered nearly 50 years ago. The great thing today is we all have our hands on masses of educational material and we don't know how to use it for own benefit and then some manipulator tells us that we need a brand.  If we were learning online, we would know in the instantaneous quality of conversations. If our conversations are actually broadcasts and advertising then what do we make of human conversation as actual conversation?  So marketing as a meme of what helps us with a career path is a truly redundant idea.   What about learning along a lifetime of learning? 

The learning paradigm therefore is NEW.  The marketing paradigm is OLD.  We are trying to make the old new again - when we need the new.  What we call learning is often more likely to be learned helplessness.  I rejected the career path even before I embarked on it and by sheer accident or good fortune found myself on a life path mentality, without actually choosing this.

At the age of 37 I began choosing learning as a choice, and nearly 20 years late I have barely got myself to my present mindset and it is only now that I can call my mind a "learning mindset".  For most of my life I was not free of a marketing mindset and nor do I need to be free of it.  Marketing and learning are no zero-sum games - today marketing becomes a form of learning for a learning mindset.  For people who push ideas like drug pushers push their stuff, there is only a marketing mindset where the learning is a form of marketing.  Why?

Developing a learning mindset includes forms of learning of which marketing is but one affinity, some of that learning is about mindset, such as developing a growth mindset - another affinity. The great thing about a learning as key to Life Path Value is that it is not a group persuasion, it is a personal choice, because there is only ONE life path - our own.  I am responsible for my own life path and not anyone's career path.  Careers can become just another affinity on Life Path.