Space Bar

Turns out that writing "Twiddling Thumbs" at LinkedIn is not sufficient to describe the present state of my current calling, which far from being a call to action is a call to in-action. As I explained to Dean Owen over at LinkedIn, the title of my post there could have been Space Bar, which got me thinking, that the title at beBee should be exactly that.

The Space Bar is the biggest single key by far on my keyboard. Yet why is the largest piece of keyboard real-estate the very key which performs one primary task, which is to create spaces. In this very moment this is exactly where I find myself, not having any inclination or have any desire to do anything that one would count as purpose or value creation. I am turning down projects and working with partners who do have their hands full, for the brief moment of moving towards "doing nothing", except getting to that point is actually tougher than I had imagined - because we are naturally gravitated to some kind of temporal purpose, we are not comfortable with dealing with space. In this regard I identify currently with Peter Gibbons in Office Space, and I celebrate the luxury of being in such a moment :

For prosperity purposes the marker for this buzz is where I am writing it from. In a near lateral position on my bed. So I admit it is not full or 100% Peter Gibbons, but in the scene Peter Gibbons does answer his girlfriends phone call. I have to go back 7 years to know that I have not reached this current point of total indifference in the space of a few months, but in 2010, in a consulting contract with a medical insurer on the East Coast of the United States, I had my first "this is not what I want to do" moments. I decided to do engage the project as I would have done it and that is something that the alliance we partnered with did not take too kindly. If anything during that gig, my primary thought was how lucky it is to be a 9-to-5 employee, being able to stick meaningless things on your cubicle walls - which are only meaningful to you.

Now as I look back at the movie "Office Space", just like the word "Space Bar" I notice more the word SPACE rather than I do the word OFFICE. In the Peter Gibbons video above, I originally identified with the Two Bobs, because that is the kind of thing I also did for years on end but now I actually do get to begin to identify with the spaced out life of Peter Gibbons in this movie, the difference being that Peter Gibbons had been hypnotized not to care about anything and the joke in the movie is that the hypnotizer himself gets a heart-attack, so leaving Gibbons in a hypnotic state.

Now no one hypnotized me though I do agree with my good friend Dean Owen that social media has a hypnotic effect if we are not careful and simply treat it as a thing that has become a part of our lives. We know from some research that social media can have an addictive effect for the simple reason that it can have hormonal effects of which dopamine (the happy hormone) can somewhat perversely be exercised, but the hypnotic effect comes from forming habit rather than hormonal or addictive effects. We can turn social media into an unquestioned habit and not be conscious just how many time our thumb hits the space bar - assuming that we are touch typing. At least that is my personal connection between my thumbs and the space bar.

In the movie Office Space, it is not Peter Gibbons whose destiny it describes or the waste of TPS repots, but the character Milton whose stapler is taken by Bill Lumbergh. The movie happens to be funnier because people identify with it and its characters because they can relate it to their work situations, but here I am relating it simply to a space bar. The one that I needed to complete my thinking in this very paragraph but which is also a metaphor for all of this. This is not a funk or a retirement or a giving up, it is an embrace of not having any definitive plan other than see what continues to emerge through serious play and then figuring out what that remotely has to do with this future state we like to call renaissance.

Space Bar

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