Josh Allred's Blog

I have been fascinated by this idea of being dropped in chaos. So much of the culture we have built has come in the last 200 years, and today, we reinforce it while simultaneously making decisions that affect those who will go next. It’s an interesting idea to live with past choices and have the power to make positive changes for the future.

No one decided to move from hunter-gathers to farming and then to industrialism. And yet, we collectively did. No responsibility, and yet we are all responsible.

I am calling this the parachute effect since we are born into the current chaos of things. 150 years ago, 85% of the workforce were farmers. Today, it is only 4%. We are all products of the time.

The Bullshit Job, as David Graeber has defined it, is a job so pointless that the person doing it believes it shouldn’t exist, and at the same time, you can’t admit it out loud to anyone.

This is such a fascinating idea to point out. We have been brainwashed since the rise of industrialism that work is part of what it means to be productive. But how much of our jobs are we doing productive work? Most of us who sit in front of a computer can admit that we are not always productive. And so can the person operating a shovel. Because humans are not machines and need breaks. We need purpose and meaning. Sometimes we do boring work, but boring work is not the same as unproductive work.

Something to think about.

Once clocks were invented, our time was no longer ours. It is someone else’s. We call it “free time” when we are off the clock for a reason. Believe it or not, the early Greek word “scole” or “skole” meant “leisure.” It led to the Latin word “scola” and the English word “school” or “scholar”—thus implying a close connection between leisure and education. Which is vastly different than what we think school should accomplish today.

We should ask why this person’s platform is as big as it is. Because there are those out there with something important to say and others with popularity who think that what they say is important.

Famous voices are not necessarily the ones we need to listen to.

Too many of us are embarrassed to admit we listen to people who shouldn’t have the stage to begin with.

Get rid of all the information on the internet; what are you left with?

Perhaps we should build something more tangible than the brand and appearance of success we create online.

Most of what we see on the internet is what people want to see. An illusion. A trick.

Wishing for things to be different zaps power out of our hands. It wastes energy that we could use to accept how things are. When we have power, we can, indeed, change things.

For we cannot change the past, only the future.

What do we choose to keep score of?

Whose voice do we listen to?

Who are we trying to help?

What do we collect?

What do we seek?

Where do we want to go?

How do we conduct our business?

Now…why?

Our minds constantly wander off to be somewhere else. Why is that? Are there evolutionary advantages to this? We transfer ourselves from our current circumstances (even if we are happy) to the next.

Wondering, however, is different. Unlike wandering, wondering requires focus. We let curiosity take us somewhere. Exploring the blank spaces on a map.

We have way more options than we think we do.

We decided it was too risky to go anywhere, so we stayed put.

After a while, that can limit how we see things,

Too much time is spent beating ourselves up over the choices that led us here.

Perhaps a better path is to focus on the choices we have in front of us rather than living in the past.

He failed because he built wings and fixed them with wax.

Perhaps that is all he had to escape.

We have the luxury to decide what materials we want to use to fly with.

But too many of us are afraid to even try and do something so bold and daring.