Disclaimer: The literary exercise to define a nowadays character for a novel led me to create these 30 blog posts. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Any opinion expressed about Uber should not be interpreted as having a negative connotation. I admire the company as an incumbent of the platform economy and I am a registered Uber driver for research purposes.
The first home consoles gave people agency over the dominant screen in their homes. The next revolution may give people agency over the world behind the screen. The screen answered back. Next time, we should discuss what happens when the world does.
I keep reading about everything that is going wrong.
A government takes something that belonged to everyone and gives it to a few. A war destroys in one afternoon what took generations to build. A company collects more information because it can, not because it should. An algorithm decides who receives help, who is suspicious, who gets the job and who is quietly excluded.
Then I close the article and return to work.
There is a backlog to refine. A meeting to attend. A bug somebody marked as urgent. A dashboard that needs another number nobody will remember next week.
Sometimes I wonder if this is what life has become for many of us.
We build digital systems all day while the larger system appears to be falling apart.
You built your persona over the years based on things that were constant from every 24 hours period to the next. You had your preferred foods, clothes brands, professional and personal activities. It was your normal and you were OK with the occasional complaint about the futility of it all.
We’re letting the craziest of us to run the asylum. We’re allowing huge corporations to get free money from our taxes while they could borrow money with literary 0% interest rate. We still put on a pedestal people that benefit from a highly uncorrelated relationship between value-added through work and profit sharing.
Reacting as understanding the moment, being present, is all you get.
The mother turned back towards me and asked: “Did you just said to your son to girl up?”
When did life become an all-out war? And who’s really winning? It’s easy. To victor goes the spoils… and the winners are:
I think I’m a decent human being that will never be without sin and never feel entitled to pick up and throw a stone.
I have seen it before. As I start the engine, I place them each in a box large enough to fit them for the night, small enough to fit into a character description.
No matter how good the people I work with are, no matter how easy the project, there is always the what-if-something-goes-wrong worm digging through my brain.
With age comes an awareness of your place as a human being in the bigger picture. The useless pursuit of material riches and the related expensively branded fake mindfulness you’re brainwashed to work for comes to an end. For 5% because they get what they want. For the other 95% because they realize they’ll never get it.
Once you discover how big this world is, that emptiness in your chest grows ten thousand times fold.
We die a little with every keystroke. It’s all about what remains on the screen in a document or in social media posting. The daily gravestone.
The entire mechanism of making money so you can afford more suffers a 180 degrees turn for some of the successful ones. Are they an example to follow?
How did we come up with this form of unethical distribution of wealth from which only the owner of the lottery or the company doing the promotion really wins?
Writing, as any human activity, is a continuous search for you voice, relevant results, a narrowing, tough, and dirty decision process about how you live your life.
It also took me years to fight the two traits I hated the most about myself. Those that went extinct after I changed my career the first time and moved into project management.
The first impression about an Uber driver is a pattern the passenger transfers from his earlier experience with using a taxi.
Be honest with yourself. You might discover that you have the life of a machine without nobody to support and keep you company when all the work is done.
I fight this war every day. I oblige myself by making fun of my own person at least three times a day for one reason or another.
It’s a fine balance between learning from other people experiences and missing the wonderful experience of making your own mistakes.
A time-related business.
Small lies build up to an erroneous self-awareness and a misrepresented daily existence.
If you really want this job, like the company, and are willing to work hard for it, tell them so, no matter their objection. Be hungry.
Stop procrastinating. Time passes anyway. You might as well look back a year from now and feel good that you tried and fail instead of just looking back and seeing yourself not doing things. Undoing your future.
Congratulations! As an Uber rider you’re by design an inductee for the Uber’s Walk of Fame. We, the Driver, we’ll give you from one to five stars no matter if you want it or not.
What I’m scared of is not death, but dying because some idiot doesn’t value his life at all, not to mention other people lives.
With Uber and the platform economy comes a change that will affect not only the economy, but the entire society and also the existence of politically set national borders.
When you decide to focus on one of your ideas, because your knowledge and gut feeling scream is the right one, a wonderful extinction event follows.
Even if the virtual world floods the reality with new ways of interacting and evaluating those interactions, you should use your brain to understand the difference. This is real life and your actions have real implications you should consider.