I have been collecting obscure science fiction movie posters from the internet for a while now. These are some of my favorites. Has anyone here seen any of these films?
We recently started working on a group project. It's just a bunch of us friends trying to build something together. But we immediately reailized how different we all are from each other. We felt like all of us wasted a couple of weeks running around in circles, not really utilizing our time and strengths.
The task at hand was to make a system that would maximize the team's output.
The obvious way to approach a task like this is to create hierarchies that are common in corporate and other workplaces. But we don't want to do that. It just doesn't factor in all the unique talents and individual qualities of the team members.
But we still need a system because we don't work at all without one. What we ended up doing was creating a very flexible workflow that accounts for individual strengths. On paper, it's a heavily skewed system in terms of responsibilities. But it works wonderfully because we are segregating tasks based on what each of us is good at.
It has worked wonderfully so far. But we are not sure how scalable this is going to be as we keep adding new members. Because we all understand each other very well, there's a trust factor that can't be replicated when someone leaves and a new member joins. The flexibility makes the system fragile.
Have any of you worked in teams and developed systems that work best? And do you think you have to steer away from flexible systems toward more corporate-like structures for larger teams?
The story only has one child locked in the basement. And the city's joy runs on that child's misery. Most of them just live with it. Some of them, every now and then, just walk away to never come back.
I am sure, I am not brave enough to walk away. Why? Because I see them everyday. Not just one, but so many who are just unlucky.
I couldn't care less about the ones who are unlucky. In the news, on my feed. Because like most, I am just happy being in the system that has created the comforts for me at the expense of the others. Systematic oppression is great as long as I benefit from it. It's easy to be moved by one child in the basement. But now make it a group of kids in a land far away from me, and I wouldn't care. It's just a stat.
And that's how our world works. There are entire societies out there, civilizations that are suffering just because they got the worse part of the deal. Whole populations that are at the wrong end of an arrangement they never agreed to. So the rest of us can keep ourselves comfortable. And we don't really care. I mean, we pretend to care, but we are all hypocrites. We look away. We would rather ignore than be aware of the privileges that give us our lives.
Because looking away doesn't cost anything. The story is not about the ones who walk away. It's about the ones who stayed, saw the child, felt bad for an afternoon, and went back to the party.
We are not the ones who walk away.
I love Philip K. Dick's work when it is dealing with the uncertainties of the human mind. That's the best kind of horror, I think. It questions the very foundations of uncertainty and what's real and what's not. The horror of what you know to be real, concrete, and solidly yours becoming alien, strange, and something you can't quite put your finger on.
That's a fear that I have been dealing with ever since I was a kid. Whether it was a parent who suddenly starts acting weird after becoming intoxicated, I have dealt with that. Or a friend who suddenly starts acting weird as a teenager after being close to me for my whole childhood. Or a partner who suddenly starts acting weird and ghosts me after being my emotional support for so long.
The fear of something dear, concrete, and real becoming alien to me has haunted me my whole life, and it will continue to do so. And that dreadful, gut-wrenching feeling is what makes PKD one of the best writers and my favorite.
I recently re-read "The Father-Thing." It is my favorite story by Dick. It captures that feeling so well: something as fundamental as a father becoming alien, without being able to put your finger on what's wrong, without anyone else sharing your deepest fears. It tickles and triggers that part of my childhood brain that, even as an adult, scares me because it was never healed.
I just read the book Finding the Mother Tree. A fantastic read. And it had me thinking how our view of nature is shaped by the linguistic metaphors we use.
We have always looked at forests through the lens of competition. Evolution is the survival of the fittest. How life is a struggle and whatnot.
But the book says we have been looking at only half the picture. If competition exists in nature, cooperation exists as well. The forest is not a battlefield. It's a much more complex system, where both competition and cooperation play their parts.
Would you think humanity at large will be a bit more empathetic if we just start looking at nature in a more nuanced way?