Late afternoon winter wind in Saint-Malo.
The city has the highest tides in Europe,
with water that can rise 13m over the course of six hours.
31 December 2019 (Saint-Malo, France) – Every New Year’s morning I have sat down by the sea, scratching notes to myself in the sand (“stuff to do in the coming year”) with an old wooden staff given to me years ago by my maternal grandfather. It was a family custom.
Usually, I was in Greece but for the last few years my wife and I have spent New Year’s weekend and the following week at our home in Saint-Malo. And yes, I bring that old wooden staff.
We always take off the first week of every New Year to rest, recharge, calibrate, and re-energize ourselves for the months ahead, and whatever they may bring us. It follows the advice given to me long ago by Dominique Senequier (she now heads Axa Private Equity in France) who told me the trick to happiness and personal success is to be committed to all aspects of your life, and incorporate down time to do it. Otherwise we are like fish who do not know they swim in water, and are seldom aware of the atmosphere of the times through which we move.
No doubt you’ve all read multiple “year-end-in-review pieces” plus multiple “the-decade-in-review” pieces” that have proliferated across the internet in late December. We know the year was filled with unprecedented shifts and shocks around the world – a tornado of news-making that scrambled our grasp of time and memory, producing a sensory overload that can make even seismic events disappear quickly from the collective consciousness and public view.
Events that should be seared into our brains and conversations are mere blips on our screen. A long-time friend, Danielle Alberti at Axios, produces a chart every year (based on search trends from Google News Lab) that shows how short our attention spans have become as news coverage darts from one massive event to another:
And truth disappears. “Truth is golden” is something I constantly hear. Well, if so, that means you can melt it, bend it, flake it, fake it, or pound it into dust. Reality, in today’s world, is something you knead. Social media has led us to skate over the surface of life, touching things lightly but never getting caught in the real essence of what is going on, and why. And the ogres have mastered language and culture. I often hear that iterary culture, or even just plain truth-telling, is in itself a bulwark against all of this. But the facts don’t bear out the hypothesis. Literary culture is no remedy for totalitarianism. Ogres gonna ogre. Rhetoric is as liquid and useful for the worst as it is for the best. The humanities, unfortunately, belong to humanity. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
And so you take a deep breath. And let go.
For those of us in the technology world, it was a killing pace. Yes, the breathtaking advance of scientific discovery and technology has the unknown on the run. But as we are hurled headlong into this frenetic pace we realise we suffer from illusions of understanding, a false sense of comprehension, failing to see the looming chasm between what our brain knows and what our mind is capable of accessing.
It’s a problem, of course. Science has spawned a proliferation of technology that has dramatically infiltrated all aspects of modern life. In many ways the world is becoming so dynamic and complex that technological capabilities are overwhelming human capabilities to optimally interact with and leverage those technologies. And that tech news/announcement cycle moves so fast that by the time it took to research, write, reflect, edit, and publish, it has already become yesterday’s news. In 2019 (hell, the past decade), yesterday’s news might as well be last year’s news.
I hope you all have the opportunity to rest, recharge, calibrate, and re-energize yourselves for the months ahead, and whatever they may bring you.
I wish you all a safe, healthy and joyful New Year.
