Factories Baby!
With the Industrial Revolution came factories, assembly lines, and big companies. Growth and prosperity ushered in for humans across America (and the globe).
Large corporate entities became a thing, and they thrived as efficiencies blossomed. After all, if the costs can be lowered, more profits can be made while the end user can get it for cheaper. We all win! Right?
Well, another effect of the industrial Revolution was the rise of the labor force. Factories need workers. Lots of them. And the workers need to follow directions so they don’t deviate from the proven formulas. Just follow the recipes that work to make efficient and cheap products. For the greater good.
So the public education system developed to this demand for a compliant workforce. Schools taught in a way that is valuable for the work needed: follow directions. If it’s on the test, learn it. If it’s not, don’t worry about it.
Basically we started to breed generations of mindless drones. Now, I’m not saying that workers aren’t using their brains on the job. What I’m saying is that the industrial factory work required compliance from the labor force and the resulting education that prepped the population as such.
Consumer Culture
If you’ve studied happiness, you’d know that buying things won’t make you happy. Not for long anyway. The dopamine hit fades pretty fast regardless of how big the hit is. Like that fancy new car you get to keep up with the Joneses.
Yea guess what, the Joneses doesn’t really care what you drive, they’re preoccupied with their own life. Ain’t nobody got time to pay attention to you buddy, sorry to break it to you. Yet, we’re caught in this cycle of “just buy another thing, it’ll make you happy”.
I’m sure there’s a conspiracy theory out there that this consumerism is designed to keep the population under control. Distract us all with shiny things so we keep grinding away at our jobs. We get unhappy, we buy the next thing. We are unhappy again, buy more. An endless cycle.
Whether you subscribe to that conspiracy theory is up to you. What is for sure, is that technology is evolving and the type of labor needed is changing.
The Dawning of a New Age
It’s pretty safe to say we’re well on our way into the Information Age. Tech is developing at an exponential pace. If you’re old enough to remember, what was life like 10 years ago? 20 years ago? 30 years ago? Okay, I’ll stop at 30.
For me, I remember dial up modems when you wanted to connect to the internet. If I wanted to find my way in a car I had to use a paper map. Of course, this doesn’t explain my horrible sense of directions. Great, now I’m feeling old.
But the sentiment still holds – technology is changing the way we live. And technology is also changing the way we work. We just survived our first full year in quarantine and for the fortune folks, a whole year of working from home.
Enter the term, knowledge worker, first coined by Peter Drucker. In short, knowledge workers are paid to solve problems. While there’s a lot of routine or mundane grind in your job (if you’re employed), the real value you provide your employers are your ability to take care of their problems.
Embracing the Future
So what’s this got to do with education and shopping? First, the education system is still in industrial mode teaching the students to follow instructions. When these students enter the workforce, they don’t know what hit them. Knowledge work requires different skills than what they learn in school.
Second, happiness comes from gratitude and growth/progress. As knowledge workers, there are opportunities for both. But there needs to be a shift in culture to teach kids how to be a knowledge worker.
Solving problems and critical thinking is more important than memorization. Because when’s the last time you were stumped on a piece of information you knew you forgot, only to just whip out your phone and google the answer? Probably, all the freegin time, amirite??
Anyway, this change needs to happen in our education system and the culture of the companies we work for. Sure, these will be slow changes, but what we can do is start talking about it. We can all plant the seeds for the future (that sounds so cheesy, I know).