What makes your life significant? Is it not the trace that you leave through interaction with others? I do not mean to discuss the meaning of life here (how hypocritical of me, since this is exactly what I am going to do right after I close these parentheses), but I don’t believe that your existence in isolation has any significance. You go through your way and leave a trace, through achievements, impressions, all in the mind of others, and this is what will supposedly be left when you’re gone. This symbolic footprint will one day be your epitaph. And then you are no more…

How is real life different than your time spent in the digital world then? You go through the web, create, interact with others, leave a mark. Every facebook update, every forum post, every online character in a game, this is you leaving your digital footprint out there. Others see that, recognize it, and remember it to a lesser extent. Perhaps your impact on other individuals online is smaller due to the informality of the interaction, but you no longer need the minds of others to keep the flame of your existence alive. As long as the web lives, your trace will live. It is a different form of life, though. The concept of “you” as a human being and even an individual gives way to the concept of “you” as an entity. We use different aliases in the web. Every one of us usually has at least 5, some more than 50, which would mean that most likely, others would perceive 5 or 50 individuals; in truth, those individuals represent the same digital entity…the same person in real life. Out there you are split into many many pieces, but you are still you, nobody can change that.

As time goes by, more and more of our real life will give way for our digital one. This is no longer science fiction, this is happening here and now. The computer revolution gave us the web. Yesterday the laptop allowed us to take the web with us in our backpack wherever we went. Today the world is in our pocket, tomorrow it will be in front of our eyes, and the day after it will be in our heads. Your digital and analog (see, clever) lives will become parallel until the web becomes an essential part of our lives (and I really mean that, and no, the web is not essential for your existence today, you can end your internal dialog) and possibly takes over. A voluntary Matrix.

In conclusion, I don’t believe that the fact that people spend more and more time online should be alarming. Human civilization can exist both in the web and in the real world. This is still your life, and you should make the most of it wherever you choose, be it offline or online. As long as you don’t come here to run away from something, because one day you may regret that…

The computer screen really is a window to the world. You hear this on the news and see it in ads. You even claim to know and understand it, and maybe you do to some extent, but that extent being far from the full one. It is a hole in your desk that allows you instant access to millions of other people, and to almost all the collective information that humanity possesses right now. You just have to stick your head in. This availability of so many individuals out there is the under-appreciated part that goes under the radar. Because to be honest, we live pretty lonely lives right here amongst us, but we have incorporated this online community into our days without even thinking about it. This thing can be felt if you have the same experience like me of staying in the room 15 minutes by myself with the laptop closed. However, we don’t do that, so we don’t realize our…dependency? No, I don’t like this word; I would say something that makes our lives many times better, but something that we could potentially live without…like our parents, for example. And yet, it’s all there now, and we should at least register it in order to recognize its importance.

You can ask, if all jobs have the same basics, then how come one person is better suited for something and another for something else? The answer lies in the fact that judgement is not always a hard-cut decision; if it were black and white, then let us be honest, you would be useless. Therefore, judgements are hazy, and their outcomes are not so trivial to predict with an untrained eye. Thus a better judgement can be made by a person who is better qualified to make it. It is qualification and capacity that separates different people on different jobs: the qualification and capacity not to do the job itself, but to make the judgements that it requires. All your hard work in education and later on in work training is oriented towards arming you with the capability of making better judgements.

For the ones that still don’t see it, let’s play a little game of examples. Let’s take a random job, any job: a cashier in a grocery store. This is a very basic example and also one that is very easy to analyze since the task is already more than 50% taken over by machines. The store is a place of trade where you purchase goods and in return leave the correct amount of trading currency equivalent to the value of the chosen goods. The cashier may help you by scanning your products and maybe bagging them, but that is not their main purpose. Their main purpose is to make the final judgement whether the transaction can occur or not. Say you owe 12.50, and you give only 12. The cashier’s judgement is that you have not given enough, and therefore you cannot proceed with the purchase. Now, if you give 15, the cashier’s judgement is that everything is in order and the transaction is finalized. This may sound complicated and even crazy, but I assure you that it’s no more complicated than buying a bottle of coke from the store .

What about a non-clerical job? Let’s look into an entire different area: the branches where people actually produce something material. These jobs have always been considered low-level, and the presence of a higher-level concept such as judgement in them seems ludicrous at first. However, I urge you to clear your head from the prejudice and to think what actually happens. To create something, you need raw materials. A craftsman takes this raw material and shapes it into something that can be considered useful to others, i.e. the craftsman uses his skill to add value to the pile of raw materials. What is skill? Is it not the ability to make better judgements in your field acquired through years and years of practice and experience? I’d say it is, and I will leave you dazed and confused at this point.

What about working with people? One of the more complicated examples would be education, because education itself is, as mentioned, one of the basis of forming later judgements. The way of teaching, the strategies involved, the approach, all of these require the judgement of the teacher. Sometimes a teacher may not be even involved: there are people who study by themselves from books or other methods. In the end, though, the proof of education comes from examination, and examination is the ultimate form of judgement. As subjective as it is, an examiner judges your ability based on a number, or even better, based on his/her own judgement.

So far we’ve mentioned machines a couple of times, and I will use this theme to conclude the topic at hand. Machines are not capable of judgement, yet they are taking out many jobs from people. However, don’t forget that it was a person that created those machines and a person that pre-made all the judgements that the machine would have to make on its job were it a human being. Therefore, the machine is nothing more than an imprint of judgements for different situations. It is given a matrix of possible problems that it can face and the “correct” judgements that would be taken by a human in that same situations. While this matrix of problems contains the most probable challenges that a certain job presents, it cannot encapsulate everything. The more difficult your job is in terms of judgement requirements, the harder it would be to construct the template of problems, and the later the point is when a machine will be sitting in your chair doing your work. But don’t worry. Go back to the beginning of the post now, read the first sentence, and know that standardization ensures the existence of a framework, which in turn is the basis of artificial intelligence. May you get your dream job while it still exists .

We are just too safe! I can feel your internal argument and your anticipation to just leap at me and tell me that I’m wrong, but I would advise you to suppress that initial reaction and to think about where we started from and where we are. There was a point in time when humans and animals were on (sort of) an equal footing. Our lives were constantly endangered, every minute of every day. Our basic physiological requirements as well as our safety were not guaranteed. We found ourselves at the bottom of Maslow’s classification of needs, much like all other living things in this world.

We were not special, but perhaps we were never designed to be special. Perhaps we were meant to stay there, at the bottom of that pyramid. Down there is the secret to our exhaustion as species, to our prolonged lethargy. You were never meant to enter the state where you could allow your heart to stop beating like mad. You were never meant to be sleeping unless your purpose was to be asleep, taking a chance against the possibility that you would not wake up due to…whatever. You had no choice whether to be alive or not, because not being alive meant that you were dead.

Spark. I had to move my leg. I have no idea why, just like I have no idea what I am doing or why I am doing it more than half the time. It doesn’t really matter. My bus stop is coming close now. 5 minutes away and then…I have no idea, nothing’s really gonna change. You are still thinking about the ending to the previous stream, thinking whether I made some logical mistake. I usually don’t make logical mistakes. Not being alive doesn’t imply that you are dead…just look at me now, sitting on the bus. My existence is not questionable (well, technically it is, but let’s not go there, shall we), but my living status is. We are too safe. Society has given us the bottom two bases of the pyramid for free. This thing which so many had to pursue at the risk of their lives is now within your reach at zero cost. Please don’t get technical, the very fact that you are reading this means that we are on the same page, and you are nowhere near suffering any lack of air or food. So, basics are covered, and we have no problem. Wrong. The fact that our safety is ensured means that our minds turn to other, more complex problems, and become lenient to the more primal ones. Lack of food is a simple problem, even if you have no solution for it. Lack of self-esteem, though, takes ages to rectify, and this is only one of them. Try and juggle in all the other ones, and you have such a mess that it will make your head spin. And so it does, every single day. The top of the pyramid weighs on our shoulders every day and crushes us as living beings. Yes, it is what separates us from animals, but it is also what makes us miserable and ultimately leads to our demise because of the stress we put on it.

Take a fucking chance, you say? You are both right, and reinforcing my point at the same time, which is pretty awesome to be honest. You can, by choice, shake the foundations of your pyramid in order to try and battle some of the problems that the top bombards you with. People do it all the time, they blow off steam by participating in clearly dangerous and risky behavior, or they willingly do extreme things. However, it is the fact that you, by choice, have to enforce some risk into your life, that is the ultimate irony in this picture. Most of the time, returning to the basics and compromising your own safety is a choice made by you. This is almost as bourgeoisie as the extremely rich Russian oligarchs that use a week of their vacation and live like  hobos, or fuck it, even vegetarians! Perhaps you don’t realize it now, but only a person who has their food secured can be picky about what they eat. Presented with the lack of food, a vegetarian will eat beef, a Muslim will eat pork, and even I will probably eat them motherfucking cockroaches, even though I find that shit disgusting. So, back to the point, no, taking a risk yourself and being naturally in danger are two very different things, the second one occurring way too rarely these days. Our ascension to the top of Maslow’s pyramid is likely to lead to our demise…