My grandma thinks I’m mucking around when, at three in the afternoon, I’m still in my pyjamas gobbling up her lemon bars, sipping coffee, and telling her I’ve been working all day and need to take a break. She doesn’t believe me when I tell her that, “Yes, I do have a job and I’m not slacking around.” I’m tempted to add that I’m probably working longer hours than most people with traditional 9 to 5 jobs, but that would probably just aggravate her perplexity. (And anyway, by longer hours, I really mean watching videos in YouTube till 4 a.m.).
So I tell her about this wonderful thing called the Internet (well, she’s not so technologically-challenged; she actually uses Skype to talk to her ever-elusive prodigal son), and how I can work from anywhere so long as I have my laptop with me and I can connect to a Wi-Fi. I can work at home, in a park, in a café or restaurant, even a bar at night, or in the beach. The world is virtually my office. “But how do you work?? How do you get paid?” She persists. “Everything is connected now, lola. Everything can be transacted online. Everything I need for work is in my computer” She nods and thinks about this for awhile, shaking her head with how much the world has changed.
I, too, still shake my head once in a while with how much things have changed. I’m particularly awed by how different our minds work today, how it’s evolving with the advent of the internet, in the way we absorb information and link ideas–like a web or a map. If before, the emphasis was on linear, systematic, and standardized thinking (which was what traditional factory and office work required, as well as researching in the library), today, we are leaning to a more abstract kind of thinking, absorbing information from all directions, manipulating them until we form patterns and meaning, and creating ideas that lead to another idea, and another, and another, and further amalgamating and encapsulating, including connections with long past ideas, and so on and so forth, processing almost instantly, millions and millions of bits per second.
I think it’s so cool how we can absorb a myriad of information, interlink them, and try to put order in all the chaos without having to think of ourselves as insane in being able to synthesise seemingly unrelated ideas. Our brains are evolving and there are studies to prove it too! With it, our boring lives and stupid jobs and silly emotions will evolve too. Ooooh. It’s so new age. Here’s a study that suggests human brains are evolving.