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By Jason Lim
My wife and I just listened to a Zoom call for the parents of kids who have entered into a national chess tournament that's happening in a few weeks. There are over 1,600 kids coming to this tournament, many flying in from all over the country. The organizers were explaining everything from how the ratings are calculated to where to go and sit in the conference hall while your kids are playing a game. In a word, they were explaining all the critical, mundane details that make a huge conference tick.
Today was freezing in northern Virginia where I live. As with any boy his age, my son braved the weather by going to school in a T-shirt with short pants. When he came home, he started complaining of a sore throat that made it painful to swallow right after he quaffed down a plateful of pasta. After a warm bath and couple of children's pain pills, he's now safely in his own bed, nestled in a warm blanket that he will undoubtedly kick off in his sleep after a few minutes.
Tomorrow morning will inevitably start the same way that it started every other morning this week. Nay, every morning since my son started going to school. Wake him up, a little too late every morning, cajole him to brush his teeth and wash his face, demand that he quickly puts on his school clothes, shout at him to come downstairs for breakfast, hurry him to gulp down whatever's left and get in the car, drive like a madman through morning traffic to the school, and then drop him off with a sigh of relief and wistfulness.
This is our life. A series of the mundane that will repeat themselves like clockwork. It's literally the reenactment of Groundhog Day, punctuated with short bursts of the surprising, unexpected, inevitable pains and pleasures of living in today's world.
And I can't complain. No, I dare not complain because it is the mundane that will save us. It is the everyday mundane that will allow us to pause our lives with some semblance of certainty that can ground us. It is the mundane that enables us to make connections that are real, definitive, tangible, and, most of all, tactile.
In fact, it's the mundane that I will hold on to for dear life as reality collapses with ever more speed around us driven by ChatGPT and similar AI engines that compresses our lives into ever-thinning layers of stimulus and reactions that spiral ever upwards in its strength, speed, and hold on our psyche. Addiction is too weak a word to describe it. It's a societal pathology that is sweeping over us like a tsunami of spiritual fentanyl that is drowning us with a fearful but omnipotent contradiction of the concurrent oxymoron: a general sense of numbness and the incessant search for the next stronger high.
Everything you see or hear is over-the-top, sensational, and shallow that's unbearable yet irresistible. The whole concept of what's authentic is losing its meaning in a world where everything you encounter online or hear over the phone is suspect and untrustworthy. You can buy a cheap tool on the Dark Web that will create an avatar that can look, talk, and sound exactly like whoever to interact in the virtual world. This avatar is now as real as you are. You can also create a late-breaking news story of some event that can be reported and widely disseminated through mainstream media that is as real as that avatar that's reporting that news in front of that crime scene. Remember that Canadian actor who traveled to Korea to get plastic surgery to look like Jimin of BTS but died on the operating table? Yeah. All real. All fake.
What do words like "genuine" or "authentic" mean in such a world? Does trust mean anything in today's emerging world? How can you trust anything when you can't trust your own senses?
The only place to turn is the everyday mundane that I can touch, feel, and trust to be real. It is my son's sleepy eyes when waking up in the morning, sighing with resignation that today's a school day. It's my wife's hurried whispers as she readies everyone to start their day in the morning. It is the daily call to my octogenarian parents who somehow still can't get their whole face into the FaceTime screen when we talk. It's the in-person high fives and hugs with my long-time colleagues when I see them at work, savoring the sense of human skin against human skin as we celebrate the day's little triumphs.
There is an old adage in Korea that goes, "Seeing something once is better than hearing about it one hundred times." Sorry, but it no longer applies.
Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.
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