This morning someone told me of a saying that regularly makes her chuckle when she goes to the toilet at work. On the back of the toilet door there is a sign that says,
“Everybody wants to change the world,
but nobody wants to change the toilet roll.
BE the change.“
I LOVE it!
I am SO tempted to “play” with this quote, to make it into a bog – oops, blog – but I will restrain myself in the interests of propriety.
Connect me to a human
This is Robin speaking – the real, live, non-AI Robin Prag.
It’s Saturday morning 27 April 2024, in Perth, Western Australia, and I’m doing some revisions to my website.
I nearly cried a couple of hours ago as I lost an hour’s worth of work – changes and updates on my website – due to a computer glitch that has never happened before, and is totally unrelated to anything that I have or haven’t done.
Aaaaaaargh!!!
I search for help; I wade through and push aside multiple cobwebs of “internet fluff” preventing me from finding what I actually need to resolve this issue.
Eventually I find a “happiness engineer” to help resolve the problem for me.
It’s a long time since I’ve contacted a “happiness engineer” – in the past, when they got back to my email query, they were mostly super helpful, so I eagerly look forward to his (the name is male) help.
He gives me loads of useful information, but something in his response doesn’t ring true to what I had written. I reply and tell him that no, the issue is not resolved, but there’s no response.
Then I scroll down and wade through the morass of information he’s given me, and I’m about to reply again when right at the bottom together with a heart-warming, wonderfully politically correct, personal encouragement of me in my life, together with supporting emojis, I see the following concluding words:
Remember, if you need to talk to a human, just type ‘connect me to a human’.
!!!!!!!!
The future is NOW.
And it’s only getting worse.
Could it be that the global epidemic of depression, anxiety and multiple major mental health issues (gotta love the alliteration) is in some vague, roundabout way related to the fact that we are so DISCONNECTED FROM OTHER HUMANS???
They’ll never prove it – try and make that evidence-based!
I’m very grateful to and appreciative of AI for all it can do for us.
And some fantastic pieces of AI generated art I’ve recently seen.
I love the humour it has provided me for this post.
But I worry for the future generations as we become more and more disconnected from our fellow human beings; as we live in, get our information from, and base our Life Decisions on algorithms and ARTIFICIAL Intelligence (which, in truth, is artificial MIMICRY).
And what about the day, when our request to ‘connect me to a human’ can no longer be granted?
I’ve had a great life, and here’s hoping I won’t be around to witness that.
Fixing the Movie
“Trying to fix the world is like trying to change a movie by manipulating the movie screen. The world as we know it is simply a screen onto which we project our thoughts. Until we change those thoughts, the movie stays the same.
Whenever our outer world remains stuck, it is incumbent upon us to look, not outward, but inward. It is a call to find the places in ourselves where we are holding on to old ways.”
– Marianne Williamson
God Help Us to Change
“God help us to change.
To change ourselves and to change our world.
To know the need for it.
To deal with the pain of it. To feel the joy of it.
To undertake the journey without understanding the destination.
The art of gentle revolution.”
– Michael Leunig; Australian Writer & Cartoonist.
Grown-Up
‘By the time it came to the edge of the Forest the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, “There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” But all the little streams higher up in the Forest went this way and that, quickly, eagerly, having so much to find out before it was too late.’
– A.A. Milne. (from Winnie the Pooh).
Personal Growth
Inevitably, each of us will reach the moment when the place we have felt most comfortable becomes so uncomfortable that we feel as if we are suffocating in the stale air of our own history.
Most of us will arrive at some point in our lives when the world with which we are most familiar no longer works for us.
We are meant to outgrow ourselves; indeed, we can no more avoid this development than we can stop the ageing process.
The only question is how gracefully – and healthily – we will handle the transition.”
– Caroline Myss
Listening to Life 