We can access digital archives of newspapers from over a hundred years ago. This means we can get closer to experiencing history than ever before. If we seek to understand how people lived five decades ago, we can read several books on the topic and we’ll have a decent idea. We will know about demographics, ideologies, the economy and the zeitgeist. However, there is merit to actually diving into that history and spending a few hours reading exactly what those people read every day. What were they complaining about? What were the pressing matters? What were the general attitudes to specific social issues?

We may learn about inflation in the 1980s, but we will inevitably transpose today’s society onto that one. There is so much we take for granted. If we explore the day-to-day of that time, we will be shocked by the most trivial details, such as the general sexism or racism of the population displayed innocuously in letters to the editor of a centrist newspaper. Apart from the inherent value of better understanding, this exercise can spark new academic analyses. It’s also a useful vaccine against judging the past through a present lens.

Experiencing the past

Art is notoriously hard to test. It’s not that it doesn’t do anything. On the contrary, it does—or aims to do—much more than any piece of technology, tool, or service could ever aspire to achieve. The problem is that what it produces is as subjective as the number of people who experience it.

If we make a chair, the necessary tests appear obvious. Does it stand? Does it wobble? Does it hold a person’s weight? How much exactly? Does it rust? Is it flammable? Is it comfortable enough? Could we add a cushion to it? If so, what size?

However, if we assemble a chair using candy and hang it upside down from the ceiling, we may have created a piece of art with endless interpretations. Does it mean something? It sure does to us, but to whom else? What is its impact? We can quantify exhibition visits but not the influence our piece may have on current and future artists.

For a while, popularity became the measure of artistic quality. The illusion has long since faded. Popularity doesn’t add or subtract from art. It’s simply another quality. A work may be abstract and popular, realistic and obscure, or vice versa.

The untestable nature of art should not bother us. Its value lies well beyond anything we can measure. After all, we’re not the only species to make and use tools, but we don’t know of any other that conceives ideas, such as chairs made of candy hanging upside down.

Chairs made of candy hanging upside down

A company may respond generously to a customer complaint because its mission is to provide and make the world a better place. Or it may do so because its current growth phase establishes that building its brand and generating word of mouth trump making a profit—for now.

We may come into contact with two separate businesses that operate in a similar manner. For one, altruism resides in its core. For the other, it’s a semblance. The result is the same. The reasons aren’t.

We live in a world where results determine everything. It’s all most care about. Almost nobody has time for reasons. Alas, reasons are the better teachers. Will we ever learn?

Results, reasons, lessons

We call it the Information Age, but it should be called the Business Age. Business dominates what happens, and why, when and where it does. When the dissemination of information and the advent of telecommunications favoured Business, we got exactly that. When Business needed people to be able to work from home, that’s what happened. When Business needs the same workers to return to the office, they do.

More poignantly, it takes a lunatic to question whether we could live in a different age. Try questioning the idea of Business being central to everything we do, and be prepared to lose trust and friends. Everything is Business and Business is everything.

Yet, another age may come. People might decide that Business no longer serves them—even if the realisation comes a long time after it did—if it ever did. When the new age comes, we will be allowed to talk about the Business Age and examine it thoroughly. For now, it takes lunacy.

Business lunacy

Popular wisdom states that there aren’t stupid questions, only those that aren’t asked. While I agree that fear of sounding foolish should never deter one from asking, it’s disingenuous to use the argument to press an audience into voicing whatever crosses their heads. It usually happens when the person with the answers doesn’t want or have the time to answer complex queries.

Indeed, a good question takes time and effort to put together. After all, the best questions are better than their answers. And yes, there may not be stupid questions, but some are much better than others.

Better questions

Box-ticking is fast and convenient, thus ideal for this age of rush and immediacy. Check here, tick there, it’s all done, everybody is happy, and we have the documents to prove it.

The problem arises when someone seeks an elaborate answer. It turns out box-ticking is also mind-numbing and alienating. Who could have thought?

Martian Thoughts

Experiencing the past

Chairs made of candy hanging upside down

Results, reasons, lessons

Business lunacy

Better questions

Box-ticking