- Achievements.
When i woke up, i gathered the last bits of a severely intense dream which revolved around my former life / or, live(s). I am meaning to digest this fully but the details of a dream only lasts up to when its actually last impressed upon you.
So , in this dream, it’s melded a bunch of people in all countries i worked in - and culminated in a conversation where they were all looking forward to working with me. There were my old colleagues, as well as the freelance people who milled around, and the casual atmosphere of creative people who sang tunes -recorded things in their minds, and made use of every space in the office. And drank copious amounts of coffee. To invite all the multiple intelligences to work for you on the daily. Not just during the 10 minutes of pitching, or recording sound, producing images for air-ing, or to place your spatial abilities at direct accountability for layouts that get printed in newpapers delivered to homes the very next day. (Not when people click on the advert, or platform it comes out in. Hopefully, daily.)
What have you gathered here, is the making of someone who is part of your routine, on the daily. Like you were in a marriage. Being someone you see on the daily, as fresh and bright as the coffee, or creativity ahead, that comes to life at your sensing it.
That experience we expound to the internet, for people who know it -or just know it- that is the circumstance of the Digital. The generations ahead will never have anything else, or know what it’s like to not just work in digital - the publishing and the media, and the advertising that happened in the last ten years as it made it’s way from being a medium where “it’s optional” or the team surrounding anything Digital was considered “Below the Line” efforts, in any marketing campaign.
But as we make our way to properly encasing our actual into digital formats -ergo, the design teams exchausting the UX/UI proportions that stop at, “wait, how was it in the real life anyway?” Is about to get a new name — when that generation wanes and evolves into : But this is the internet. What “experiences” are we transferring to this anyway? What are we translating to something that could only now be evolved, in itself?
Everything.
(Still.)
As long as we aren’t virtual, that is. And we aren’t. We are real people with real lives. And impact real communities, and places, and situations.
But when we have more lives to live “abroad” when we can clearly be sufficient on our 16" of space on our laptops, getting cranially esconced in what screens there are in our 75sqm boxes, from the mobile and tiny, to the split screen laptops, to the monitors, to the TV screens (that now behave like engaged magnets to the internet as well, as if it never had a broadcasting cable exclusively receiving free TV signal in the first place).
The places i’ve been in — were not as long or as hefty as some people’s but what it was, were memorable. If after 20 years, i still have been dreaming about them, i think the fears and the nervousness at presentations and pitches were totally worth all the jive i get in the present. That was epic. The first page of my resume should have read, Objective: To be impressionable.
The thought that your achievements were paled in the fore of an actual working resumé that came alive with your actual experiences. And whoever you are, your interests were penned in stone, brightly ahead of you.
I worked in the creative industry, and having been both in advertising and marketing, made that life look a bit seamless. In theory, it was a gallant thing to be “dragged to another country”, as an expatriate - which then was the only way to evolve the circumstance of head-in-the-clouds (creatives are notorious for getting itchy feet and agency roulette at 2 years), or head cut off by ceiling (marketing people always get frustrated by the symphony of Boards and Directors not looking out for their star players). And moving, while my star was still heading towards North in a place where connections were far more important to track -ergo, that dream- was valued more than the actual work you had done or made. Imagine if Pablo Picasso couldn’t fathom his Guernica more than his madrileñas. That was not sacrificial — it was immediately suicidal.
Why do expat wives have their own businesses? Because, no one has the tenacity to employ them. They, like produce and makeup, came from someone else’s country’s production line, and how do we trust people from a “different system of schooling/ governance”? with our communications, or marketing, or heavy-set implementations of programmes? I’ve become seriosuly heavy set with Diversity in the past.
I don’t think i’ll do that here, again.
When it comes to being asked (for work) about your right brain production or your left brain production. You can ask them, i don’t know any neurologists to help out with that question, do you? At best, they’ll know who you were and offer you a place anyway. But if it’s a cultural shift - being subjected to something that makes society “more advanced” like the quiet evolve of humans - as they “make a living”, to qualify for positions and roles that subject only half their brains into outputs that entirely consumes them, and retire to meager pensions not utilising their halved credit cards as well. Else, not having worked this out yourself, (in the thirty minutes you take up sussing out the role, and them seeing if you’re “a good cultural fit” and allowed to be cut up and thinly sliced like ham), just stand up.
And leave. (That place wouldn’t be worth your time.)
