Chapter 12: Getting It Together

“The world is fucked up,” Dexter declared.

Al, the social worker Dexter had started seeing, fidgeted in his seat, in anticipation of another long session of venting. During the first two sessions with him, Dexter had talked non-stop about the indignities heaped upon him by an unfeeling corporation, and the disrespectful way in which his wife had dumped him. Al had not been able to get a word in edge-wise.

Al asked, “Why do you say that?”

“All of the old rules are gone, and there aren’t any new rules to take their place,” Dexter said.

“Can you give me an example,” Al asked.

“If you’re going to dump someone, you tell him or her to his or her face. If that isn’t possible, you write a letter ... a Dear John letter ... in which you explain things. You don’t leave a one line note or a text message,” Dexter said. “It isn’t right.”

“I’ll admit that doesn’t give you much of a chance to get closure,” Al said.

“Here’s another. It used to be if you worked harder than everyone else and did a great job, then you’d be promoted. Now they expect you to work harder than humanly possible, and to do a great job, just to keep your job. That’s not right,” Dexter said.

“Well, that bit about working hard and getting rewarded for it has never really been true,” Al said.

Shaking his head in the negative, Dexter said, “It was true when I started working. My boss would say, ‘do this extra work, and do a good job, and we’ll promote you.’ I did the job, I did it well, and they promoted me. Now, they tell you the same thing, and you do the job, and you do it well, and they don’t promote you. When you ask why they didn’t promote you, they tell you that you should be happy to have a job.”

“That’s just basic dishonesty,” Al said.

“Absolutely. We used to be honest, and now we aren’t. That has destroyed the old rules we used to live by,” Dexter said.

“So what has dishonesty got to do with the old rules not applying anymore?” Al asked.

Dexter said, “Because when people aren’t honest, they won’t live up to the agreements made under the old rules. You follow the old rules, only to discover that people are using them to take advantage of you. The new ‘name of the game’ is: lie, cheat, and steal. There are no rules.”

“You don’t think you’re being a little negative?” Al asked.

“No. I’m being honest,” Dexter said. “Look at the games they are playing on Wall Street! They promise ‘granny’ all kinds of return on her investments. She loses everything because they kill the stock market with junk bonds, insider trading, and Ponzi schemes. Do they lose any money? No. They make money, regardless of what happens. Those crooks are stealing grandma’s pension, and they are getting praised for it. If that doesn’t prove my point, then nothing does.”

“You’re talking about a few individuals in a select industry,” Al said. “The vast majority of people are still honest.”

“The honest ones are losing their homes. The crooks are getting rich,” Dexter said.

Al said, “It just looks like that. You’re just looking at the worst cases and generalizing from them.”

“You’re naïve,” Dexter said.

“No. I just prefer to see the good side of things,” Al said. “I’m an optimist.”

“There was a time when I was young and naïve, like you.”

“Are you saying you’re old and jaded?” Al asked.

Dexter sighed, “I remember when I was in college. Some of our professors used to talk about how we would start having thirty hour work weeks, because technology would allow us to accomplish in thirty hours, what used to take forty hours. They said our increases in productivity would lead to increases in leisure time. I actually believed that garbage.

“I looked forward to working six hours a day, or four days a week. I thought the arts would really flourish. I thought that families would grow closer.

“I really thought that by being an engineer, that I was going to help make that happen. I got into the area of information sciences, thinking that I could leverage computers to increase the productivity of office workers. We could generate a report in ten minutes, that used to take all day of a manager’s time. That would give some manager a four day work week.

“The result was just the opposite. They got rid of people, and dumped more work on those left behind. Rather than working forty hour weeks, we’re working seventy hours a week. Instead of creating a utopia, we created a dystopia.

“There’s no escape. Technologies like cell phones and e-mail made it easier to interrupt our leisure time, made it impossible to get away from work, since work could now follow you anywhere and at all times, day and night.

“Looking back at all of the seventy hour work weeks that I put in at the company, I am not happy. I helped create this modern dystopia. I don’t know how many people lost jobs because of the software that I helped write.

“I think the arts have suffered. I haven’t seen any major new trends in art. It’s just the same old stuff repackaged. It reminds me of packages of soap that now come with ‘new and improved’ labels put on them. There’s nothing new and improved about the soap. You lather up, rinse off, and you’re cleaner than before. No change.

“Television as an art? Give me a break. It has successfully sunk to the lowest common denominator of society. I watched a ‘reality show’ one night last week. I don’t know what planet those folks were living on if they considered it to be anything at all like reality. It was horrible.

“There’s no such thing as family any more. Before the technological revolution, most marriages lasted a lifetime. Now, half of the marriages in this country end in divorce. Half of the adults in this country live alone. We’ve become isolated. Even when we are together, we aren’t.

“My wife and I never talked to each other. We were each too busy with work to talk. Texting. That’s how we communicated. That’s not real communication. How can you look deeply into her eyes and tell her that you love her, when you’re fifteen miles away, and all you’ve got are one line text messages flying back and forth across the telephone network? You can’t! The ‘I love you’ carries as much emotional impact as: ‘pick up milk.’

“My son plays video games all afternoon and evening. Trying to get him away from the game is impossible. He says that he’s doing things with friends, but he’s interacting within a fantasy world. He’s killing mythical monsters with magic spells. That’s not real. He’s not even looking at real people, just computer generated avatars.

“My daughter spends all of her time chatting with her friends online. She’s holding six or seven different conversations at once. How can she share something meaningful? She can’t. Thinking and expressing deep ideas can’t be done by typing single lines of text back and forth. Does she do anything with her friends? No. What kind of friendship is that when you don’t do anything with your friend?”

Al said, “I’ll admit that I see a lot of that.”

“Could you imagine treating me using chat, or texting?” Dexter asked.

“Not really,” Al said, thinking that in this case, he’d like to give it a try!

“The thing is, that this kind of surreal and unnatural form of interacting is going to become accepted and normal, if something isn’t done to change it,” Dexter said.

“I have a bit more faith in people than that,” Al said. “We’ll find healthy ways to work within that matrix. We’ll have relationships with people, but they’ll be different in nature than the ones in the past.”

“They’ll be dishonest relationships,” Dexter said.

“Why do you say that?” Al asked.

Dexter said, “It’s real easy to lie when your interaction with someone is via text on a one inch by one inch screen. I could tell some woman that I’m tall, dark, and handsome. She’d never know that I’m of average height, pale, and nothing special in the looks department ... unless we actually meet, which is becoming less and less common. Lies are easy.”

“I don’t believe that is entirely accurate. Lies can introduce inconsistencies, and people pick up on that pretty quickly,” Al said. “It’s also a lot easier to be honest about things from a distance.”

“I don’t believe it,” Dexter said.

“It’s true. People find it easier to admit to some things, when they aren’t face to face. I think the net result will be better relations among people,” Al said.

Dexter snorted. “When was the term ‘friends with benefits’ introduced into the popular culture?”

“I don’t know,” Al said.

“That term didn’t exist when I was a teenager. At that time, sex was making love with the person you wanted to spend the rest of your life with. A man didn’t experience sex with a woman, until long after everyone else knew they were a couple. Otherwise, she’d be labeled a slut. Now, it’s something ‘friends’ do. What the fuck is that all about?” Dexter asked.