The Joy of Working Things Out
When Dad hit his seventies, Mom started calling him “The Old Curmudgeon.”
Not living with them by then, I naturally did not have a clear idea of why she called him that. I suspect he was just grumpy. When he turned 65, we threw a birthday celebration for him, which in retrospect likely wasn’t such a good move. Dad was generally a pretty quiet guy (even though he had a pretty good temper, too), and I remember at one point in the party he looked at me and said, “Well, your father is going to go in the basement and hang himself.”
Dad didn’t like getting old. None of us do, I think. The body starts sending you messages, and (I suppose because you may be getting hard of hearing) those messages get louder all the time.
Dad’s claim of Curmudgeon was hardly unique. I could well be wrong, but I suspect that part of it came from the fact that, as part of the Depression / World War II / post-war prosperity generation, he could well remember hard times, physical tests, and the joys of hard work. Indeed, one of his simple lessons to me was to “work hard and keep your nose clean (1).” I suppose others would need to tell me how well I’d followed his instruction.
Dad grew up in Detroit, in a neighborhood rough enough for him to witness a police officer shoot a suspect dead on the street. Later in life, working in a Detroit Free Press station (2), he was robbed at gunpoint. Like most Depression-era kids, he had tough times at home, and he saw plenty of things during World War II, even though he never shipped out.
So when it came time to be 65, all done, retired, he must have had that sense many of us do, of something lurking over our shoulders, watching us as we manage and maintain — what would he do now that was relevant?
What, indeed? Dad was forty when I was born, so when he retired from the Free Press I’d barely hit the workplace. You’re immortal in your twenties, and perhaps for this reason (I’m being charitable with myself) I had no real idea what was going through his mind on this milestone birthday. I suspect Mom, who would retire from her own job at Ford the following year, had an inkling.
And several years later, Dad became The Old Curmudgeon.
I get it now.
You begin to get a sense that the world is moving to a place far different from that place where you grew up, lived, loved and worked. And while I spend a great deal of my time keeping current with cybersecurity and am still quite involved in business, serving on a couple of local cybersecurity-related Boards, still there is that sense of That World Which I Understand giving ground to That World Which I Do Not Understand.
Which brings me to the Joy of Working Things Out.
Today’s LinkedIn feed presented me with the latest in an endless string of generative AI miracles, this time extolling the virtues of one such engine (name I don’t remember) that helped the extoller create something like 17 TikTok videos in under six minutes, and wasn’t this amazing?
I have a grandson who is learning two languages growing up in Amsterdam — the English of his parents, and the Dutch of his nannies. He’s figured out how to walk. He is learning to be kind to animals. He likes his trucks. He is learning to point, to say one-syllable things, to feed himself, to watch colorful things on the television, to enjoy trees and leaves and especially birds. He is less than a year and a half old. That is amazing.
Seventeen TikTok videos in under six minutes is, I suppose, something to crow about. I don’t know. I have a feeling that the world of TikTok and genAI may be where I start to draw the line.
Here’s what I mean.
I walk in the woods. A lot. Lately I’ve learned to spot all kinds of interesting mushrooms, or funghi, as Italians would say. At the same time, on these long walks, I’m wrestling with the kinds of ideas I now have the time to wrestle with. What is information? How can information security policy be reduced from a hundred pages to three sentences? How fragmented is America? What does “patriot” mean, and why is it so dangerous? How can the Fraud Triangle and the Security Triangle conspire to define who we are and how we should live? (3) What is the nature of knowledge versus the dark matter that surrounds us? How can enterprise risk best be understood, and what actions can best address this?
Late in my career, I said that the duty of an “elder statesperson” employee is to organize one’s long experience, separating that which is timeless (guidance, wisdom) from that which is fleeting (the latest technology, the newest way to get something done) — and, once organized, to jettison all the stuff that had been fun to learn but is irrelevant now, and to hand over that which was hard-won experience transcending the technical moment, so that those coming along could benefit and possibly avoid tripping over the same tree roots.
We don’t really get that chance, though. Business has a way of brooming aside those who no longer scratch the latest market itch. Lately, it seems that that brooming is happening more and more, and for more and more arbitrary reasons.
Enter generative AI, TikTok, and all the rest.
That genAI / TikTok extoller was so excited. He’d worked out all the steps using this tool, and presto! he had such an amazing thing to share! How creative!
If this is creativity, it is concerning.
There may well be another reason behind those 2023 Hollywood strikes. Writers and other creative folk live in perpetual fear: Something will come along that will knock off a “creation” that’s good enough, that can substitute far more cheaply and with more replicability, than that which a writer, painter, singer, composer, or actor can summon. And for business, and for the mass markets it serves, this may be sufficient.
But it is not enough.
You see, there is a joy in the hard work of working things out. It’s exercise every bit as demanding as a healthy physical workout. You’d think by now we’d have invented machines that would do our workouts for us. After all, that would be efficient, wouldn’t it? Some genAI-driven beast in the corner, sweating through crunches, while we watch the latest offering from the latest influencer?
We know it wouldn’t be.
So why shy from thinking? Why shy from working things out — even if, as I’ve argued elsewhere (4), the insight you gain is satisfying to you alone?
There is no greater reward than breakthrough thinking — even if that breakthrough leads to nothing pragmatic or marketable in today’s consumption-mad world. These are, instead, breakthroughs of the heart — and while their influence may be on a (very) few people, or simply on you alone, still they are worth laboring for.
You may well work out, as I have no doubt done, answers to problems which have been wrestled over before (with answers obtained then as well). After all, in thousands of years of interactive human existence, there is nothing new under the sun (5).
Or perhaps everything is new. In the woods during or after a rain, things feel new-washed. New creatures arrive all the time. And thoughts and insights new to you are valuable even in their isolated novelty — if only because you worked so hard to find them.
The wellsprings of creativity arise in all of us, do what we will to tamp them down to accommodate a pragmatic world. Generative AI will never teach me to have a flash of insight while walking, alone and Internet-less, on a path in the woods, sorting things out. Eventually, it will find its resting place in our restless world.
As for me, well, I suppose I may be becoming that Old Curmudgeon — ahead of Dad, which would make me an over-achiever.
Or this. The world is too full of new things for me not to discover them, explore them, revel in them. I may choose to sideline the latest in tech. If that makes me a Curmudgeon, well there you are. And in the exploration, the finding, the Joy of Working Things Out, I will shelve that Curmudgeon and remain a child always on the edge of discovery.
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(1) Here’s more on this strange little phrase: https://english-grammar-lessons.com/keep-your-nose-clean-meaning/
(2) A Free Press station was a small building where the daily newspapers were dropped off. In those days (and it may still be true today), you had press runs and trucks full of newspapers. These papers had to be dropped off at various points around the city in large batches, which were then broken down into the numbers required for each newspaper carrier (at that time, a boy between twelve and eighteen), who would pick up his batch of papers and deliver them on his paper route. A circulation supervisor, Dad had to have a working knowledge of a sizable chunk of the city’s streets.
(3) I’m unpacking this a lot more elsewhere, so just go with the flow here.
(4) See Dark Matter. It may seem like all these essays are unrelated, but trust me, they’re all squirrels frolicking in the same park.
(5) Ecclesiastes. Need I remind you? https://www.gotquestions.org/nothing-new-under-the-sun.html
