Tag: Philip Dodson

Progress

Posted on by philipdodson

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‘Development towards an improved or more advanced condition’ is how it is defined in the dictionary.

However, progress is a very subjective thing. It is often thought in a way that bigger, faster and easier are better. Why?

Having clean running water versus walking miles to a diseased water supply for an African villager is indeed progress.

Is having, say, more megapixels on your smartphone camera progress? Or is that another example of #FirstWorld ‘progress’, also known as needless upgrades to encourage yet more needless consumption.

Perhaps we could progress further as a human race if we concentrated our efforts on people and their well-being, instead of wanting to progress yet ever more shallow needless technological enhancements in order to fuel more meaningless consumption.

After all the number of pixels on our camera will never advance kindness, compassion, love, and empathy for our fellow human.

Magpies

Posted on by philipdodson

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There are things in life that we do, yet do we stop to actually think is there any value to it. Do we ask ourselves ‘what was the point of that?’.

Day-in, day-out our time is consumed with ‘doing’, we are busy.

That Facebook survey to tell us ‘who our best friend forever is’ or some repetitive work task that’s done because ‘that’s how we do things here’.

How much of our lives are we sucked into things, especially in a digital world, where we end up spending time on an activity that adds no value at all. It also creates a habit of being distracted by the next thing that comes along, so when we need to focus, we’ve lost the skill to.

Just because it’s there and we can do something does not mean that we should be doing it.

Our lives are precious, guard your time for deeper and meaningful things that make a difference. Don’t do ‘that’ and become a ‘magpie’ taken by the next shiny thing.