Burnout or perhaps a smattering of weltschmerz?
At first glance I blamed my delayed 2024 launch to burnout. Reasonable considering the amount of travel and work preparation I left behind in 2023.
But in a moment of clarity I remembered how uniquely perfect the German language serves up the right word in the right moment — Weltschmerz.
According to Collins translator, “sentimental pessimism or melancholy over the state of the world“
We can throw up our hands in defeat (or just throw up) but I believe there is something of value to offer. In the last few days I have read with earnest, a few books for fine-tuning talks I am giving in the first quarter. A line from Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson continues to serve me well. He says, “Gradually I discovered that what. made it difficult to tell the class what the course was about. was the fact that my way of thinking was different from theirs.”
This is exactly how I feel when describing ideas I address from the podium. The world of geospatial analysis is a hard nut to crack if you want to zoom out and in to bring a whole story into focus. Often there are gatekeepers that only want certain stories told — and only certain people to tell them.
A dear friend explained to me something I can’t believe I hadn’t connected in all of my years working not only in the business, policy, and medical world but as a communicator — many people are transactional. If your voice or presence isn’t something they will personally benefit from, then your value to them plummets. It isn’t gloom and doom though because nothing is better than being seen, recognized and welcomed by others that see the world in a similar way.
“it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair
We live in a world of loud voices with opinions seeking opportunity after opportunity. The cacophony of noise can be deafening and serves to distract many of us from the big picture.
Look over here, not over here…
Beware of a single perspective or part of anything. Being swept up by the AI hype? Pause for a minute and think about the race for opportunity outpacing assessment of risk. The rush to market rewards the first across the finish line — not the thoughtful and careful.
Be reminded of the tragedy of the commons. When anything including tech becomes an open-access resource people will act in their own best interest. The energy demanded of these systems is finite — and exponential. Is the transaction worth eradicating life as we know it on a fragile planet?
Do you know the risk or the harms? The benefits are shiny and promising. Here in the U.S. for example we enjoy our fancy cellphones. Our GINI coefficient does not capture the harms we outsource—factory labor in other countries that manufacture or mine the inputs to our convenience.
World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform (2022) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Seventy percent of the world’s cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The opportunity to tell the story requires history, culture, economics, and politics simply as context before location intelligence can be meaningful.
These topics are where I will be focusing my lens in 2024.
We get so much more when we bring the parts to the whole and tell the entire story.
Stories benefit from our ability to hold different tensions and datasets in consideration when building a narrative.
Learn how to build better stories with not only data but better questions.