21st Century Workforce

A week without my desktop, an older laptop cursorily filling in, helped me realize just how much we're dependent on the New Internet/Digital World to feel active and alive. The HeartFix ebook, main project of course, has been spottily worked on, as I cannot see well on the smaller machine. So in fits and starts, she's almost ready to go, save for some parting words to readers, a book list for further reading, and --last but certainly not easiest --formatting. From RTF to PDF to compatible formats for leading online distributors.(Now there's a sentence that never existed before, say, 1989!)

Alone in my little office room, I'm too easily persuaded that everyone else is out and about in the hard copy world. "Non, non, ma cherie!" she says to herself: Workers from sleepless 16-year-olds to graying execs waiting for the requisite gold watch sit in front of their machines doing everything from creating viruses to making million dollar trades. I and so many others are somewhere in between, pummeling the keyboard for far less sophisticated and impressive reasons. Or talking on their I-Phones. Or doodling on their digital pads. Or, young though they may be, kids sit or stand fixated on their hand-held gadgets, feeling insulted if someone calls by voice instead of texting.

So this is what it's come to. I sit for hours and stare at my magic monitor, feeling my butt and hips spreading like melting snow on the first day of spring. Our hearts work on the same matters they've struggled with for centuries. But our brains are likely developing symbiotic neurons to be encoded in our DNA and passed on to those generations for whom neural compatibility with machines will be a survival necessity. Will our hearts keep pace?