I wanted to spend today making a plan of what I would do with the rest of my time before National Service but unfortunately (or fortunately, for those freaks out there), my mum got me to help out with cleaning the house. That means I have to help vacuum the walls, floor and ceiling corners, boxes areas; and clean the computer, all the tables and chairs in the house and change the bedsheets. I have got to help in any case, partly out of tradition and also because my mum needs it badly. As my mum decide to dump the old hi-fi speakers, I naturally decided to do some operation on it to extract the powerful magnet that is present in all of such sound-emitting devices. Unfortunately the screws used by that darn company is one with the strangest designs I ever seen, it was an ‘=’ sort of top.
As I appeared to be ‘slacking’ away and fiddling with the parts my mum started requesting me to get back to the cleaning because I am halfway through with the computers (which required me to remove all connections and clean the wires by running them one-by-one through a wet cloth). Frustrated with screws and my mum’s nagging, I rebutted her, saying that the reason why she’s always so tired and busy is because she spend so much time doing things the same old, inefficient way and none of her time exploring for new ways of doing things (the way I do). It dawned on me that this is very true – I mean I didn’t really think about it before and the point was merely a reaction to my mum’s nagging. Perhaps we have spent way too much time in our lives doing things we hate in ways that we hate but are forced to work on them. Other times, we pay those who have less degree of freedom to do the stuff, or maybe these people really like to do the work. If we were to just stop work and leave them alone, invest some time to explore other means of attaining similar results, or consider whether to scrap the entire activity all together, we may end up enjoying our lives more and benefiting mankind.
I’m of course not saying we devote all our energies into creativity and exploration and be in constant state of experimentation (like in the case of some screwed Institution doing some screwed Programme, which is ever-fine-tunning their stuff with radical measures). I’m suggesting we, as common people (as in we don’t consider ourselves innovators), lack the motivation to try and work things out differently.