What Can We Actually Count On?
Lately, I have been really struggling to keep my world in some semblance of order.
My most recent incident involves an online selling platform and their automated approach to transferring proceeds from sales to the person who has sold them.
As the years have progressed, there have arisen an increasing number of security loops you have to jump to in order to just receive the money that you earned as a result of selling your products. Most recently, I received a message "we were unable to deposit your funds" as a result of my bank merging with another bank, and even though the routing numbers and account numbers stayed the same the fact that the bank has an ever so slightly different name caused everything to grind to a halt.
Perhaps this would be simple enough but the methodology required to reconnect a bank account has become fully automated and it's now done through channels that make it impossible for a human being to look at anything.
So not only is it challenging do something as simple as connect a bank account, each time I engage in any kind of modification to try to fix the problem I get a little message that my funds "will not be available for five business days for your security."
After spending several hours in a chat and then on the phone with the so-called customer service agent, I was finally told that the automated deposits have to fail a certain number of times before the system generates a special link to manually confirm a bank account.
Meanwhile, I have hundreds of dollars sitting on this platform that are legitimately mine but I can't touch them because of these convoluted verification steps. Forget the fact that I have been a customer since 2003...
Compare this to the system as it existed 15 years ago where I would sell something, somebody would charge it to their PayPal account, and the money would be in my account spendable by debit card... 15 seconds later. No muss no fuss.
The thing that I find troublesome about this situation isn't so much the fact that the money is tied up and I need it to pay bills as the fact that it is representative of the entire world in which we live... in which it seems like our ability to count on anything being the way it's supposed to is eroding every year.
Aside from incidents like this simple situation, it seems like the company and product cycle is forever getting shorter and more fragile.
If I have a favorite product or service I like to use I'd better stock up now because three months from now it'll either have been discontinued or the company will have been absorbed by a different company and the product changed to something completely different.
Meanwhile, if I call a plumber because I need somebody to come out and fix a leak, there's a good chance I won't even get a phone call back. And forget about having a favorite service person, because the moment you develop a working relationship with someone in the trades you find that the next time you call them they have already changed careers five times since the last time you called and they certainly can't help you fix your problem.
What's more, if you pick a career and invest your time and energy and effort into becoming expert at it you may discover six months from now that your entire field has become obsolete.
Apologists like to characterize it all as "progress," but I don't feel very progressed!
As I read my words back to myself I see one aspect of them being an invitation to people to say that I'm just old and not keeping up with the times, but at the same time I also have a fuller appreciation for why so many who are part of Gen. Z are grumpy and disillusioned about the ways of the world, and their place in it.
The pervasive state of impermanence we have at the moment strikes me as quite different from the tenet of impermanence as explained in Buddhist traditions. Our current impermanence is violent and chaotic and doesn't seem to follow any kind of natural cycles.
Throughout history humanity has always been able to progress through a process involving a certain degree of stability and predictability. As an analogy, even though we may not have known how good or bad the harvest was going to be this year... we do know that we are going to have spring, summer, fall and winter. We never lived in a world where fall and spring suddenly changed places unpredictably but only for one year because next year summer will be where fall is.
And that's kind of how the world feels at the moment.
Somewhere along the way it feels like we traded in our humanity for the latest iPhone 456; then we traded in the ability to find our place in the world for the eternal pursuit of growth and profit, as evidenced by the fact that the instant something we enjoy comes along, it will immediately be ruined by the pervasive need to make it obsolete so it can be replaced with a "new and improved" version that ruins everything...
Don't get me wrong here I have nothing against money and people wanting to progress in their lives, but everything seems to have devolved into an unsustainable cloud of unpredictability.
Which may also help explain why so many people are choosing to just drop out. And, at age 66, I feel very tempted to drop out, as well.
Thanks for stopping by and have a great week ahead!
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2026.10.25 23:33 PDT
1686/2952
As an elder millennial, I feel as though I have seen everything from the last phones people actually dialed to the modern computerized age, and I think it all started to go awry ca. 2005 when the internet became the thing by which all would be measured instead of just another tool. Is it just a coincidence Facebook took off around then? Hmmm...