Truth is changing

“ All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident”?

Arthur Schopenhauer

Truth. A big word. What is true and what is not? I am not asking, what is right and what is wrong - No. I am asking what I should believe in to be true. Honestly, I am pretty sure that we all came across this question.?

Yuval Noah Harriri has an elegant way to describe this. First, there is objective truth. We study it at university under the banner of natural sciences. Unquestionable, undeniable and somewhat eternal. The laws of physics, biology or chemistry simply define our world, our everyday context and we cannot do anything about it. It’s simply true.

And then, there is everything else. The way we interact with each other, the roles we are playing and the value we give to it. It equally defines our world, our everyday context, but we actually can do something about it. So, is this really true ?

My truth is that of an immigrant kid of the 70-80ies in West-Berlin, Germany. “Learn and work even harder, you know, we need to be better. Get the best education you can get and strive for a solid, well-regarded and well-paid job, my son”.?

Whatever your personal story, I believe you heard more or less the same melody. Go to school, get an education and get a job. Ideally, a really good - which means well paid - job. And if not, then at least any job. To be safe.

Has the world now changed? Isn’t that book still a bestseller ? I guess, you still need to get your act together, learn, fail, learn more and fail even more. A safe job and a career are still great goals to have. And whilst the world somewhat ticks the same, doesn’t it feel a bit different?

Nothing trumps the experience. Period. And everyone of us has been taken through it, lockdown after lockdown. An unseen global shift in our work lives and the discovery of the ‘art of the possible’. As we move back to normal, it is hard to deny that it’s actually a new normal:?

Education? Check. A safe job? Hmmmm

A new normal, which today’s Gen Z are already living to the fullest. 48% of them in the US are already freelancing today. “They’re finding that they are actually feeling more comfortable by having a career that is freelance..” states Hayden Brown, President and CEO of Upwork.

Adobe’s recent creator study highlights that “More than 165 million creators joined the global creator economy in the last two years”. Becoming a creator and taking the leap is not a Gen Z thing only: “...more than 40% of creators, globally are millennials …. on average, creators are 40 years old, with Gen Z only representing 14% of all creators”.

So what is true these days? The kid from the 70's is now a daddy of 2 beautiful daughters and a baby son. I am a daddy now, c’mon, I can hear that the melody is changing. What should I sing to my children?

Yuval Noah would elegantly talk about the dynamics of social context through history and the humanist time we are living in. Technology is super powering our ability to connect and deliver our individual value, whenever and from wherever to whomever we want.

Are we now all empowered to define our lives? Am I really the master of my context? No more alignment of life to job, but the other way around? Albert Einstein once said he has “deep faith that the principle of the universe will be beautiful and simple”. Don't you think, this would be beautiful and simple?

Being a dad is definitely beautiful, but not simple. Not simple at all. But what I sing to them before sleep is quite simple. I love them, I believe in them and I wish that they believe in themselves as well. I know Yuval, it is a humanist melody, but isn’t love eternal and objectively true?

And isn’t this new way of work actually a new way of thinking? And doesn’t new thinking eventually mean new truth? An update to what we believe in to be true??

I really don’t know. But I know I’m gonna continue to sing my song.