Simulation

Simulation is what computers do best. The most visible simulations are films where stories are made more believable by CGI production and editing. I sold simulation software for cancer treatment. Technical design has been revolutionized by computed simulation shortening product development to manufacturing cycles multi-fold. Quality and innovation have improved too for electronics, lenses, cars, airplanes, appliances....

Now that some tools of life have improved, how we use them and live have made little use of simulation. Thinking allows us to make models of reality, discuss it, change it, design it, question it, improve.... It's how academia operates. Abstract theories guided the invention of physical products where the industrial paradigm has served us for over a Century

Even before computers, smart people used budgets, projections, prototypes, trial and error, mock-ups, tests etc. to simulate something before doing or making it. It's not easy so many people still don't bother and dismiss simulation and modeling as a waste of time.

Not me. I love building models of anything: even institutions, relationships, history, rooms, plans, concepts, ideas, pathways, advantage, value, pictures, stories.... I don't like set plans but models that can adapt and change as things go. It's like a bottom line on which the future is based but not at all set in stone. After all, any mock-up can be erased and restarted with less to lose than the real thing.

With all the ranting I've been doing about new paradigms, how times are changing, institutions are tools instead of standards and change, I still thought my way out is to build a neo-industrial model company. I did not know the needed change would so profound and feel so painful. Old props that made me feel secure (even little things like scheduled meals, meetings, obligations just to make money), were all removed for me. It hurt because I was addicted to the unsubstantiated feeling of acceptance and fulfillment that my addiction gave me.

Some of my dependence on the industrial model of success were so deeply subconscious and subtle that I didn't know I still wanted acknowledgement from those who only want to relate to me based on what I do, how much money I had, or just because it was scheduled and where any personal involvement seemed taboo.

So in my personal doldrums, I was forced to face of all my personal inclinations, reactions, feelings, addictions. I am still experiencing withdrawal symptoms. My difficult time turned out to be a real-life simulation of a path towards personal and creative discovery free from the albatross of institutions.

It is difficult and painful because I was being weaned off of things that are everywhere. To navigate these obstacles and opportunities is only possible when I see the difference between them.

I am off the road ways of industrial highways and on the open waters of information, connectivity and expression that is seeking to replace the value we used to put on material products and over supply.

A Russian diplomat once told me he was "stuck between a jail and the big blue sea" (their version of a "rock and a hard place") because he did not know what to do with the freedom of open waters facing him after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I think I have been facing a simulation of the same problem.

The point of this simulation through difficulty or a trial by water and fire perhaps, is to make me stronger in who I am to face an uncharted, unscheduled, unplanned future: Both frightening and beautiful like an ocean of blue water.