Doctors know that transplants require traffic accidents to occur so that they can procure organs for transplants to patients who need them to survive. Does the doctor influence the amount of innovation that goes into making the roads safer?

One of the illusions which some try to put across to people today is to get them to believe that technology makes them more free. Western civilisation is obsessed with automation. We consign governing to a select group of people, we let a few banks handle all our money, police handle our security, and computers organise, plan and predict for us. But when you always defer responsibility and let someone else do the work for you, you open yourself up to incredible vulnerability, manipulation, theft and eventual loss of life. Which is it: the pleasure but grotesque risk of convenience, or the pain but real substance of true involvement in our lives, communities and society. Also if you ever want to hold a family meeting, turn off the wifi and wait in the room where the router is kept, damn the kids with their 4G.

In a community where everyone asks about what you do and no one asks about what you love, it’s easy to become discouraged and uninspired. Many of us cease to think of ourselves as “artists” as our minds and our days are consumed with the tedium of the jobs we take on to afford living in <insert_city_name>. So what’s the point?

Life is bearable in part because we can so easily resist imagining the extent of suffering across the globe. And if we do think about it, for most of us that thinking is dispassionate and removed. That is how we as a species live. Perhaps it’s why the collective noun for a group of apes is a ‘shrewdness’.

The teacher is jealous of the textbook he defines as his professional implement. The student may come to hate the lab because he associates it with schoolwork. The administrator rationalises his protective attitude toward the library as a defence of costly public equipment against those who would play with it rather than learn. In this atmosphere, the student too often uses the map, the lab, the encyclopedia, or the microscope at the rare moments when the curriculum tells him to do so. Even the great classics become part of “sophomore year” instead of marking a new turn in a person’s life. School removes things from everyday use by labelling them educational tools.

Defence against the damages inflicted by development, rather than access to some new “satisfaction”, has become the most sought after privilege. You have arrived if you can commute outside the rush hour; probably attended an elite school; if you can give birth at home; are privy to rare and special knowledge if you can bypass the physician when you are ill; are rich and lucky if you can breathe fresh air; by no means poor, if you can build your own shack. The underclasses are now made up of those who must consume the counterproductive packages and ministrations of their self-appointed tutors; the privileged are those who are free to refuse them. A new attitude, then, has taken shape during these last years: the awareness that we cannot ecologically afford equitable development leads many to understand that, even if development in equity were possible, we would neither want more of it for ourselves, nor want to suggest it for others. One last thought on my mind is for you to be mindful of your thoughts as much as your surroundings and the connections between them.