Opportunity knocks, but doesn’t tell us what we will find behind a different door. We often pursue what we’ve always wanted—something hard to turn away from.
There are many possible vocations. Additionally, hobbies, vacations, romantic pursuits, and friendships compete for time. How about adding education instead of working or choosing to spend time with the kids? Trying to repair the world is another worthy avenue for your energy.
How shall we decide? Consider this:
Opportunity cost is “the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.” For example, we cannot profit from road B if road A consumed our time. The lost chance might be due to a poor decision, but the world’s speed of change and complexity also play a part.
Should we stay with lover A or pursue other relationships? The guidelines are not clear.
Choose a job, and A.I. might gobble it up in five or 10 years.
Decisions would be easier if we were better at affective forecasting—predicting how we will feel about our choices when we are older. As Kirkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
In our high-tech age, how many jobs can you adapt to in a lifetime?
Yuval Noah Harari, a historian who looks ahead, raises this question in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.
He indicates that we should not classify A.I. as a tool that mankind employs and empowers our species, similar to previous inventions like the printing press. Instead, he describes it as an agent that can consume and retain unimaginable amounts of information, make decisions independently, learn and change by itself, and create new ideas and things.
He predicts that A.I. will outperform homo sapiens in communicating, analyzing, learning, and understanding how human emotions work. If this is not unsettling enough, he says A.I. is in its infancy.
Harari suggests A.I. will take over some professions currently performed by humans. The process will not stop, but continue to take more unless governments choose to stop it.
Would such a circumstance require us and our children to transform ourselves into experts in several new fields during our working lives?
The repeated stressful changes will tax humanity’s emotional adaptability if Harari’s expectation is fulfilled.
In the meantime, we would be well-served if our vocational plans include a wider range of careers than have been customary in a single lifetime.
The one thing we can be sure of is that the decades ahead will be interesting in ways we could never have imagined.
Read Harari’s books and watch his many interviews on YouTube. He is a remarkable and provocative communicator who makes the complex easy to understand.
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The top photo is a Flamingo in Amboseli, Kenya, taken in November 2024 by Laura Hedien, with thanks for her kind permission to use it: Laura Hedien Official Website.
Beneath it is Composition VI, 1913 by Kandinsky. It is sourced from Wikiart.org/
