Hello & Bye - The Modular Man...

Globe trotting, socialization, automation, attrition, layoffs, high productivity, transfers, and quest for knowledge anytime, anywhere – these are the buzzwords of lifestyle today. As a result of this lifestyle, an individual will come across hundreds of people in a week, at work or at play. Gone or the days when a man would live in a village throughout his lifetime and will know just hundred people during his entire lifetime.

Workplace teams are formed in a jiffy and also disperse in a jiffy, once the project is complete. So, how many people can the modern man really get to know.? And to what extent can he get to know the other person is a big question. One of my friends used to quip, “I maintain many relationships on an above acquaintance but below friendship category.” Seems like an interesting range that we can deploy for relationships these days.

Alvin Toffler in his book “Future Shock” explores the transient nature of human bonds in this century of industrialization. I have listed few interesting passages from the book, that Toffler has quoted from other works too.

--The man on the move is ordinarily in too much of a hurry to put down roots in any one place. And his move destroys a complex web-work of old relationships and establishes a set of new ones.
--If the urban individual reacted emotionally to each and every person with whom he came into contact, or cluttered his mind with information about them, he would be completely atomized internally and would fall into an unthinkable mental condition. In an urban environment the attempt to 'involve' oneself fully with everyone can lead only to self-destruction and emotional emptiness.
--We have created the disposable person – The Modular Man. Rather than entangling ourselves with the whole man, we plug into a module of his personality. Each personality can be imagined as a unique configuration of thousands of such modules.
--The urban man's life is touched by dozens of systems and people. His capacity to know some of them better necessitates his minimizing the depth of his relationship to many others. Listening to the postman gossip is an act of sheer graciousness for the urban man, since he probably has no interest in the people the postman wants to talk about.
--Difficulties arise only when one or another party oversteps the tacitly understood limits, when he attempts to connect up with some module not relevant to the function at hand.
--The tighter and more totalistic the relationship, the more modules, so to speak, are brought into play. And we make numerous demands.
--Our friends float past; we become involved with them; they float on, and we must rely on hearsay or lose track of them completely; they float back again, and we must either renew our friendship – catch up to date – or find that they and we don't comprehend each other any more.

Those are few passages that sum up the transient relationships today. I remember one interesting forward that still circulates. The subject of the forward message is “Reason, Season, or Lifetime.” We meet a fruit vendor to buy fruits, a colleague at work for an year or two, and a spouse or a child for a lifetime. So, we need to cleverly know when we interact with someone, if it is for a reason, season, or a lifetime.