The life in the dead stuff

Yesterday i was going through some old things and i found lots of stuff. Stuff like,

• Old books
• School notebooks
• College notes
• University quizes, assignments, exams etc

There were pages with phone numbers, web sites and email addresses (of course by me:)). I could not remember when and why i wrote them down. Yet i felt the urge to keep them. But then i asked myself; Why do i need to keep these pages? They looked important, but i never needed them in the past, surely i do not need them now and chances are i will not need them. If i wanted to keep them, i had to sort, filter, analyze and arrange them. So i just threw them in trash (after destroying them of course).

We encounter such things every day. But the behavior is not just limited to stuff. At any time, we seem to carry around loads of useless things, ideas and values. Stuff that i like to call Dead Stuff. Little do we realize the cost associated with them. To us, their unknown value is so huge that we ignore the costs. Note the word 'Unknown' here. I ll get back to it later.

We can assume that this is default. But actually it is not. Observer a kid playing (get married and have kids if you dont already). If you can look into his treasure chest (kids have them), you will find lot of stuff. Stuff like,

used batteries, thumb pins, common pins, shiny coins, fancy cards, key chains, candy warper

Useless isnt it? Actually its not. Ask a kid why he keeps that stuff? He will have an answer for EVERYTHING. You will not find anything USELESS in that chest. At least not for the kid! Strange; isnt it? The kids only collect things that they find useful. Its simple; keep what is useful and get rid of others. Kids go on to become adults, so the adults should exhibit this attitude. But the adults seem to carry so much dead stuff. Somewhere during the transition this behavior gets lost.

Teenage fits perfectly in this situation. Kids have to go through teenage to become adults. So teenage might just be the culprit here. But what happens in teenage? Lets have a look.

A teenager is just old enough to become a part of adults. But to be an adult, he must BEHAVE (not think) like an adult. This he cannot do, because his whole life he has been a kid. As a kid he knows how to assign values to things. No one ever told him that his values are incorrect because he was surrounded by kids.

But now suddenly he has to deal with adults. Adults, who try to impose an adult like thinking on him. The first thing they tell him is "Your judgment of values was wrong. These things that you value are actually trash. We will tell you what is useful and what is not. Since you are too young to understand, take our word for it and behave like an adult". If you do not feel the strength of this statement, read it again. Now we refer to the term 'Unknown'. Things that he sees in the adult world are unfamiliar with unknown value. He feels the urge to reject them but is forced to accept. So he begins to believe that if something is unknown, it MUST have a value. Mathematically speaking,

Unknown = Valuable (Equation I)

Being a kid, the teenager can not understand something without a value. So he asks for it, but is told that he is too young to comprehend and should trust the knowledge of adults. He has to obey or be considered abnormal. Result, he begins to rely on adults to tell him things. Again, mathematically,

age difference = authority (Equation II)

Combine I & II and you get a crippled mind. To make someone understand the value of an unknown, you must have an age difference. Conversely, an age difference can convince someone of a value for unknown. Think about it this way, the inventions and discoveries are done by young energetic people. But people do not accept them because they are only influenced by age, not idea. Without age difference to impose value, they fear the unknown, not value it.

People do not like young managers, young CEOs and young founders. They like to think that they are wrong...because they are young. People do not like to think about the value of unknown. Because they fear that the unknown will turn out to be nothing. They prefer to keep unknown stuff with imaginary value than to get rid of dead stuff.