These Outrageous Times

I often think the times we're living in are outrageous, sometimes comical and other times completely unbelievable.

You'd be forgiven if you woke up one morning and thought you were watching a slow-burn, dystopian art-house film that lacks any kind of purpose or central creative idea. However some days remind me too much of films and books I've read where I have laughed out loud and sometimes cowered into a fetal position, thankful that it was only a book that I was reading.

I sometimes look out into the world and see a neat evolution of Back To The Future, Orwell's 1984, Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and the bits in Blade Runner when we all hoped that the sun would shine just a little.

It is with a mix of rising emotions that we enter into a year filled with hopes and aspirations anew — that this year might in fact be ever so better than the last — that our dreams for ourselves, our craft, our families and our teams, will be realised once and for all, and the woes of the year gone by will be a distant memory.

Yet, on our way to work each morning we see bowed heads blindfolded by our little screens walking through careers oblivious to the story we are living, barely even noticing when the page turns or when it's time for a new chapter to begin. Heads bowed, thumbs scrolling up for the next hit of dopamine, hoping something good will happen soon. Hoping something new, something good pops up to spark the brightness of a brand new memory of the future. Hoping that it is all in fact real and not a figment of our own, or someone else's imagination.

These outrageous times.

One flick of the switch, one scroll of the thumb, one too many meetings about nothing, and far too many presentations from people talking about themselves, and suddenly we're confronted with news, ideas and situations that are both confronting and confusing. Leaving us to ask ourselves such forever questions — do we fit in this place at all, or has this place (and time) changed so drastically because we paid so little attention to it? Are the smiling men in suits with perfect white teeth on our television sets to blame, or has this folly worn too thin and instead should we be looking at someone else a little closer to home to wear the responsibility of these outrageous times?

And as these questions sit with me, I slowly realise that we might be the ones who carry the burden, the shame and the responsibility of these times of outrage. That we are the ones who made them. We the leaders who have said that we will lead. We the ones who have chosen to harness our own creativity and that of others to walk through a career that balances our purpose for something good.

And if this is to be true, we are then the ones who are accountable to redesign these times — to recreate them anew, to rethink them and to reimagine them with less outrage, less division and more of something else.

More of something better.

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First published on The Weekly Journal of Creative Leadership Newsletter