System overload

(Originally posted on Sunday, 24 May 2020)

This is getting insane. Nowadays people have so much to remember and so many things to do that it is impossible to handle everything. When I started going to work 18 years ago my job was MUCH easier and much less stressful than it is today. The number of legal regulations has skyrocketed in the recent years. What’s worse the new legal regulations are so badly written that it is very hard to use them.

Instead of writing simple rules (or as simple as possible) the governments impose more and more needlessly complicated rules that can only be handled by true specialists. However, the number of workers doesn’t really change, so people who used to do a particular set of things are now forced to do many more things, which makes them much LESS specialized. A true specialist is a person who spends most of his time on a particular subject, so a person doing many different things is NOT a specialist by default.

Older workers use their experience gathered through many years, but young workers need to learn many things in a very short time and they are usually overwhelmed by the current work reality. However, when numerous totally new laws are introduced then the older workers are in trouble too, because their brains are not as “fresh” as when they were younger.

Even jobs that were easy not long ago suddenly become complicated. For example it seems to me that soon you will have to finish a collage to be able to handle duties of a garbage truck worker, really. No offence to garbage truck workers – I know that every single job is important to the well-being of the whole society and this is why I am so pissed that governments make it harder for everybody, but NOT for the producers of goods – the source of many problems. For example the vast majority of the producers of goods don't really care about recycling, but they still place a recycling sign on their products and say that everybody should be satisfied! It seems to me that many products can't really be recycled because they are made of different materials mixed in a very inconvenient way. Inconvenient for the recycling companies, garbage truck workers and normal people obligated to carry out the waste sorting, not for the producers of goods!

The current system is close to a total overload. It can be clearly seen by the rising number of people who suffer from depression or other mental disorders. Just think about it – how many more things to remember and to do are there now in comparison to the world that existed 200 years ago? In JUST 200 years our world has changed in such a HUGE way that most people can’t really handle it. And the new generations don’t “evolve” as quickly as the world around them, because 200 years is just a blink of an eye in the time-scale of the human species. Human mind, just like a human body, has it limits, obviously.

It's true that some things need to be regulated in a specialised way, but not all of them. Many “specialists” wouldn’t be “specialists” at all without all the needlessly complicated legal regulations. Right now this vicious cycle is true also for the private sector:
“The administration is growing to handle the challenges of the growing administration.”

My dream is that governments would spent one whole term/stint/tenure for simplifying existing legal regulations, also by disposing of the unneeded ones, without “inventing” any new “ground-breaking” ones. Our world is in dire need of governments listening to average people as well as true specialists, but not self-made “empty specialists”. Unfortunately our world is already so complicated that is very hard to objectively distinguish one from another.