Technology

It's midnight. I sit in the beautiful lobby of Hotel St. Nicolas in the heart of La Rochelle. Next to me is a new friend, D'Arcy, a warmhearted and sharp-witted Canadian expatriate, who I met between sets at a May 6th concert. This trip has been a story of chance encounters, new friends. It has been characterized by adventures both exhilarating and exhausting but also by the warmth and tranquility of home-cooked meals.

I normally find it easy to write about recent experiences, but I find myself struggling to process the last two weeks, and to contextualize it in the wild adventure that has consumed the last three years of my life.

For hundreds of years, the increased specialization of labor drove greater productive capacity and increased efficiency across all sectors of the world economy. Philosophers like Karl Marx noted the potential damage of such a division of duties to man’s soul. But few could have predicted then that the over-specialization of labor could spell financial catastrophe on a massive scale for those married to very specific skill sets.