Suppose I lend you money, and we agree that you will pay it back in a week. In such an arrangement, the trust between us is the basis of the transaction. But suppose that a week later, you are nowhere to be found. In a country governed by the rule of law, I would find recourse through the courts. But in a country without the rule of law, I would have to find and force you to pay back the money by other means. Either way, the problem with trust is it can be broken. And the cost of enforcing a contract when trust is broken is often high - sometimes higher than the value of the contract.

watched a documentary once about people who had lost a limb. Apparently, it is common knowledge that many amputees can feel their lost arm or leg. In some instances, they can even feel pain from a limb that is no longer there – this is called phantom limb pain. Even if you throw a ball at an amputee’s lost arm, for instance, they will instinctively try to catch it with their phantom arm. Of course, they adjust eventually, but the feeling and awareness never really go away. I often wondered about this phenomenon. Is it the same mechanism that drives us to yearn for people we’ve lost?

In the film, Man of Steel, there is a scene where the young Superman is in a classroom, and suddenly gets overwhelmed by his sensitivity to the world. He hears distant and even the most minute sounds – the clock ticking, sirens blazing, hearts beating, and even the sound of pencils scratching on paper. He sees food digesting in people’s stomachs, eyeballs rolling in their sculls, lungs inflating and deflating, and even the clamour of his classmates’ most deplorable thoughts. Eventually, he storms out of the classroom, locks himself in a storeroom and covers his eyes and ears, hoping to silence the avalanche of information. Finally, his mother arrives, and he cries out to her, saying, “The world’s too big mom.” To which she replies, “then make it smaller.”

According to an article by the British Chamber of Commerce (2015)[1], companies are disappointed with the quality of young candidates entering the job market.  Even when searching Google for articles relating to millennials and the job market, one inevitably comes across the sentiment there are issues. For starters, millennials, or the me-generation, as they are called, are said to have entitlement problems, often believing they are worth much more than they deliver. They are self-centred and motivated by passion rather than reason and common sense. One blogger wrote that millennials lack the Protestant Ethic, the old tradition of working your hands to the bone just for a chance at creating a meaningful life.

During the early 1900s, there was a problem in the music industry. By and large, people were using gramophones to listen to their favourite songs. But the technology only allowed for approximately four minutes of playback, and the quality was awful: the high notes from flutes and violins, together with the low notes from the tuba or the base were either distorted or barely audible. Incidentally, this gave rise to the four-minute-long pop music that we are familiar with today, where the prominent feature is the human voice.