Page 100 – Mechanical Sympathy

The Digital Divide is Deep and Wide

The idea of computer technical proficiency has come up many times over the years on Dusty World. Whether you want to call it digital literacy, digital fluency, or twenty-first Century skills, there is obviously a big gap in the computer user skills we’re graduating people with. This isn’t a new thing, I’ve been benefiting from this lack of fluency in the general public since the 1980s.

After dropping out of high school in the late ’80s I started apprenticing as a millwright. At our warehouse the new building control systems were becoming computerized and all of the very skilled welders and mechanics in our department were leery of them, so guess who got to take that on? The new guy who had been working with computers since he was ten.

A summer job I got while going to university in the early 1990s involved converting an engineering shop over to computerized ordering (they’d hand written all parts orders and completed shipments prior to that, ironically while producing telephony computer electronics). I got Lotus1-2-3 (which I’d never used before) working with the formatting so we could print out orders using our existing forms. This took a bit of trial and error, but I wouldn’t have described it as particularly difficult, it just took a willingness to make effective use of digital technology in problem solving.

After graduating from uni I continually found myself moved into technology implementation simply because of this fluency I seemed to have that many people didn’t. This eventually led to me getting IT qualifications as a technician. It even followed me into teacher’s college where I found myself teaching other students software and has been a mainstay of my teaching career.

This week I came across a recent study that sheds light on all of this anecdotal experience. The Distribution of Computer User Skills research across wealthy OECD countries all point to some rather astonishing facts:

“Overall, people with strong technology skills make up a 5–8% sliver of their country’s population, and this is true across all wealthy OECD countries.

What’s important to remember is that 95% of the general population in North America cannot make effective use of computers in resolving even simple problems or overcoming unexpected outcomes.”

Computer use isn’t just poor, it’s abysmal. Over a third of Canadians aged 16-65 can’t do anything other than simple, rote, habitual work in a digital environment. If asked to do tasks that I would consider straightforward and with no particular digital expertise, they are unable. Keep in mind, this is only looking at the skills of work-aged people. It’s not even considering seniors who generally have much weaker computer skills – so the actual computer skill level in the whole population is even lower than this implies.

You’re probably doubting your ability to be considered an advanced user in this study, but you shouldn’t. None of these tests involved programming or having to do anything engineering wise with a computer, it’s all user focused work using simple software. To be considered a strong (level 3) computer user you had to be able to “schedule a meeting room in a scheduling application, using information contained in several email messages.” If you’ve ever had a group of people email and work out a date for a meeting and then you’ve put that meeting in Google Calendar, you’re considered a high end user. If you’re reading this online blog, you’re probably considered a proficient, level 3, high-skills user.

The article that started this leads on to another on the digital divide, but rather than hang it all on economic factors it also considers psychological and skills based limitations. A few years ago I attempted to provide local households that said they couldn’t afford one with a computer. It was a complete failure – like giving books to illiterate people then wondering why they weren’t illiterate any more; there is a lot more to the digital divide than economic barriers, though they no doubt play a part in it. The fast evolving nature of technology means relatively recent computers are available often for free to people who otherwise can’t afford them, but the problem isn’t just access to technology, it’s the inability of our education system to build sufficient digital fluency in our population to make use of them. There is no point in handing out technology to people who can’t make use of it.

With all of this in mind, who are we aiming at when we introduce digital technology into the classroom? What are we doing when we pitch elearning at a general public who have this distressingly low level of digital fluency? The vast majority of our students (fictitious digital native prejudices aside) are functionally illiterate when using digital technologies in even simple, user focused ways. We seem to think we are graduating students who are able to make effective use of computers – except we aren’t. Many educators dwell in that level 0 to 1 poor user category themselves.

I’ve been advocating for it for over five years – nothing changes.

If our digital fluency were seen in terms of literacy, we’re handing out the complete works of Shakespeare to illiterates and then wondering why it isn’t working and why it’s being vandalized. At some point we’ll stop dumping the latest multi-national prompted tech fad (ipads, chromebooks, whatever) into classrooms and start teaching a K to 12 digital skills continuum so people can actually make use of the technology we provide.

Last week one of my essential students intentionally punched and broke a Chromebook in my classroom. This made me quite angry because I saw a useful and expensive digital tool being broken. After reading this report I can’t help but wonder if he was just breaking a thing that he can’t do anything useful with that frustrates him.

“Educational technology has failed to move the needle on either cost effectiveness or student success in the past ten years…” – Brandon Busteed, Gallup Education
(they were talking about this in Phoenix in 2014)

OECD (2016), Skills Matter: Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills, OECD Skills Studies, OECD Publishing, Paris, France.

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The Future of Work: Bridging The Digital Skills Divide

Bridging the digital skills divide

Once again I seem to have found my way into an upper management summit. I imagine I’ll be the only classroom teacher in there, but that’s no bad thing. If more front line people were directly connected to decision makers, our policy decisions wouldn’t seem as fictional as they sometimes do. The other nice thing about a summit like this is that I get to dust off and exercise the philosophy degree, which in a computer technology classroom sometimes lays dormant for too long.

The keynote for this summit is Cheryl Cran, an author and speaker on the future of work. Her approach seems to be very human resources based, which is appealing to a teacher who works with those humans every day. Digital transformation tends to diminish a company’s need for human resources since it’s really just another form of automation/mechanization. Can digital disruption actually lead to better relationships with the humans in your organization? Perhaps for the few that are left. If digital disruption is going to lead to mass unemployment, then how effective our companies run is going to be the least of our problems. Making too much of the human population redundant never ends well for the society that does it. This is a very difficult path to tread, so I’m very curious to hear how Cheryl presents it.

Cheryl sent out a pre-summit Q&A on where attendees think the future of work lies. Here are the questions and my responses:

1. In your opinion what does the future of work look like?

The social contract between employers and employees will continue to deteriorate. Private employment will be limited to short term as needed contract work for the vast majority. This is dressed up in “always be retraining/adapting” corporate speak, but the end result is usually downward pressure on everyone’s work/life balance. The ‘try harder’ language of private business can get hard to believe when you’ve retrained (paying for your own training) multiple times only to be be made redundant again. Meanwhile wealth is being concentrated into an ever decreasing class of ultra-wealthy entities.

Only the management class will still consider themselves employees of a single company. A universal wage may be instituted to stabilize and pacify a large under-employed working class. Even specialized skills will increasingly become redundant under more advanced automation. This is less about profit than it is about control. Machines are much less demanding than people.

2. What do you think are the current challenge for employers right now in regards to attracting youth to work for their companies?

Companies tend to approach employee relations in a conservative fashion with little change in approach from previous years. GenZ expectations around work have been formed by evolving educational experiences. With the school system no longer holding students to deadlines and graduation standards much more flexible than they used to be, employers find dealing with young employees who have never had to work to a deadlines challenging. Attracting youth to a company successfully would have a lot to do with clarifying expectations in the workplace and training to cover that gap between an employer’s expectations and the young employee’s experience.

3. What do you think needs to happen to prepare today’s youth for the future of work?

Our education system (in Ontario at least) has already started moving towards a universal pay standard by moving from graduation by proven skill to graduation as a general expectation. This was largely motivated by Ontario’s learning to 18 legislation. As education has reorientated on a graduation for all approach, there has been increasing friction between graduates and workplace expectations. If k-12 is an experience everyone is expected to graduate from, then it will fall to post-secondary education to provide support for students as they transition into the workplace. That support is vital as students are not being taught that deadlines nor even attendance are mandatory. If we can’t train to bridge that gap, then the workplace itself will have to evolve to expect employees who may or may not be there and may or may not meet deadlines. From a social efficiency point of view, that obviously isn’t the way forward.

4. What inspires you about today’s youth? Why?

They are as bright and capable as any other generation. Only lowered expectations create a social perception of laziness and lack of focus. One need only attend Skills Canada Nationals or CyberTitan to see just how capable this generation can be of mastery learning. Whenever I hear someone slagging young people I remind myself of all the great students I’ve seen graduate who have produced world-class results in spite of a system that did not encourage it.

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Hibernating a Motorcycle: Tires

Dave Hatch’s Motorcycle Experience is doing a series on how to store a motorcycle over the winter (or for any extended period). The first bit is on how to prepare and look after your tires while the snow flies outside:

So, make sure they are clean and at maximum pressure when you put the bike away, and move the bike every once in a while to prevent the tire from settling on one spot. It was interesting what Warren Milner, the tire expert, said about what super sticky sport bike tires can do in extreme cold. It’s an issue with all super sticky tires evidently.

Space Limitations

At 12x20ft, I’m feeling the pinch…

I wish I had a bigger bike cave. With only a one car garage I’m having to pick and choose my next steps. In a perfect world I’d have room for active bikes and a workshop at the back with longer term projects on the go.

The 2 ½ car option at 24x30ft would feel cavernous by comparison to my cramped 9x20ft space, but a garage that big would mean I’d probably have to keep cars in it. A safer bet would be an outbuilding workshop, like this Canadian made prefab kit.

They have an A style 20×30 footer for just over $12 grand. That would be wider than my current space is long. Instead of my meagre 180 ft², I’d have a whopping 600ft². That kind of space would let me chase down all the loose ends I’m considering right now.

My current urges run toward a couple of dirt bikes for my son and I, a distance capable road bike and something more intimate for short blasts and track days. While the working bikes get their occasional maintenance, I’d also like space for a project bike.

Roughly to scale, that 20×30 workshop would fit the bill nicely.

Tough Ricoh Theta360 Photography on a Cold Spring Ride

Barely above freezing, but the sky is clear and winter blue. The camera is a Ricoh Theta S on a Gorilla Pod wrapped around the rear view mirror, until it wasn’t. Without a hint of a problem it suddenly let go at 80km/hr as we rode down a country road. The tripod and camera slid down the pavement for 50 odd metres before coming to a stop. We turned around and went back to find the camera case popped open and electronics hanging out, I figured it was dead.

Once home I put the guts back in and snapped it shut again and it powered right up. All the photos on it were fine, only the plastic piece at the top shattered. It’s now covered in tape and looks like the tough little camera that it is. If you’re looking for a hardy 360 camera, the Ricoh Theta has survived thousands of miles on a motorcycle taking all sorts of photos and videos, and now it has hit the road at high speed, and it still keeps on ticking.

I’d kinda hoped that this nixed the Theta S so I could upgrade to the new Theta V. At this rate I’m going to have to drop this thing into the sun to kill it! #onetough360camera

I had the camera set to take a photo ever 10 seconds. I hoped that it happened to be taking one as it came off the mirror, but no luck. In the meantime, here are a selection of stills and 360 movable images from the Ricoh on the ride:

Dress warm for a cold ride. – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA

Cold, easly spring #Triumph ride #theta360 – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA

Westmount Rose Covered Bridge https://goo.gl/maps/sCEvFbtqgrC2 – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA

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A Commute Home from a Different Angle

Some variations on a theme. Instead of attaching the 360 camera to the mirror, I’m trying some different locations. This time it was attached to the wind deflector mounted above the windshield:

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The Perils of Riding Someone Else’s Bike

It was a cold and windy ride through the Superstition Mountains yesterday. The route we took after taking Gaylen’s advice at azride.com gets you out of the city and into the desert quickly and lets you bypass most of the urban sprawl east of Phoenix.

Our trusty mount was a Kawasaki Concours 14. I thought it would be interesting to compare my 20 year old Concours to a younger one.

After I got myself turned around and rode ten minutes the wrong way into Phoenix, we got moving in the right direction and soon found ourselves on the Bush Highway, a twisty, bumpy highway that doesn’t go anywhere – I guess that’s why they named it that.

It took me some time to get used to this unfamiliar bike. The gear shift was very close to and felt lower than the foot peg which made for awkward shifts, and the brakes felt very (dare I say over?) assisted unlike the old-school hydraulic brakes on my classic Concours. When you applied the front brake you stopped in a hurry causing my pillion to plough into the back of me a number of times until I got really ginger with brake application. The other off-putting part was that each time I used the front brake it was accompanied by a loud electrical whining noise like a cicada chirping. Sometimes it would stop when I let go of the brake, sometimes it would keep whining afterwards.

I was unsure if this was a Concours 14 thing (doubtful) or an azride.com maintenance thing. CoG didn’t suggest any known brake electrical noise problems so I suspect this is a maintenance issue. The azride.com website didn’t mention what year the Concours was (unlike other rental sites which tell you it’s a 2015 but show you a five year old bike), but based on the body the bike we had was a pre-2011 model. Maybe it’s starting to get cranky in its old age.

Taking a water break on the Bush Highway. It was about 15°C, comfortable riding weather.
Up in the mountains it was 5°C when we stopped for lunch.

After owning three Kawasakis I have to say, man do they know engines. Every one I’ve owned or ridden has had a jewel of an engine and this Concours was no different. Passing through the tunnel leading out of Superior, the engine sounds echoing off the walls were spine tingling – it sounded like something straight out of MotoGP.

With that big wobbly wind screen up
high you’re in a big air bubble, but it
looks ungainly. Fortunately you can
lower the screen in town to restore
a sportier look.

The engine didn’t disappoint in power either. My Connie does the business with carburators and 300 less ccs, but what this bike does with the monsterous ZX14 1300cc lump is truly ominous. I’ve ridden fast bikes before and this is one of the fastest.

On mountain roads this newer Concours felt smaller than my bike though they weigh the same. The newer bike is much narrower and quite wasp wasted compared to the chunky older model. That monumental engine that produces sixty more horsepower than my bike probably helps with that feeling of lightness too.

Wind-wise, I was able to ride in jeans all day into single digit Celsius temperatures without a problem. The heat that pours off my Concours was absent on this one, though it was a cold day so it wasn’t something I’d notice anyway.

The windscreen is electrically adjustable and at the top it stopped all but the top of my head getting hit by wind (I’m 6’3″ and I had given up on windshields doing anything for me). My bike gets me squarely in the shoulders and up all the time. I didn’t like how much the windscreen wobbled at speed, it looked flimsy, not to mention goofy in its highest position. Once I was back in town I lowered it back to a less Jurassic Park look. Goofy or not though, it made a cold ride through the mountains much more bearable. A transformable windshield is a piece of magic, though a more solid feeling one with manual adjustment would do the job better. I’d rather not have the added weight and complexity of the electrical one.

You can see just how ridiculously high the risers
are in this view of the Concours back in the lot.
The big googly-eyed headlights don’t do
much for me either.

I’ve got a 32″ leg and find my bike a bit cramped. The ZG1400 was a bit more relaxed in the legs. After a couple of hours in the saddle I had no problems.

The ergonomic problems began where azride.com made changes. The huge risers they installed on this Concours looked like comedy units off a 1970s banana seat bike – huge bull horn things that put the grips right under my nipples, or so it felt. They pushed me so far back that I was riding more on my tailbone – cruiser style – than I otherwise would have. The narrow Concours 14 seat wasn’t build for this contortion and it became quite uncomfortable. It makes me wonder how the stock handle bars would have worked. I have low risers on my old Concours and have a slight forward lean, which I prefer to a bolt upright or reclined stance.

No fancy paint, electrical wind screens or whining
electronics, but it’s a solid old thing that does the
business with gusto. I’m still wishing for the
bike bag to magically whisk my bike along.

All of the electrical noise from the brakes and fuel injection made me cross. I don’t mind electronics (I teach computer engineering), and my Ninja had EFI that was bullet proof, silent and efficient, but when the electronics are whirring away it is intrusive and just reminds you of another expensive thing that will break on you. I don’t feel that this Concours 14 gave me a fair idea of what the breed is capable of. I’d especially like to try a newer one to get a better sense of the machine. Maybe Kawasaki will be doing a riding tour again next year and I can try a 2016 model.

That whacky old-guy handle bar riser (and accompanying sore ass) conspired to make me long for my own bike. It might not have the heat management, or easier reach to the ground (which I don’t need anyway), or fancy moving windshield, but my old Concours feels solid, is usually the fastest thing on the road when you twist the throttle and offers a satisfying mechanical simplicity that I missed on this electronically whinny newer machine.

Final OISE Blog

The final blog entry from my OISE computer engineering program:

Name and describe the school, board and ministry standards you must follow.
Our school and board follow Ministry standards and our collective agreement based upon it. One of the challenges we have is in following changing standards. One of those specific problems is the adoption of skills based assessment (a holdover from the Harris years). Many teachers have a great deal of trouble following this protocol (the learning to 18/student success plan works with it extensively).

I recently had to do a heads thing and sit on a committee that would create school level language around assessment. The fights were pretty epic. Many of the academic teachers believed that students should be marked on their behavior, not what they know about their subject. To them, school is about control and discipline, not subject matter (this dovetails nicely with a conversation I had with my wife last night – I think I’ll be blogging about it on Dusty World shortly).

In any case, our admin is determined to even out the radically different approaches to assessment that go on in our school (even within the same department). I’m curious to see how much this affects teachers this coming year. There is a great deal of professional latitude given to teachers whenever the door closes to the classroom. Unlike the US system, our lessons aren’t mandated and while we have invasive standardized testing, we aren’t held too tightly to them. US schools are required to force feed students lessons year round to feed standardized testing. They then rank poorly world wide.

As much as a loose, teacher centred approach grates on the nerves of hard core curriculumists, it does produce broad based learners who score well in general testing (and adapt well in a changing work environment).

I personally have issues with student success and many of the shortcuts they take in getting students diplomas. But even that process is one I can live with if it allows the majority of students to maximize their learning.

What would you see changed?

One of the few countries ahead of use in world rankings is Finland. Finland does a couple of things that I think would fit well with Ontario’s approach to education. Firstly, they expect teachers to be highly trained specialists in education. In order to teach in Finland, a teacher must have a Masters in Education. I think university focus on this isn’t a great idea, but I’d like to see teacher’s college be much more rigorous in producing teachers. A two year program that offers easy outs into other programs (teaching assistant, educational support worker, business training, etc), or out of education entirely, would be helpful. A greater stress on teacher’s college as an apprenticeship with many more weeks spent in-class with an associate teacher/mentor would also shake out the applicants.

I found a number of candidates in my program who wanted to drop out, but were given no option other than withdrawal with financial penalty. I’d really like to see a first semester drop out option (available after the first in school, teaching COOP session), that offers escape with no financial penalty. I’ve seen too many people teaching who aren’t particularly good at it, have no interest in changing that, and are doing it because they feel trapped into doing so. A more stringent, apprenticeship based, exit enabled teacher training system establishes higher standards (like Finland’s) without the university bias, and with a firm focus on developing teachers actually interested in teaching well.

The other thing Finland did was abolish all standardized testing. Standardized tests do not produce broad-based students who are able to adapt to new situations in creative ways. Standardized testing produces myopic, specifically focused students who fail in open, changing environments (the kind most students will be facing when they enter the workforce).
I’d also like to see a huge push away from the walled garden/board run IT model. The language around protecting students produces overly restrictive access to technology that reduces students’ ability to learn how to author, manage and effectively use current digital tools. If we want to remain relevant, we need to be able to meet students where they live, and show them how to manage modern digital tools effectively.

Develop an action plan to push forward your idea(s).Process:

Figure out what my stance is on effective educational reform

Read other theory, review statistics (don’t be Ontario-centric, look at educational theory from around the world), establish an understanding of what you believe effective reform is

Metacognitively, reflect on your own experiences in the classroom. What is a modern student like? What is needed to reach them? What would an effective learning environment look like in 2012 and beyond?

Develop your own ideas

Collaborate with others to organize and present them

Publish your thinking and invite critical response

Build a following or establish connections with other people who share your vision

Continue to respond to conditions in education,

I’ve done this by starting a blog that continually looks at current digital learning. I use it to reflect on my own experiences, think of ways to produce better results, publish my ideas and continue to evolve my own understandings of this very complicated (and very simple) profession. The blog led to presentations at Edcamps, conferences and PD. It’ll lead to a book at some point me-thinks.

The most important step in this action plan is to take action, and make other people aware of what you’re struggling with in education. If you’re a teacher who doesn’t think twice about teaching, I’d suggest that you’re probably not a very good teacher. If I had to mandate any Ministry requirement for teaching, it would be that teachers should be life long learners, who love the process of teaching and learning, and demonstrate how they are actively working to improve it, in themselves, their classroom, their board and their profession in general.

http://pinterest.com/scottmcleod/slides/ Some good (and funny, and sometimes nasty) comments on educational irrelevance

Trying to understand UK PCP deals on motorcycles from a Canadian perspective

I’ve been trying to understand this since reading the
~~advertising~~, um, I mean buyer’s guide in BIKE last year.

I’m trying to get a handle on PCP financing that seems to be popular in the UK right now. If you’re going to buy a Kawasaki Z1000 with ABS in the UK, you’re looking at a price of £10,389 ($17,453CAN). The on the road price in Canada is about $16,000, so you’re already almost $1500 ahead, but cost of borrowing is where I get really confused.

If you PCP (personal contract purchase) you’re paying a £2500 ($4200CAN) downpayment and then £147 ($247CAN) per month for 36 months. At the end of that time you’ve got nothing, all while paying 5.9% interest and having to ride the bike under mileage and keep it pristine to keep your investment intact. You’re also hit up for financing paperwork fees. If you go over mileage or the bike is in any way less than mint when you return it you suffer additional costs. I imagine the same goes with any farkling you might want to do – don’t. When you hand it back you’ve paid $13,092 Canadian dollars in interest and what basically resolves itself as rental costs; you own nothing. That’s when they ask you if you want to do it again with another bike or now pay a balloon payment equal to the current value of the bike (assuming it’s in perfect shape).

If you buy the same bike in Canada and put the same amount down, you’re looking at a monthly payment of $348 Canadian (£207), and at the end of the 36 months you own the thing. There are no mileage restrictions, no worries about keeping it stock and perfect and if it is in good shape you’ll have spent about $550 in interest and have a vehicle that UK Kawasaki says is worth £3628 ($6095CAN).

The pure costs of borrowing in the UK would be the down payment plus the monthly interest costs. That’ll be £2500 down payment + £465 in monthly interest, all for the favour of giving you this great deal. The pure costs of interest on the PCP deal is £2965 ($4981CAN). The amount of interest you’re paying to own (rather than borrow) the same bike in Canada is $460.

The context of borrowing in the two countries is quite different. The UK happily followed the US down the rabbit hole that caused the 2008 financial crisis by deregulating banks. That never happened in Canada where interest rates and the cost of borrowing has always been held to reasonable standards. Canadian banks still make huge profits (they now own a number of US banks that crashed in 2008), but they don’t break the financial system in the process and people who live here aren’t subject to the ridiculous costs of borrowing that British people seem to think reasonable. I frequently see ads on UK TV for credit cards with interest rates that would be illegal in Canada.

With that in mind, maybe throwing nearly five grand Canadian to borrow a bike for three years (that’s $139 a month just in borrowing and rental costs!) makes sense, but it sure doesn’t from this side of the Atlantic.

I’m also left wondering what a flood of lightly used bikes will do to the marketplace in the next few years. In classic short term financial thinking it looks like PCP will flood the market place with short term ownership and then flood the market again with bikes people couldn’t afford in the first place. Won’t this eventually hurt new bike sales as dealers become swamped in returned PCP bikes? Maybe the idea is to return the bike and the go looking to get a massive discount on it when you show up a week later and they don’t have enough room on their lot to hold all the PCP returns.

I’m starting to see why the UK found keeping up with the EU too difficult to continue. They seem to have a very loose grasp on how marketplaces work and seem determined to ignore anything like sustainability. I’m heading over there in a couple of weeks and enjoying a great Canada/UK exchange rate thanks to their wobbly economic choices. I’m curious to see if I can get a first hand look at what this approach to bike selling is doing.

UK Kawasaki’s PCP calculator

Canadian Kawasaki’s offer on the same bike…

Cost of borrowing on Canada Kawasaki’s 36 month financing offer…

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But we’re all much happier now…

The stats back up that officer’s anecdotal experience.

I’ve had a number of conversations in the past few weeks that shed some light on a difficult subject. This all began at my men’s yoga class. One of the other guys there is a detective from the city south of us. He has been working on homicides for the past nine years and is starting to feel the weight of being around that much death all the time. He said the hardest part of is job is seeing his own demographic so prevalent in the suicides he covers. When I asked what he meant he said the suicides always seem to be guys in their forties and fifties. That was a heavy way to start a yoga class full of guys in their forties and fifties and not the kind of thing you soon forget.

From that I went into Christmas. The last couple of years have been good with trips away to warmer places. These adventures have been a great alternative to having how dysfunctional my family is rubbed in my face for two weeks. After a long bout of mental illness, a divorce and a suicide the local family members aren’t very good at getting together and all the rest are an ocean away. I feel remarkably isolated during the holidays and getting generic presents from in-laws only serves to emphasize how peripheral I am to the festivities. I can see why some people struggle with the season while the rest are manically happy.

With that all behind me I attended a lodge meeting this week that developed into a very insightful discussion by a group of sharp men on the steady deterioration of social interaction between our gender in the past two decades. Evidently I’m not the only man who feels socially isolated. Many older members lamented the lack of time and the means to enjoy that social time together. My sardonic reply was, ‘yeah, but we’re all much happier nowadays.’ Attendance in masonry is an ongoing concern. Twenty years ago the social aspects of the craft were central to a meeting with brothers often socializing long after the meeting was done. Back then we had time for each other, nowadays our commutes are longer, our work expectations more stringent and our family commitments more involved. We have less time for each other in the Twenty First Century.

We’re feeling time squeezed at a time when our debt levels are going through the roof in a desperate attempt to maintain that standard of living we enjoyed two decades ago. One of the first things you try to curtail when you see debt spiraling out of control are optional social events. The economics of Twenty First Century life is just another force acting to tear us apart. As Axl so aptly once said, ‘as our arms get shorter our pockets get deeper.’

Running the desperate treadmill of modern life has us feeling like we have no time to make connections with each other. To fix this problem we cunningly invented social media to fill that gap. You can stay in touch without sitting in traffic in crumbling infrastructure while burning ever more expensive gasoline to see people, but you’re not really seeing them. Having the time and means to actually meet your fellows and spend time with them without feeling like you need to be virtually or physically elsewhere is a basic human need many men have forgotten. I’m willing to bet many of those suicides my yoga buddy attended were lonely men feeling socially isolated.

The health considerations of poorly socialized, less active men are bad for everyone. I keep getting told to be active. I’d love to play hockey or soccer as I once did, but there is no access to the local cliques who do it. Men tend to be remarkably tribal and don’t like taking in outsiders. That makes it difficult to play team sports if you’re not living where you grew up with the people you grew up with (that’s most of us).

I’m going to make a concerted effort to try and cultivate the time and space to find the social discourse I seem to have grown out of as a middle-aged man. My family and my work are important, but so is finding the time and means to experience meaningful relationships with other men. It might even lead to exercise and a chance to expand my social network into something beyond words on a screen.