Breaking paradigms

Breaking Paradigms

A former business man, who now calls himself a mathematician, an artist and a poet. Carlos Pacheco  invited us to imagine a world where people are paid to feel occupied. People working on a fictitious company receiving packages, processing invoices and printing documents. The goal of this company is to keep the retired people busy like when they actually worked.

Carlos’ professional activity in new technologies and his sensitivity are worth echoing in this article. What he saw in a documentary about fictional companies has made him accumulate numberless reflections. He said that the fictional company looked truly real and reportedly that made him think about other things.

I feel that most of the work done in the industrialized world is unnecessary and shallow, I feel that I could work less hours and have a better life quality. I feel that most of the time I worked for money it was like printing documents.
How valuable is what I have accomplished? Zero. How important is that in the “x” month I overcame the goal or that in “y” years the company had grown or that the department grew “z” percent above the sector average? Zero.
I feel the need of align myself with what I do. I wish to look back and see something solid instead of ephemeral printed papers and nonsense activities. To do something meaninful and useful is to have an activity that can result in a real benefit to other people.

He explains the driving trigger behind his will to work for the benefit of social causes and engage in cooperation projects which aim to build the grounds of development:

I don’t like companies because they are hostages of the stockholders investment. I also don’t like the state; religious organizations also don’t make sense to me, I’m atheist. I believe that a NGO is something in between and that’s something better.

Carlos points several examples of what he considers to be meaningful and useful activities,such as building a water treatment station in a very poor area or the construction of dams, watering systems, wells, residual water plumbing, schools, improvement of the sanitary conditions, providing local self-sustainability (agriculture) and power distribution… In general, what he believes to be the basic solid instruments for the development.

Carlos also claims that starvation, need of medical assistance and the human rights are also very important matters. However, he believes that if infrastructures are granted than starvation and diseases like cholera, etc, tend to disappear and conditions for people to think would raise out so naturally the social development that the human rights violation would decrease.

Proving that breaking paradigms is possible, even to those who were scientifically and technologically trained and who have dedicated a whole professional life to managing and selling services, Carlos states that those experiences must be considered advantages and opportunities if directly applied to social development.

Back to the basics: Projects that create infrastructures are very seductive for me. I wish to do something meaningful and useful with my time

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This interview comes up after a conversation about personal motivation of those who decide to fight for Millennium Development Goals opposing to more conventional ways of life and to being profit-oriented.