The Final Reckoning

One survey after another reports the same thing: the young are avoiding the technical fields. In Germany, enrolments in mechanical engineering have fallen from 120,000 to 80,000 within ten years. Two hundred thousand engineers will retire over the next ten years. The professional association already puts the loss in value creation at thirteen billion euros a year.

The experts' explanations follow a pattern. The younger generation is said to be less resilient. To struggle with logical thinking. To be distracted by social media. The course of study is held to be too demanding and too strenuous. Every one of these explanations looks for the fault in the young.

There is another explanation. It looks for the fault not in those who turn away, but in that from which they turn away. It runs: the young are not reacting unreasonably, but reasonably. They are drawing a conclusion from what they see.

The Witness

What they see can be read off those who have walked the path. Whoever has spent a lifetime inventing, developing, designing is today in a position to give a young person the most honest information available. It does not turn out encouraging.

Whoever enters technology enters foreign structures, with rules he must accept. He invents, he develops, he masters the process, but he does not own it. His patents are exploited by licensees who decide their fate without asking him and without an appropriate share in the success. His developments run in companies whose substance migrates to wherever it can be had more cheaply. He commands means that are not his, within limits that others have drawn. At the end of such a working life what stands is often not the work, but its unsatisfying and imperfect exploitation by others.

An older person who has this behind him has a demoralising effect on a young one through his mere existence. He is the result the career runs toward. In that sense he is the most effective deterrent imaginable — more effective than any statistic on income and workload.

The Reckoning of Others

The same phenomenon is viewed from two sides, and the second is likewise not positive. In the circle around such an older person there are acquaintances who read his life as confirmation. They chose the safe path, the salaried post, the adaptation, the manageable risk. They look at the one who attempted the other thing, and conclude, from what is discernible to them, that they did it right.

This reading has a premise that is rarely spoken: it holds the reckoning to be closed. It draws a line in the present and reads off the result. On the one side the secured income, the career without breaks, the quiet balance. On the other the effort without corresponding return. The account seems clear.

It is so only under one condition: that the present is the right moment for the reckoning. This condition is not examined, but presupposed. Whoever has adapted himself to the present knows no other measure than it. He settles accounts in the only currency he allows to count, and finds that he is richer. Within that currency he is right.

Who Determines the Date

A reckoning presupposes a point in time at which accounts are settled. Whoever determines that point also determines the result. This is the decisive and usually overlooked point.

For whoever works exclusively for the present, his reckoning coincides with the present; it is due at any moment and closed at any moment. For whoever works at something whose use becomes apparent only later, a reckoning in the present is premature. It measures a result that has not yet come about, and necessarily arrives at a negative finding.

That recognition and work fall apart in time is not the exception, but the normal case wherever something comes into being whose value the present does not yet recognise, or for which it has no use yet. The present is a poor judge of that for which it has no use. A work that aims at a later need cannot be judged accurately by the time in which it comes about. Measured against that time, it is always in deficit.

The Deferred Reckoning

From this follows a sober consequence. Whoever has reason to assume that his work can only be judged later has an interest in deferring the reckoning — and the means to do so, provided he meets one condition: the work must reach the moment of judgement. It must be documented completely, securely, and independently of the person who produced it. What is not secured is reckoned with its author and ends with him. What is secured waits.

A complete, permanently archived documentation of one's own work and thinking is therefore not a by-product. It is the means by which the reckoning is taken out of the present and deferred into a future that can apply other measures. It makes the work independent of the judgement of its time. It is the structure the author himself possesses, and the only one over which no one can decide for him.

With this, the meaning of what the acquaintances observe also shifts. Their balance is closed; with their life accounts are settled, no item remains open. The other balance is open; it contains an item dated to a later term. Whether this item is ever redeemed is uncertain. But a closed balance that counts as success, and an open balance that counts as failure, are not the same thing, and the present cannot decide the difference.

Old Age as the Closing Account

It belongs to a sober view to carry this thought to its end, there where it is least consoling. In old age, when role, task, and effectiveness fall away, the present presents its closing account. Whoever was effective earlier and now, often enough pushed aside, spends his days without a task, examines whether what he lived amounted to a connection. Often this examination turns out negative. That is the latest and most personal form of the reckoning in the present.

It is tempting to assume that earlier success protects against this. It does not. Whoever drew his worth from role and present effectiveness loses it when both fall away; the contrast with earlier success sharpens the loss rather than softening it. His balance was bound to the present, and when the present no longer needs him, the balance is worthless. The success was never detachable from the person.

Whoever, by contrast, has worked at something secured outside his person is not deprived by old age of this one certainty: that the open item persists, regardless of whether the present still heeds it. That is the sober half. The other must stand beside it, or the thought becomes a consolation that promises more than it can hold. For, first, even the secured item does not reliably protect against grief; a human being is not a balance sheet, and doubt, loneliness, and the question whether it was worth it know nothing of the safeguard. Second, the conviction that one's own work awaits a later, more just judgement cannot be distinguished from the outside from a mere rationalisation. It can be a consolation that never redeems itself.

This does not invalidate it, but it determines its status precisely. The adapted one has likewise only borrowed his certainty from the present; his account too the future can revoke. The difference between the two is not that one is sure to be proved right. The difference is solely that one has an open item and the other has none. Over open items the future decides. Closed ones are decided. More than this cannot honestly be said.

What Follows

The honest information to a young person thus consists of two parts, and the second does not cancel the first. The first part runs: whoever enters technology in order to find recognition and return in the present within the existing structures must reckon with disappointment; the structure exploits his work and settles accounts with him himself on its terms. The deterrent is justified on this point.

The second part runs: this deterrent applies to entry into the foreign structure, not to the matter itself. It applies to the expectation of present recognition, not to the work. Whoever creates something whose value the present does not recognise has not chosen wrongly, but too early — and the too-early is correctable, if the work reaches the later moment. The condition for that is not adaptation, but securing.

With this, the demoralisation reverses itself at its end. It is directed not against technology and not against inventing, but against a single assumption: that the present has the last word. For whoever gives up this assumption, the image of the older person is no longer a deterrent. It is the pointer to a choice that is to be made — not between technology and security, but between the reckoning of the present and a reckoning whose date one determines oneself.

Which of the two is worth more is decided not by who shows the larger balance today. It is decided by when accounts are settled. And that point in time, for the one who has secured his work, is not yet fixed.