Crossing the Atlas
The road snaked against the high Atlas, 2300 meters above sea level. We motored through dust, brush, heat and rock, Giant cranes expanded the mountain side as the car made its way. Sheep herders tended to their flocks like a millenia of generations before.
Caterpillars loaded rubble onto beds of 20 ton trucks and laborers shoveled smaller clay bits into packs attached along the side of their donkeys.
History watched skeptically as the present made its case and the future waited furtively around the corner. I was in Morocco. I could have been in Ural, or Iraq, or Uruq.
Consumer internet was born with my generation. My mom (PhD in Math) took years to adopt the web. I find Snapchat’s UI weird. How do you get youth raised on herding sheep to learn Python, if that’s where the jobs are going.
If the future of work is decentralized, hyper technical and reinvents itself every generation - how do we develop an ability to keep up.
Deep red and orange adobe clay punctuated the lush greenness of the surrounding vegetation as we descend from the peak of the range.
The gnarled alpines shaped a bowl that encased an entire canyon with an oasis at the bottom and river flowing through its heart. The scale of the ecosystem was astounding.
I understood how someone feels humbled by this natural immensity and relates it to the divine.
Mud brick huts seemed to sprout straight out of the mountains which donated raw materials for their construction. The local dwellings were close cousins to the neighboring kasbahs built 1300 years ago.
I made friends with the owner of my hostel at Fez. The building was a newly remodeled riad that the proprietor was quickly turning into a Social Club where locals mingled with back packers and the old coalesced with the new.
It was a fresh take on an old hostel, a WeWork for travelers. The other hostel owners felt threatened (according to my friend) by this innovation and tried to make life difficult for the entrepreneur.
"People are hoping that you fail" he said wistfully. The culture seemed inward looking. It celebrated tradition and skeptically held reinvention at elder arms length. But I didn’t have to go to Morocco to find conservatism at odds with a changing world.