John Y’s Musings from the Middle: The Next Big Idea

The most brilliant solutions are usually the most obvious. Mine is no exception. After you hear it, you will want to kick yourself for not thinking of it yourself.

I believe that given the extent of our national debt coupled with individual’s lack of retirement savings and the disappointing failure of multitasking to allow us to complete all of our errands and “action items” each day in our frantic wireless world that never turns off, we need a solution that is bold and “out of the box” — a “game changer,” if you will.

Here’s my idea to solve all these problems. It’s this generation’s Star Wars Missile Defense System. Only better.

We must use our best and brightest scientific minds to get an extension, as it were—via Mother Nature.

We need to slow the rate at which the Earth rotates. Not a lot. Just a little—so that it is barely noticeable after the first month or two (like in the 1970s when the speed limit was dropped to 55 mph to reduce our national usage of and reliance on foreign oil. Car pooling helped to.)

By slowing the Earth’s rotation to lengthen our days from, say, 24 hours to 27 1/2 hours, and our calendars from 365 days a year to 432 days a year, we will buy ourselves the much needed extra time we need to pay down the debt, put away adequate retirement savings, and finally get to check-off our entire “to do” lists including everything from that overdue oil changes to getting our dog’s nails clipped. And we’ll still have extra time left over for flossing, which we seem never to have time for in our current outdated 24/365 system.

Will it work?

I think the Japanese are already doing this and having quantifiable success. Retirement savings are up and cavities are down, per capita

We need to “catch up” and we aren’t able to “speed up” any more. Slowing the Earth to lengthen our calendars is the only thing that makes sense.

Who doesn’t love that feeling of getting an extra week to finish an major assignment you are behind on or moving a conference call you aren’t prepared for to the following week? This solution would do that for everything!

If this doesn’t work, the federal government will be left with no choice but to require the only beverage served in the US to be Red Bull–to speed us up artificially. And not only would that not work since most of us are already hopped up on caffeine, but drinking that much Red Bull daily is really bad for our teeth and causes gingivitis.

This “game changer” solution just makes good common sense! Not to mention political, economic , and dental sense.

Its brilliant but not a panacea. We should still encourage car pooling too. It can’t hurt.