Programaddict

I don't count myself as a professional coder, I'm not. I may write a healthy amount of SQL queries during the course of my normal working day, I might even get the occasional chance to write some pretty impressive (largely for their brevity) Unix shell scripts, but I don't spend every day at work writing code. The days when I do are the ones I like best. On those days I almost don't exist: I hover in the liminal space between conception and execution, I drift through data fields like a space tourist. This all sounds utterly pretentious, but it is the best description of the sense of freedom I feel when coding. In a world where so much discovery is precluded by the success of history, the infinite possibility of an empty command line is the greatest uncharted territory left. The satisfaction of making the world change instantly through language alone is hard to beat and it always leaves further possibilities. With code there is no end. If you genuinely enjoy programming, there will always be something new to find out. It is often problem solving, but it is more than that: people who enjoy programming will invent new problems to solve for the joy of solving them. This may sound like a waste of time or energy, but I would argue that it is a vital part of the creative process.
A friend recently pointed out his indignation at those who say that coding is not very creative. He should know, he does quite a lot of it in order to make some of the films you see look quite as spectacular as they do. I guess you could argue that Hollywood isn't that creative, but you'd be clutching at straws. Anyway, regardless of its current uses (and they are myriad) coding is as creative as the person doing the coding, much like writing or painting, but with the potential to change the world in which we live directly. As I have already said, I enjoy this creative process and I am by no means alone. I remember hearing a profile piece on Mark Zuckerberg on the radio, in which a friend said "he just really likes to code more than anything else". So it is understandable that on finding a vehicle through which to do this, he did. Never mind what you may or may not think about the outcome, Zuckerberg has got what he wanted. He'll be able to code long after his company's star has faded, and he may yet get the chance to change the world with it. However, in the interim, as I have previously pointed out, he has settled for a position within the standard corporate structure in return for the opportunity to pursue his passion. As much as we believe that the act of writing code will change the world, we are deluding ourselves unless we are willing to look at the contexts within which that process happens. We have the power to restructure society and yet almost always we leave it to the old fashioned venture capitalists and politicians to impose the same tired old structures on the systems of the future. Philosophically any change to this status quo would be hard, as the language of the tech startup is still largely the old fashioned language of venture capital, which instantly boxes anything new up as a marketable product; unique, simple and isolated. This is understandable: 'monetizing' a chunk of code in this way is a tried and tested way of earning a living and everyone needs to eat. Fortunately the world of code is awash with myriad examples of people who have subverted this system in one way or another, hence the fact that I can legitimately build a complex web platform without having to pay a penny for software. I may be encouraged to make a donation to its creators (and I will get round to it at some point, honest), I may be expected to pay for software support, but I am not expected to pay simply to use the software. I am certainly not expected to pay for the software as part of the cost of buying hardware (ahem, Microsoft). The alternatives exist, but they are not common to the mainstream, meaning that weirdly people prefer to engage in piracy of proprietary software rather than look into the 'free' alternatives. This may be for many reasons, not least because the marketing budgets that come with the levels of income generated by highly priced proprietary software backed by classical investment structures mean that a wider audience is easier to reach. I am not saying that it is all down to advertising by any means: I am a keen user of Ubuntu (a Linux operating system for those who don't know), but I wouldn't recommend everyone switch to it, I wouldn't recommend my parents try and use it. Whilst it is fairly user friendly and works in pretty much the same way as most modern operating systems, it still requires an amount of confidence with computers in general that is lacking in many people's approach. The fact that for years most computers have come pre-loaded with Windows and, by and large, it functions with little active maintenance has clearly worked in its favour; users have been able to use software with little understanding of how to. Of course the new exception is Android, which is free, open source, pre-loaded on most devices and easy to use. Seemingly, Google's rationale for doing this is twofold: making something open source gets the geeks onside and having everyone on your platform can help you nudge them towards other revenue generating services. As long as that remains a nudge, then no one minds, but Google is - financially at least - still a classically structured company with shareholders who expect an ever increasing return on their investment, so the danger of them suddenly deciding to hold their users to ransom is always present, even though it would probably be commercial suicide. It would certainly be interesting to see what would happen in such circumstances. In all likelihood, the geeks would take up the mantle of creating an android clone. In such a case, it would be interesting to see whether commercial organisations backed it, as many have a tendency to like proprietary software because it makes them feel like they have some sort of comeback. Of course it would be interesting to see how much sway any commercial customer of Microsoft or Apple has over development requests or bug fixes. I guess in the end, people in big companies like to be able to talk to other people in big companies about their software; it fits with their ideas about how business should work. Old fashioned ideas that are out of touch with the new world of technology. Hopefully, one day, the the old world of finance will catch up.
In the meantime, people like me will carry on coding just for fun.

Persistence

I was thinking about Oliver Burkeman in the shower yesterday. Not like that. Having battled my way through the January gym with all its attendant new year's resolutes, I was feeling good about myself. This wasn't anything to do with managing to get to the gym, I always manage that, largely because I know I will stand in the shower at the end and feel good. I attribute this feeling at least partly to chemistry and the endorphins that exercise floods your body with, but part of it is also a sense of certainty.
In one of his brilliant 'This Column Will Change Your Life' columns a while back Oliver Burkeman addressed the problem that people who are broadly to the left of the political spectrum tend to be less happy than those on the right. This is apparently down to certainty. If you are a bit of a lefty wooly liberal type, you tend to question the rectitude of everything you do and worry about its impact on others (cf the rest of this blog), whereas if you're a right wing chin you're certain of the rectitude of all your actions and unconcerned whether they affect other people. The result is that being heartless and uncaring makes you happier, because in order to do so, you need to be certain that you are right/justified in your actions. Obviously, I would look at it that way; perhaps if I was more right wing, I'd say that if you're a feeble whingeing loser, you are bound to be miserable and deservedly so. Either way you want to cut it, this observation brings up some interesting questions about temperament and ideology, and illustrates one of the many problems with the left as a whole: that in order to compete as a political force, it has a disproportionate amount of navel-gazing to work through as a matter of course.
On a personal level this navel-gazing also needs to be overcome to avoid crippling stagnation and/or the depression that is apparently the curse of lefty liberals everywhere. According to Burkeman (who was summarising someone else - yes this is tertiary) the key is in planning ahead, having fixed goals and definite plans. If we fix our plans, we reduce the opportunity for change and uncertainty, and therefore also doubt apparently.
At this time of year we quite often think about making changes in our lives and I find this sort of thing to generate a large amount of uncertainty, as we may have ambition to change, but whether we manage to is reliant on so many factors that it is hard to imagine a person who has sufficient blind self-confidence not to be affected by the uncertainty. In such a climate, it is nice to find anything that will introduce a little certainty. Hence why I like the gym: it is based on a simple transaction with definite outcomes.
I suppose the danger is that I comfort myself with these minor certainties to a sufficient extent to avoid facing up to the major uncertainties that I need to face in order to move my life forward. Although it is odd to think about what I mean by 'move my life forward', what does 'forward' refer to? It surely cannot mean forward in time, as everyone's life moves that way without prompting. It has some sort of goal oriented meaning requiring a specific goal: wealth, career progression, social movement; any kind of achievement of accumulation. I'm human, so sure I want to accumulate stuff, I'm just not sure what it is exactly or whether I can justify it... Oh hang on, here I go again. Clearly I need to go away and come up with a plan.
See you next year.

Protocol

A recent piece of research showed that people are very very conservative when it comes to weddings and notably wedding proposals. I would have found this surprising were I not married myself, but as I am, I am only too aware of the fairly rigid ideas a surprising number of people hold on the whole process.
Firstly there was the fact that Ms P proposed to me. This, according to the survey and the reactions of many people is incomprehensible. "But it's not a leap year," people would say, baffled as to how else this could happen. To be honest, until we started telling people, I hadn't thought that there was anything odd about this apparently transgressive flouting of tradition. Much more was to come: there is always someone who is going to be flabbergasted that you have failed to incorporate into your wedding some apparently indispensable custom. I don't think our wedding was particularly 'whacky', but it managed to confuse many people with its myriad breaks with perceived tradition.
I have been careful to say 'perceived', as tradition is really not as rigid as people like to think. Christmas is a very good example of this. Almost every single aspect of what is popularly defined as Christmas tradition is usually less than 100 years old and largely no older than 150 years. Everyone knows that the Christmas tree was brought to Britain by Prince Albert in the 19th century, but that is a long established tradition compared to eating turkey, which no one would have considered doing before the 1950s. Neither are these things universal: ask any child anywhere how their Christmas presents arrive and you will find a startling amount of variation. This just serves to highlight the purpose of most traditions: they are personal or family habits that we find it comforting to repeat at certain times. Such 'family' habits are often repeated at national level, probably because they help us get comfortable with our rulers, but even national traditions are easily changed. Modern British Christmas tradition includes the queen's speech, but this has only been on television as long as the telly has been around, granted before then it was on the radio, but only for about 30 years.
I'm a big fan of some traditions: I think wearing a tie with a suit is a good tradition based on the fact that not doing so looks a bit shit*; I'm all for Speaker's Corner and Black Rod and MPs not addressing each other directly, because such traditions preserve the conceptual framework of our democracy; I'm quite into pageantry in general, as it gives a framework to national community and is generally harmless. Many of the things associated with the official duties of the royal family have both a high amount pageantry and a large amount of tradition associated with them, mainly because if they didn't we'd all be wondering what the point of the royal family is. However, just because the royal family follow many arcane traditions doesn't mean the rest of us should. In the 19th century, the king of Thailand decided he wanted to take mistresses openly, and being the king, he just got on with it. Men in the Thai aristocracy thought that this was rather a smart idea and copied him. Middle class Thai men decided they wanted in on the act, but they couldn't afford to keep mistresses, so they just took prostitutes. Thus prostitution became normalised in Thailand, allowing thousands of creepy European men to justify their exploitation of Thai women because "it's tradition."
Tradition is not and never should be an excuse for unacceptable behaviour: no one ever says they're racist because it's tradition, but they might defend racist traditions. Traditions do not have to have a rationale, they do not have to be rational, but they should be essentially harmless. Most importantly in my view, traditions should never be compulsory and they are certainly not universal. What I find most astonishing is that a number of 'traditions' persist well into the 21st century, long after we would assume they'd have passed into obscurity. Turn on the television at this time of year and you'll see loads of mildly offensive adverts in which some poor woman works herself to the bone whilst her ungrateful family sit around watching shit on the telly. I get angry at the lazy assumptions of the creatives who came up with these adverts, but maybe once again it's me who's the oddball. Maybe most families do consider such massive gender stereotyping to be the norm, or tradition. I do not deny that 'traditionally' it was the case that women did all of the domestic work in households, but that is only because 'traditionally' men were working down the mines for twelve hours a day. Given that one of those traditions is well and truly dead, I would expect the corresponding one to be as dead.
Of course now I'm drifting into tradition as societal norms, but unfortunately the two are deeply intertwined and often get confused. A lot of this comes back to image making, and the ideas we present to each other as a society. If we reinforce bad stereotypes and feed them back to ourselves as tradition, then we allow ourselves lazy and thoughtless excuses for poor behaviour. Equally, if we actively question the stereotypes we are presented with, we might arrive at a better set of traditions. Maybe if we saw more Christmas adverts where the family prepare Christmas dinner together, we might not find it so odd. Maybe if we saw any adverts/films/TV programs where a woman proposing was not presented as hilariously freakish, we might not get quite so hung up on some of the ridiculous wedding 'traditions' that people seem to care so much about.

* at least that is my opinion. You might be perfectly happy dressing like a used car salesman.

Parochial

One of my colleagues is a member of a Lewes bonfire society whose chosen guy this year was apparently Angela Merkel sat atop a shattered Acropolis, doing some sort of cross between a Usein lighting bolt and a Nazi salute. This could be interpreted as exasperation with some of the most overexposed media images of the year, but I think that is possibly a little generous. In all likelihood this is a fine example of all that is insular, small minded and parochial about this great country of ours. It is a feeble piece of sixth form politics to think that Angela Merkel is singlehandedly responsible for the troubles that Greece currently finds itself in. Then again I guess it's hard to fit the overenthusiastic politicians and lawyers who drafted the Maastricht treaty, the legions of Greek politicians too full of the kudos of power to actually deal with political realities, the bankers hopped up on hubris who allowed the property bubble, all the people who bought property they couldn't afford with sub-prime mortgages and the tax-dodging Greek wealthy on top of a bonfire. So instead some of the good people of Lewes thought it might be easier to make an inaccurate political point and reinforce some fairly ugly stereotypes at the same time. Of course we shouldn't take any of this too seriously right? People just stick effigies of popular hate figures on bonfires because of how they are portrayed, not because they genuinely believe the portrayal, right?
Even if we assume that the highest intellectual standards are being applied to the casual demonisation of public figures we can't escape from the fact that such things reinforce negative stereotypes. One should always try to be aware of the consequences of one's actions, and that any nuance implied is likely to be lost on all but the most clued up observers. In a global society it worth thinking about the subtleties that are lost in translation. The song 'Gangnam Style' is a satirical dig at the ridiculousness of those who ape the elites of a district of Seoul, it is effectively the Korean version of a song ridiculing the cast of Made in Chelsea (except that would be pointless - they have a whole TV program in which to make themselves look utterly ridiculous). However it is likely that, as the song is untranslated, the majority of its 700 million YouTube viewers* watch it because of the man doing the funny dance. I guess there is nothing fundamentally wrong with this (and certainly Psy doesn't seem to mind), as it is light entertainment, but the fact that the point of the song is entirely lost on most of the people who watch the video is important. What if there had been something in the video that could have been misinterpreted in a negative way, what if the video had seemingly encouraged the abuse of horses? Doubtless there would then have been an outcry over the perceived encouragement of animal abuse, regardless of whether that encouragement was actual.
We live in a visual world where perception is everything and therefore it is our responsibility to make sure that every message we present is as clear and easily read as possible. With something like satire this is not so easy, as it relies implicitly on a decent amount of cultural and linguistic knowledge to be effective. However, that just means it is only truly great satire when not a single cultural or linguistic subtlety is misplaced. Making crass political points based on inaccurate generalisations based on prejudice is not satire, it is incitement.
I'm sure the people of Lewes would take me to task for being far too serious about something that is just a bit of fun and maybe they're right, but I can't help thinking that too many of the things we excuse as 'just a bit of fun' require that label as an excuse for their negative connotations. The bonfires of Lewes would be just as fun with historical or fictional demons atop them, without inciting needless and misguided hatred. Our society already has a surplus of that.

*obviously I am being simplistic. 700 million YouTube views does not translate to 700 million viewers. I assume (incorrectly) that everyone, like me, considers anything on YouTube worth watching only once.

Piles (part 1)

When we hear about the amount of money that we as a nation have lent to banks or the value of the total national debt, we struggle to comprehend the sums of money involved. This tends to have the effect of trivialising the amounts of money involved, they simply become conceptually small again, because in order to be able to deal with them we tend to remove the zeros. On top of this, when amounts of money can be related to us personally, we tend to concentrate solely (and understandably) on the part of the transaction that concerns us, rather than using our part of the transaction to contextualize the whole transaction. If we take a long haul flight, we might pay £850 (assuming it's not peak season), and our ticket will be one of 150 on that flight (150 x 850 = £127500), and if we add in some business class (20 x 2500 = £50000) and some first class (10 x 6000 = £60000) then we can pretty much visualise what a quarter of a million pounds looks like: like 180 people eating unfinished baby food, watching three month old films and breathing each other's recycled farts (obviously, some of them get more space to do this in than others). Once you fill the sky with these things, it becomes a very valuable place, but the sums of money involved quickly become incomprehensible again. If you look up at the sky and think 'two hundred and fifty thousand pounds (£250,000)' every time you spot an aeroplane, you'd lose count very quickly. This dissociation is both a symptom and a necessity of the systems of large scale capital: being in possession of large amounts of money obtained from the payments of a large number of people is only morally acceptable if we are entirely detached from the mass of humanity that lies behind the money.
Of course an amount of upscaling is required for large-scale economies to work, but the dislocation between the source of income and its output that this creates allows for inefficient distribution of the wealth generated. Indeed, as the systems and networks that the global economy relies on improve, it increasingly appears that the only reason for the traditional large scale corporate structures is to justify the payments of those at the top. The skills involved in the provision of any upscaled service cannot reside with one excessively remunerated person, so why do they get paid for making largely ineffectual decisions about 'direction', 'strategy' and other nebulous concepts? The only reason I can think is that they have persuaded us of the importance of what they do. In the past it may have been the case that the benefits of scale only came from behemoth companies with legions of superremunerated executives at the top dealing with their corporate affairs, but with the infrastructure that exists now this should no longer be the case. Smaller companies should be able to pool their specialities to form lose partnerships of common interest that would have the advantages of scale that large corporations currently do. Such networks could be formed and funded on a project by project basis. Obviously there are issues of joint liability that would need to be clearly defined at the start to avoid the sort of blame-shifting that can happen in large companies when something goes wrong, but the infrastructure required exists. So why isn't this happening? The main issue is one of perception: ask any young silicon valley/roundabout entrepreneur what their goal is and it will invariably be founded on an idea that they may one day be as unimaginably wealthy as the pioneers of the commercial computer technology: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. Did you spot the odd one out? Mark Zuckerberg is not like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. The latter two men found themselves at the head of multinational companies due to an overriding passion for their subject and after years of work. Mark Zuckerberg had one idea and almost instantly saw its potential to make him a lot of money as event software. There is no sense in which facebook was ever intended to bring benefit to humanity; Zuckerberg never had any of the early revolutionary zeal of Jobs or Gates, he wanted to fastrack to the executive boardroom. Sure, he made the early years like being at college, but that's because he was at college and so was his market. Zuckerberg unfortunately embodies the dreams of the people who could so easily change the way our society functions: at the first opportunity, sell out.
With the strange abstraction that comes from very large sums of money comes the assumption that, as we cannot really comprehend such things, they must be unimaginably good. Whilst we all dream of winning the lottery we will never move away from this flaw in our culture; whilst we believe that the only way to be truly happy is to have considerably more than everyone else, we will have a society where there are a sizeable minority with much more than everyone else. The only way to comprehend the big numbers is to think of the individual stories that make them up. Think of each of the people on the aeroplane and how each of them got there: the pensioners who have waited all their lives to make that trip; the young couple looking for a new life who have bought a ticket on credit and hoping their future will pay down the debt; the businessman chasing the dream of glamorous business travel. The stories quickly pile up and become overwhelming in themselves and we realise that it is money itself that allows us the separation from those who contribute to our wealth. The idea of owning slaves is reprehensible to almost everyone, yet many people have no problem putting a price on the value of another person if that transaction is indirect. The fact of money allows us to make a commodity out of anything without any associated guilt; it allows us to launder association and context, so that commodity may be sought from the ills of the world without any associated moral taint. I am not saying that money is the cause of all of the world's ills, but that it is the means by which we most easily allow ourselves to ignore them.
We don't need to burn all money and return wholesale to a barter economy, but maybe we should think about the true cost and value of the goods and services we buy. If we think about it as buying a segment of someone's life then maybe we'd be more concerned. Then again maybe we just don't care, maybe we're too selfish care, maybe we'd rather just think about all those people's lives as so many numbers.

Passing The Buck

Someone somewhere may well read this post and shake their head with exasperated condescension, or sigh at how naive I am to wish the world to be such a simple place. However, I am going to attempt to argue that just such people are very much part of the problem. But I am getting ahead of myself: first to set out my stall.
I had a little Twitter rant the other day about bond traders and their seemingly short sighted desire to cause a sovereign debt crisis. The argument being that by increasing the price of sovereign debt, they are increasing the chances of a sovereign debt crisis, which will mean they are less likely to see a return on their investments. Obviously, they won't lose out, as they will have bought credit default swaps to insure against a country going bust. And of course the price of those credit default swaps goes up the greater the risk is of a country going bust. Obviously, insurance companies have to price their products according to risk, so they get the credit ratings agencies to calculate the risk of a country going bust for them. The credit ratings agencies look at the amount of debt a country holds and what the bond traders are charging for that debt and decide on the risk of a default. So it is a self-perpetuating cycle, that amplifies the jitters of those involved into massive gains or losses, potentially ruining the economies of nations. Of course those involved in the process don't make massive losses, they have made sure that there is no chance of that. However there are losses and gains built into the system, so who pays for them? You do, you schmuck. Not only do your taxes go into paying back the money that your government has borrowed, but the money that was lent in the first place came from your pension scheme, or ISA, or other savings scheme. So you fund the system at both ends, yet the amount of your tax that gets spent on paying back bonds does not equate at all to the rate of return you will see on your investments. Obviously there is a need for companies to make a profit, but there seems to be a problem with the fact they can make a profit when the losses occur at both ends of the chain. It's odd that so much has been made of governments bailing out banks when government debt has been an essential part of the investment mix for years, quietly turning profits for financial institutions, and allowing a 'safe' investment vehicle for people nearing retirement. The current financial system needs sovereign debt to function properly, which cannot necessarily be a good thing. If we are replacing the welfare state with a system that relies at least partially on making money from government debt, what are we actually gaining? By 'we' I mean taxpayers, not the 'wealth creators' who profit from this situation and make sure that their money remains largely untaxed.
Anyway, the people who do profit from this system excuse themselves by stating that they didn't create the system, and that they are just reacting to market pressures. Brilliantly, they are instantly absolved of any responsibility, making it a classic victimless crime, except of course it isn't a crime. The significant lobbying power of the financial services industry ensures that time after time any legislation that may threaten their ability to exploit whatever market they chose is kicked into the long grass. The result is that it is only people who do not listen to the financial services industry at all who make new legislation, and because of the lack of dialogue, it is not very good legislation. This in turn fuels the view of those in financial services that politicians are not competent to regulate the system. In many ways of course they are right, our economic systems in their entirety are now so complex that economists struggle to explain them fully. It is easy for traders to understand the influences on their specific product, but as they have little concerns for the effects of that product beyond profit making, they cannot be considered to have a 'big picture' understanding. The economists who do look at the big picture can't agree on how it works, so how are we supposed to know what the effects of certain products are?
In such a climate, politicians can perhaps be forgiven for regulating the symptoms without any real understanding of the cause, but that doesn't mean they do any good by it. Self regulation would be much better if anyone had any enthusiasm for it, but they don't. The city's enthusiasm for self regulation is just a pretext for its enthusiasm for no regulation. You don't ask an alcoholic to look after your cellar.
So we are at a regulatory impasse: the only people capable of understanding the detail sufficiently have no interest in the big picture and the people whose concern is the big picture rely on others who only understand theory or poachers turned gamekeepers. I sometimes think that the solution might be arrived at if we all study economics, but I'm not sure: knowing the theory hasn't worked for anyone so far, so all of us knowing the theory is likely to just cause more confusion. Also, knowing the theory won't get us any closer to understanding the details, or understanding the relationship between the two. So we have to go one way or the other, either financial products must have clear definitions of their influence and impact if they are to be licenced, or they must only be allowed if they are simple enough for a politician to understand. And that's pretty simple.

Passage

I've reached an age where I am suitably embarrassed by how late in life* I was still enthralled by Star Wars. In that respect, I am possibly in the minority: Star Wars is a cornerstone of the contemporary cultural encyclopedia of many a man child, rather than something they were interested in as a kid. How else can you explain Vodafone considering Yoda to be a suitable brand ambassador?
Star Wars is a useful piece of rights-of-passage filmmaking that saw many a young person through the darkness of an 80s childhood. It taught us many useful adult lessons, not least about technology, which should be viewed as either:
a) polite yet totally ineffectual (C3P0),
b) belligerent and utterly incomprehensible (R2D2) or
c) functional but occasionally requiring a kick to fulfill its potential (Millennium Falcon).
Indeed a major lesson of the original trilogy is that efficient technology and organisations are to be feared, because it is impossible to be technologically and/or organizationally efficient without being evil. This is perhaps the most effective message that Lucas portrayed, indeed he is at least partially responsible for making this counter-cultural concept mainstream. Whilst we all consume goods from vast corporations at a rate unseen in human history, we get nervous and edgy when these corporations become too vast, and rightly so. The Microsofts and Apples of this world maintain their market dominance by methods not dissimilar from those of the Empire (minus the killing people bit). As a consumer of goods from these companies you are basically told to either subscribe to their system wholesale or not at all: protectionist strategies that even in the late 70s were viewed as undesirable and old fashioned. So, oddly, the technological universe can still be divided into the factions defined by Star Wars: those who are happy to be conform, to allow a single, faceless, homogeneous organisation to form their world view in exchange for technological efficiency, and those who are willing to accept a ramshackle technological landscape inhabited by myriad worldviews, personalities, races and cultures. I will not make judgment, but Star Wars clearly does.
Of course, it is not just (70s/80s) adult attitudes to technology that are presented, young Luke Skywalker has to deal with all the pains of growing up, from learning to operate his 'lightsaber' correctly, to fulfilling the oedipal cycle by killing his father (although he gets off with his sister, due to his mum being entirely absent from the picture). On the way he has to deal with the fact that adults lie to you if they think it's in your best interest, the knowledge that everything is not always as it seems and that to achieve anything you have to put in quite a lot of effort (and literally fight against yourself, etc etc).
Yes it's tough growing up, and Star Wars helped us get there. However, that doesn't mean we need to spend all of our adult lives eulogising it. Surely it should be like any other part of our childhood, which we remember fondly, but with an adult understanding of what's past. In that respect, surely the Walt Disney company taking over the franchise appears wholly fitting, they are specialists in children's filmmaking after all. If you find yourself in the position of being a grownup with genuine concerns over what will happen to the franchise next, you are either George Lucas, a Disney employee, a little bit immature or hopelessly nostalgic. If you're any of the last three, it's time to move on.
*about 24