The HUM, Humans of Macquarie – Eric

Inspired by Humans of New York, a photographer’s mission to glimpse into the lives of strangers on the streets of New York City, we wanted to get to know a more diverse slice of the community here at Macquarie. So Mike Catabay and I simply left our office armed with a camera and voice recorder app and randomly approached someone walking by to photograph them and ask them some questions about their everyday life.

We’re calling it The Hum – Humans of Macquarie.

Eric, Learning Technologies Systems Analyst

What inspires you? –

“Because we deal with e-learning and my background is in IT, definitely some of the leaders in the IT industry always inspire me. Elon Musk, even Bill Gates as well. Particularly with Bill Gates, integrating the technology side with business. You see lot of people who are passionate about technology, they focus on that, and yet at the same time they can’t get their idea off the ground because they neglect the business side of the stuff.

You can actually redirect yourself, or refocus yourself in line with these kind of future predictions, from all these really smart people.

“Stephen Hawking as well. Recently he has been predicting some really scary things about AI and things like that. It is something that we need to keep in the back of our mind, not dwell on it, saying ‘AI is going to take over the world’, but also keep in mind…a lot of the professions will slowly be replaced, or maybe closely integrate with the AI industry. So in that sense, the whole world is going to have an impact, and that will trigger down, eventually will effecting individuals as well. Those kind of people, who have the vision… who are able to see into the future and give us some sort of warning, also, say inspirational speech as well… they can actually point you in the right directions. You can actually redirect yourself, or refocus yourself in line with these kind of future predictions, from all these really smart people.”

What advice do you often give others? –

“I think the only advice that I really give over and over is

nothing is actually certain, or concrete. So you do have to keep your perspective wide enough to accommodate a lot of the changes.

At the same time you do need to have a point of view as well. So it’s a very delicate, a very difficult balancing act. You have to have your own point of view to basically, to help direct yourself where you want to go. 

What’s challenging at the moment? –

“We’ve been trying to get a deck set up and it sounds like it’s just a straight forward project but a lot of the time it’s about juggling between what I want, what my wife wants.

It’s definitely a negotiation in process [laughs]. A negotiation of… in the long run, what do we want from it? So a lot of the time, it’s really about narrowing down all the common things that me and my wife want, and just focus on it.

Every decision making (sic) you will learn something new about your wife or about your other half as well… some people have… something that [they] will not budge about. For me, I really want a hard wood floor, but for her, she just wants to get the deck done. She wants to have a big enough deck to be able to host parties and things like that. But for me, because it’s a hard wood floor, I was thinking it’s just a deck for me and her to relax over the weekend, have a drink outside, things like that. So there are some things that you don’t realise a person [has] a particular point of view about until you actually get to that point, start negotiating and start talking about it. I would definitely say you learn something new every time, not just this particular time.