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Emotional Intelligence: yet another thing we can beat ourselves up for not having.

Why?

The jobs and therefore income of the future will belong to those with a high 'EQ - emotional quotient'.

IQ-heavy roles are about to go the way of manual labour. White collar is the new blue collar.

Software and robots will replace nerds and jocks respectively. Only the popular kids - those who can creatively connect clients and contacts - will be spared. The future consists of fluffing enthusiastically to keep your five star rating.

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Furthermore, soft skills are thought to be migration-proof. Caitlin will sign up with Madison after bonding over Master Chef, while Corazon who's only watched telenovelas misses out.

No wonder panicked friends are pushing their kids into the 'right' schools and enrichment activities to develop a healthy network - and social media following - before high school.

This emotional intelligence arms race paints a picture of the future labour market as a disco filling up with ever more pick-up artists - copy of 'The Game' in hand - competing for a shrinking dance floor.

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Not pretty.

What is EQ?

I use Emotional Intelligence, Soft Skills, and EQ interchangeably to refer to the ability to gauge the emotional state of yourself and others.

EQ's treatment as a discrete concept is not new. All Japanese people angst about their own or their children's ability to 'kūki o yomu' / 空気を読む' (read the air). They're paranoid about not being able to do it, and hate that they have to. Failure to read the air means ostracism and bullying, or rather, more ostracism and bullying than normal.

I think the Japanese term clues us into EQ's drawbacks.

Ephemeral Quotient

EQ is only applicable to the proximate and transient; the here and now. Emotions, like the air, are localised and fleeting.

EQ will tell you your place in the herd and how you might influence it.

However, it will not lead you to re-contextualise your situation using non-social tools, such as cost-benefit analyses or historical perspectives. There are no numbers, dates, or technical terms in soft skills. No, my friend, that is a job for IQ.

Even drawing parallels with the Japanese anxiety around soft skills is an IQ play.

Intelligence, analytical thinking, and sheer book-knowledge provides frames of reference from every other time and place in history. This broad choice of perspective dilutes and diminishes current concerns. One effect - for better or worse - is that we could re-frame ourselves right out of the game. FOMO is nothing new. Today it's the job disco, yesterday it was Dutch tulips.

Ironically, the notion of 'soft skills' which were intended to expand discussion of human potential beyond the physical-intellectual duality is now its own restrictive box. EQ was meant to be the trimmings on a vessel, not a life raft.

Remove the urgency to develop soft skills and you also remove the motivation to develop soft skills. Conversely, people tapping into the gestalt FOMO (fear-of-missing-out) on EQ is ... pure EQ.

Nerd-watching

While friends kvetch about how they hope a new extra-curricular activity will save their kid from the playa-pocalypse, I wonder, "What will mid-IQ low-EQ folks like me do?"

It's a mistake to think that social capital will be the only viable form of capital going forward.

It's also a mistake to think that collective or individual problems can only be solved through feewings.

It takes a lot to translate actual capital into social capital and then back again. Instead of gaming friends to grant me gigs, I'd rather see myself spinning up a cloud instance to rebalance my portfolio. That's right, I have more fun driving machines than out-manoeuvring them. I won't have to dig through my contacts list for help because I've instead invested time in reading the manuals.

So while the asocial may be locked out of the jobs of the future, they will have unimpeded access to solutions of the future.

Those with brains or brawn but without influence will do what they've always done: work it out themselves.