i’m beginning to wonder if retirement is and was always a bad idea. reasons (bullet style because i haven’t organized the thoughts yet:
doing meaningful work is one of the few things in life that consistently bring happiness
given the above point, the narrative that people should only work up until a certain point (age? level of mental or physical ability?) and then they should be excused from the system is problematic. it frames work as something that is bad and needs to be escaped or given relief from. that made sense in a factory world where working literally shortened your life span… but the work world we’re moving towards is no longer like that (or at least it doesn’t have to be).
most people that i know who are nearing retirement are struggling with it a lot. financially, i know many folks who can’t afford to retire. the cost of living is so high and their retirement payments are so low (often because of the jobs they chose in order to do meaningful and not soul-destroying work) that they won’t even even be close to living their current lifestyle. socially i know people who don’t want to be forgotten, by society or their families. working gives them a sense of purpose and community.
it seems silly that we have a massive childcare industry (one that is unaffordable for many people) and all these senior citizens holed away in retirement communities. why not combine those two excess capacities (peers inc style)?
even when people do retire, many folks i know are still doing meaningful work. my step-dad retired a while ago, but now he uses his time to enjoy his land, fish, and is also trying to grow 90% of his food. if growing almost all of your food isn’t work…
there is so much knowledge and wisdom in folks who have lived a long time. sure, some of it may not be relevant anymore, but some of those hard-earned lessons are timeless. when we push older intelligence out of the workplace, we doom our organizations to repeat avoidable (already experienced) problems.
i wonder if reversing the narrative of retirement would create an opportunity to intervene in several socioeconomic problems at once… i’d be curious to talk to people who retired from shitty jobs and see what they’re up to now.
there’s a chapter in resilience (specifically page 244) that discusses what happens when systems that move at different paces intersect. i’m not totally sure what the implications are for me, my work, and the people around me, but it’s an interesting point to cover.
different types of systems at different scales operate at different paces. the book’s example: the pace of market transactions move much faster than than the time needed to recover nutrients in the soil on a particular plot of land. things can get really messy when systems are layered in ways that cause them to be out of sync. when the demands of a global food system require production at a pace that’s too high, the likelihood of the land being pushed past the point of recovering goes way up.
the situation can gets even messier when there are power imbalances between the different systems. expanding on the above point, global market systems move with the power and force of global corporations, while people who are in tune with the land and its needs tend to be individuals, small place-based communities, and indigenous people.
when people operating at these different levels are unable (or unwilling) to understand each other and everything in between, well… it’s problematic to say the least. and then, when things like capitalist market economies expand and become the dominant forces in places that had sustainable, functioning communities and make it impossible for them to turn back… fuck.
something i’ve learned from being a part of the infinite growth program is that we all have strengths and weaknesses but some of those are accentuated or hindered by systemic forces in our society. for example, you may naturally be a hard worker but when society rewards men for overworking whereas it punishes women for that, the impacts of society on your well-being affect how you build a healthy personal system. i bring this up because of the two points i wanted to expand on from yesterday’s post.
first, i think that overwork of highly-educated, highly-skilled people is a significant part of why our society isn’t moving forward as quickly as it could. part of that is because overwork undermines our society’s capacity to love well. the other part is that individuals not having limits on how much work they’ll do means that corporations get to hire fewer people. if paying one person 100k had the same societal implications as paying two people 50k, that would be fine. but i would argue that full employment has better societal outcomes than paying a few people tons of money and requiring everyone else to work for low wages or be rely on public resources & services. there are many reasons for that, but i think at the very least, it’s because i think we need a society where everyone and everyone’s work is valued. when some people’s work is highly valued (think computer programmers and ceos) while other people’s work (childcare, cooking, art) is under-valued or not valued at all, this is problematic.
second, i think the current work structure in our society (i have friends working in silicon valley who think that their 120k salary is small and other friends who are still driving for raises and bonuses on top of their ~450k/year salary) makes it possible for some people to find all their meaning in their work. this makes it easier to create & maintain class divisions.
i think it takes empathy and relate-ability for people to love each other. and it is really difficult for someone who makes 120k to understand the life of someone who makes less than 40k. whether it’s a language barrier or a physical segregation based on housing or a cultural (the daily life of someone who owns multiple homes is very different from someone who has rented for their entire life, for example) barrier, it’s just really hard.
so what do i think that means? i think the means we need to find more ways to get people whose skills are highly valued right now to defect from capitalism and consumerism (my friend caroline’s workshops on ‘enough’ might be one good way to start very soon…). i think fixing our socioeconomic system will require pressure on many sides and one of those sides is getting wealthy people to stop believing that wealth is more valuable than almost everything else.
hm!
note: today i’m starting to add writing time and research, formatting, & editing time to the footnotes on my posts. it’s mostly for me, but i think it might be interesting for other people, too.
on a coaching call, i was working with someone who said almost these exact words to me:
“i basically get to a point where i have so much to do that i don’t have time to work out or sleep. i just have to keep going to make sure everything gets done.”
when i heard it, i sort of couldn’t believe what i was hearing. but then i had a visceral flashback of a time i said those same words to my mom. and i realized two things: (1) it wasn’t just me that felt that way so there must be some societal/systemic forces making that belief possible and (2) it’s possible to change and not be like that! these were great realizations and i will expand on them in detail some other time, but, for now, i want to write about the steps i took to get past that type of thinking. and to be clear, i think the idea that we have too much to do to be healthy (because sleep and exercise are necessary parts of keeping the body working) is a personal system design problem that is predicated on a broken socioeconomic system.
so how did i move past that type of thinking? i think most simply it boils down to two things:
learning how to say no better
realizing that, when i’ve said an appropriate volume of “no,” i get just as much done when i’ve slept well and exercised as when i don’t.
wow. it’s already been 10 minutes. guess i’ll expand on the above points and the ones below tomorrow.
points to expand on later:
this broken idea this keeps oppressive systems functioning because it makes it possible for some people to find all their meaning in their work which makes it easier to create & maintain false class divisions. overwork also squeezes people out of work that could be distributed if our society actually wanted to achieve full employment instead of maximize profit for corporations. in the end, what we need is a society where everyone and everyone’s work is valued.
bell hooks and why we can’t love well (which breaks our society) when we’re too busy
the last 24 hours have been more explicitly about spirituality than any other time stretch i’ve experienced since like 2011. this post isn’t a cohesive thought, but some threads that i think are shaping up to be woven together later.
yesterday i had lunch with my neighbor yotam (and eventually his wife, shoshana, joined the lunch party, too). we wanted to get to know each other more intentionally and the frame we told our stories through was basically our spiritual arcs. he started out with his father’s spiritual and religious background and then traced out his own; i did the same.
one thing he said really stuck with me was that religions are living things. and, as a massage therapist, he knows that living things can hurt and sometimes need work. he and i both feel energy to put that work into our respective religions, but maybe not yet…
at the end of lunch with my friend, marilyn, we ended up landing on the discussion of religion and spirituality and why it’s seemingly so taboo in new england. it really was only the last few minutes of our conversion, but i’m excited to pick up on that thread in the future with her!
dinner with casper is always a spiritually focused endeavor (he’s at the harvard divinity school and doing all sorts of awesome work). he’s thinking about some next steps centered on what it means to be human and, maybe in the end, that’s all spirituality and religion really is?
this actually didn’t happen yesterday, but i’ve been thinking about my friend gibrán a lot lately. we’ve definitely talked explicitly about starting a church in the past and while i’m not actually sure what’s happening with that, i can certainly see that being a valuable endeavor…
this also didn’t happen yesterday, but i found this flyer on the bus the other day and thought to myself “this church has a fundamental design problem. this material is made with the wrong audience in mind. this is a solvable problem.”
anyway, the idea of starting a “church” (maybe cosecha style) with a focus on… something other than God is sounding increasingly attractive and also necessary.
this is much more of a public journal entry than a blog post… but whatevs. my blog. i do what i want with it lol.
