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.Â
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.
ross and i are in a war against the 9to5 work schedule. i think we’re just two soldiers in a battle that’s been going on for a long time, but we’re definitely in it.Â
around the 20-minute mark in the episode, lauren discusses how her work schedules changes from day to day. for creatives*, it’s just unreasonable to assume that everyone is productive between 9a and 5p everyday. lauren said that sometimes early morning is great. other times, you get a flash of creative inspiration and you want to work all night. when you have a 9to5 job, you have to squash those potentially productive hours to sleep so that you can show up at your desk and putz around trying to make yourself look productive. at one point she said “i felt like i was spending most of my time trying to look productive instead of actually being productive.” i feel her on that one and there are plenty of studies about regardless of how many hours we clock, we’re still can only achieve a certain level of productivity.
now, the 9to5 work schedule made sense as a protection for workers who were being overworked (more history in my other post over here). having a maximum number of hours in a day you could expect someone to work is great when everyone makes widgets or is supervising people making widgets. but knowledge workers no longer make widgets in that way and as automation continues to expands, fewer and fewer people will work jobs that having them working in a widget-making sort of way (did you see that mcdonald’s is automating more and more parts of its stores now? i think the line that it’s because of the fight for 15 is a myth; they were gonna do this anyways, but it’s really great story to blame the workers for their own job loss instead of the fact that the automation is more profitable…)
more flexible work hours would allow more people to be productive when they’re maximally productive. i think it would also have the effect of making “vacation” time less important as a balancing force. because who needs vacation when you can vacation a little every day? i’m not saying that taking long stretches of time off isn’t important (they really are and those long breaks are where i find some of my best inspiration and have major breakthroughs), but i do think that the vacation as an antidote to working is problematic. people are happiest when they’re doing meaningful work. pitting vacation/leisure tie against working time to me is not actually what we want to be doing.
*note: “creatives” is a term i don’t like, but still use because it’s easier, conveys meaning quickly, and i haven’t found a better word. i don’t like it because i think all people are inherently creative and that creativity is the only thing people have to keep themselves doing meaningful work when the robots come, heh.
