overwork undermines love and is collapsing our soceity

hypothesis: working too much actually undermines our society’s capacity to be loving. this makes our individual problems at odds with our collective problems and make the whole system unsolvable.

how to test that? unclear. but here’s the thinking that lead me here:

industrial capitalism with its hourly wages connects livelihood to amount of work done. in theory, the more hours you work, the more money you’ll make and the better you’ll be able to economically support yourself and/or your family. so, this means that the path to a better life is seen as working more and also getting a higher wage.

the trouble with over-prioritizing money is, well, money isn’t actual wealth. this quote from alan w. watts explains this really well. 

“What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money. Money gets rid of the inconveniences of barter. But it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth, because it will do you no good to eat it or wear it for clothing. Money is more or less static, for gold, silver, strong paper, or a bank balance can “stay put” for a long time. But real wealth, such as food, is perishable. Thus a community may posses all the gold in the world, but if it does not farm its drops it will starve.”
— alan w. watts, the wisdom of insecurity

loving takes real time and energy. and the more people work, the less time they have to love.

“The practice of love takes time. Without a doubt, the way we work in this society leaves individuals with little time when they are not physically and emotionally tired to work on the art of loving.”
— bell hooks, all about love, chapter title: mutuality: the heart of love

without time to learn how to love and be loving (to yourself and to others), individuals fail to develop their capacity to love. without this capacity, self-love, familial love, community love, and societal love are all out of reach.

and since loving means taking actions that encourage the growth and well-being of others, this lacking capacity means we will never make good collective decsions about our soceity (healthcare, policing, financial policy, etc.).

there’s more to this, but the more i think about this, the more i believe that overwork undermines a functional world.

if i’m honest, this is part of why i’m so excited about ross’s #5to9 concept. it’s not a new idea (juliet schor has written several books on why working less is better for societies, most especially the overworked american), but it’s a necessary one. supporting/encouraging people to work differently (less) and do other things with their time may actually encourage repair in our societies. if people have more time to learn how to love and then act on it, maybe we will be more compassionate to ourselves, our families, our communities, our nation, our society, our fellow humans, our world.

:O

relevant recent articles from colleagues

• on love and justice by aisha shillingford
• net work: “soft” tools for real change by curtis ogden
  

turns out academia is a crock

i think this is the last post in what has evolved into a four-part alain de botton series (at least until i read one of his books). alain was responding to a question (starts around 6:30) about why he dropped out of his phd program and he shared this thought:

“Like many young people with a kind of cultural and aesthetic interests, I imagine that academia was going to be nirvana because these guys were gonna pay you to do the stuff that was lovely to do anyway: reading books, writing, et cetera. And then I quickly realized there was a mass deception going on and that academia had gotten together collectively to try and make this supposedly lovely thing as unpleasant as possible simply because they had a problem with massive oversubscription. So the way they dealt with the oversubscription was to make you jump through so many hoops and make those hoops so unpleasant that only the most determined survive.”

as he said it, my mouth dropped open. during grad school i had started to realize the same thing. not only was getting a master’s degree more of a sham than i expected, i had started to notice some terrible patterns among the phd candidates.

i went to the same school (mit) for undergrad and grad school so i got to know more people than the average student. i spanned the undergrad/grad divide and was there over the course of seven years. and what i observed was pretty sad. almost all of the master’s students realized that writing their master’s thesis was more of a chore than a joy. they found that in order to “contribute to the body of knowledge,” they had to dissect and shoehorn the subject in which they were interested into this terrible place between existing knowledge. and then they weren’t given enough time or support to usually produce a good product anyways.

and for the phd’s it was worse. because they had more time, sometimes they got to write about what they actually wanted. but not always. and many of them realized that the deeper they got into it, the less they wanted to be subject matter expert at this tiny little slice of the world. of course, they didn’t enter academia to do that anyways, but that’s the path that had been laid out (see above quote) in order to land an academic job. not only that, but the writing process was isolating and the academic journal publishing process was grueling.

so what’s my takeaway? fuck academia.

on getting married in america

continuining the theme from alain de botton’s interview on design matters, marriage is a beautiful and difficult thing. so how is it that we see so many bad marriages? alain lays out a few points that i think are brilliant (my favorite parts are around the 32:00 mark, but the points really are scattered throughout).

for starters, we really want it to work! most of us have been socialized to believe that marriage is one of the primary goals of life. to go without it, for better or worse, is observed as cultural failure. we have been given SO much societal pressure to couple that when a good enough opportunity presents itself, we take it. people rarely stop and really pull the lid off their relationship before getting married because they’re often afraid of what they might find. being so close to achieving success (being married), the fear that a deep assessment might result in them not getting married is too great.

and so people rush in, hoping that it’s right enough.

but obviously that’s bad.

so, not only do many marriages here get off to a rigorously examined beginning, we also don’t have good training on how to do it well. the closest examples we have, our parents, don’t often really let us in to deep truths of their marriages until we’re older. and even those aren’t often good example. and then the other examples, friends and tv, are often particularly bad.

all of alain’s thinking on this stuff lines up really well with many of the lessons in all about love, one of my favorite books of all time. here’s just a few relevant quotes:

“When we see love as the will to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of love in our life is the same. There is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners. Genuine love is the foundation of our engagement with ourselves, with family, with friends, with partners, with everyone we choose to love. While we necessarily behave differently depending on the nature of a relationship, or have varying degrees of commitment, the values that inform our behavior, when rooted in a love ethic, are always the same for any interaction.”

“I had been raised conventionally to believe this relationship was “special” and should be revered above all. Most women and men born in the fifties or earlier were socialized to believe that marriages and/or committed romantic bonds of any kind should take precedence over all other relationships. Had I been evaluating my relationship from a standpoint that emphasized growth rather than duty and obligation, I would have understood that abuse irreparably undermines bonds. All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly, we know that the healthy, love response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way. Even though I was a committed feminist as a young woman, all that I knew and believed in politically about equality was, for a time, overshadowed by a religious and familial upbringing that had socialized me to believe everything must be done to save “the relationship.”

“In retrospect, I see how ignorance about the art of loving placed the relationship at risk from the start. in the more than fourteen years we were together we were too busy repeating old patterns learned in childhood, acting on misguided information about the nature of love, to appreciate the changes we needed to make in ourselves to be able to love someone else. Importantly, like many other woman and men (irrespective of sexual preference) who are in relationships where they are the objects of intimate terrorism, I would have been able to leave this relationship sooner or recover myself within it had I brought to this bound the level of respect, care, knowledge, and responsibility I brought to friendships. Women who would no more tolerate a friendship in which they were emotionally and physically abused stay in romantic relationships where these violations occur regularly. Had they brought to these bonds the same standards they bring to friendship they would not accept victimization.”

“To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds. I know individuals who accept dishonesty in their primary relationships, or who themselves are dishonest, when they would never accept it in friendships. Satisfying friendships in which we share mutual love provides a guide for behavior in other relationships, including romantic ones. They provide us all with a way to know community.”

previous relationship partners are educators about ourselves

in the alain de botton episode of design matters, alain dropped a piece of wisdom that has really shifted how i think about relationships. the moment is around 21:30 but here’s my paraphrase:

one of the beautiful things about people getting into relationships when they’re older is that they bring knowledge about themselves from their previous relationships. these gems of knowledge often sound like “i really like ___” or “i think about ___ like this ___” or “i am this way…” or “i really appreciate ___.” but these gems may be the lessons of years of fights with a previous partner.

this, to me, is SUCH good perspective. sure, marrying your first partner certainly means you’re “unblemished” and without baggage. but some of the hurts from my first relationships i would never want to exist around me for the rest of my life.

i think sometimes relationships are better ended and left in the past. but that doesn’t mean that they were a waste of time. our previous partners really are our educators about ourselves.

and like the johari window explains, there are some things we just can’t learn on our own; we need other people to show them to us.

in a good partnership, we are each other’s teachers (another line dropped by alain in this episode). and, for those of us who have been through school, learning is hard. so is teaching (in fact, teaching might be harder). so, then to ask someone to be a teacher about yourself… for the rest of their lives… that is a HUGE ask. the hope, i think, is that the benefits outweigh the effort, but the effort is real.

and so, the more knowledge about ourselves that we’re able to carry with us into each subsequent relationship, the better it will (or could) be for each new partner.

oh SNaP: skills, needs, and passions

at the end of my short series on jobs, automation, and the future of work, i started to map out what every individual in a society like that would need to know. my jungle partner, ross, and i think about this set of info along three axes: skills, passions, and needs. this, on its own, doesn’t solve all of our problems. but without it, we definitely can’t move forward.

in previous phases of the economy, production was coordinated between the needs of firms and the skills of workers. if a firm had a need (floor manager, engineer, toothpick shaver) they would seek someone who could fill that need.

as our economy evolves, i think two things will change:

1. coordination will have to include the passions dimension of individuals (because it’s better that way), and
2. our economy will actually get more productive, but less consumptive (less output, not necessarily less throughput… but hopefully also less throughput). 

ok so what does a snap assessment look like? here goes the first draft…

skills

• what do you think or know you’re better at than most people around you?
• what do other people say you do really well?
• what have you gotten paid for in the past?
• what activities can you do for which other people are willing to barter resources?

needs

• what do you need to live for the next seven days? month? year?
• what things would allow you to spend more time doing what you’re passionate about?
• what things would allow you to better focus on improving your skills?

passions

• what do you do when you’re bored at your current dayjob?
• what activities can get you into flow (what can you start doing and be so into it that you lose track of time)?
• what do you always want to do but instead don’t because you’re too busy?

some other details:

• every person’s snap profile is dynamic. people’s needs change over time, as do their skills and passions.
  
• all profiles are a composite of self-generated information and community-generated and community-verified information. if you think you have singing skills, but no around you does, it is unlikely that you will ever be able to use your singing to get your needs met.
• also, firms (and by firm i mean generic entity: could be a household or a company or a school district or a government or more) will need some sort of comparable profile. it probably won’t have the same metrics, but in order for the coordination to happen at all, firms (and work seekers) will need to know what they need and also have to offer.

ok so it needs work. but there’s no better place to start than at the beginning, right?

ps - i realized in the middle of writing this post that snap (skills needs and passions) is a better acronym. i went back and rewrote it after my 10 mins of writing was up.