Month: October 2023

Thomas Hawke is on a quest to publish one million photos in his lifetime. Let’s say it will take him 40 years. That is 14,610 days. Which means he would have to produce 70 photos per day to reach that goal. If he misses a day, that means 140. That is a high commitment. It also means that Hawke understands that the stack of photos that will move his audience is small, and the throwaway pile will be significant. But you can’t get to the work that changes us without having a stack of okay photos.

Dignity flows wherever agency is present. When we use an agency to contribute, we can’t help but feel a sense of purpose. We can make sense of the suffering. We have something we can point to that we can be proud of. Happiness also comes when we share it. The first thing you do when you make a great meal is to call someone over to taste it. The same is true for art, nonprofits, and small business owners solving real problems—it’s creating connections. When one human can look another human in the eyes and see the shared experience of being alive. 

When we settled for a 40-hour work week, it certainly was better than a 72-hour one. But why stop at 40-hours? Because industrialists and capitalists created laws that said so. As a result, we settled that this is the way things are. So, we settle again when healthcare isn’t a fundamental human right because, hey, that’s just the way things are. We settled with a two-party system because it seemed too big to change the political system when the one we got carried us here. The goalpost keeps moving, and we watch as humanity corrodes. It is easy to settle when you have already done it once. The same is true about corruption. When you do it once, you feel like you can get away with it again. 

Convenience is a new problem in human history. For most of human history, convenience wasn’t an issue. To make bread, you had to bake it. You had to pull the grain, grind it, and prep it to bake. It lasted for a couple days, and you needed to do it again. Now, you can buy a loaf of bread and store it for weeks. The industrialists saw this and created whole industries around the power of convince. Now, convenience has turned to one-click shopping at cost. We are addicted to convenience and it simultaneously kills our only planet.

We get to choose what it is we want to focus on. Which story to tell about ourselves and the world around us? One full of abundance, possibility, growth, and abundance or one that is scarcity, fixed mindset, and limitations. In the end, we get what we hope for. Each of us in all of this is searching for meaning in our lives. We can’t fill it with materials. No matter how hard we try, it won’t fill our cups. Sure, we can distract ourselves, but in our hearts, we know better. No one wants to feel like a rat on the constantly spinning wheel or someone who keeps pulling the lever at a slot machine. 

This story of money has fundamentally changed the interactions we have now and the language we use. We have become so transactional in the way we operate. Author Lewis Hyde has pointed out in The Gift that communities were built on gift-giving for thousands of years. When we gave our neighbor a gift, there was an imbalance; as a result, these interactions brought the community closer together. Since money wasn’t around, you needed to pay back your neighbor somehow. Money, on the other hand, drives us apart. Money transfers value away from communities to the central bank. When we pay for something, we are done. No one owes anyone anything. There is a price for a good or service; you spend it, and the deal is done. There is no need to check back in afterward.

I am unsure if Albert Einstein said this, but famously, he is attributed to have said that compound interest was the world’s eighth wonder. “He who understands it earns it; he who doesn’t pays it.” Translated, debt grows, and savings grow slower. A simple example is if someone who views money as a tool may figure out how to save a few bucks each week and put it into the market, where it compounds until one day you have a healthy retirement account after 40 years. However, someone who tells themselves a story of money as this burden may buy themselves a 500-dollar television on a credit card will see the interest compound at 20+ percent rates, and the debt grows out of control. 

Yes, money is a story. But it isn’t that simple either. It would be unjust to say it is the only thing that drives us into wealth or poverty. Economist Raj Chetty’s work has shown that we can accurately predict someone’s chances of economic mobility based on their zip code. Race, incarceration, discrimination, education opportunities, social engagement, family dynamics, short-term assistance, and even landlords play a part in upward economic mobility. It’s a map that is already drawn for all of us now. It feels like determinism based on circumstances of when, where, and whom you were born to. The culture says it is the individual players’ fault if you are not rich.

Attribution theory is the idea that when we are successful, we point to internal forces that got us there. We are likely to give ourselves credit for making the right moves. When we fail, we are more likely to blame external forces. “The dog ate my homework.” That’s because our narrative works overtime to protect us from ourselves. We don’t want to be wrong, we don’t want to be blamed, we don’t want to be judged, we don’t want to be seen or exposed. 

Recently, I went through a Wendy’s drive-thru to get my kids something. We sat in the drive-thru for 20 minutes. When we pulled to the window, they told us the credit card machine was down, and they could only take cash. I didn’t have any, so the question is: Does the cashier holding the bag of food still choose to give me the food we waited for, or does he keep it and just throw it away. After all, they can’t put it back on the frier once it is in the bag.

Dumbfounded about what to do, the cashier said he couldn’t give the food away. I asked. “So, you’ll just throw it away?” And he said yes. We ended up driving to McDonalds.

The story’s point is this: Industrialism has sliced the working class’s task on the assembly line so small that we no longer need to think or make decisions. Remove decision making and you can increase productivity. The answer was just give the food away and hope I come back soon to pay. Better to feed someone who waited 20 minutes then to watch it go into the trash. Perhaps, you delight the customer and it comes back in increase. The cog in the machine doesn’t understand this because it wasn’t in the simple set of instructions he was given. The answer wasn’t in the manual. It is exactly the system we have set up. Make the worker on the assembly line like a robot. Because if he was treated with dignity as a human, given authority, trust, and decision-making, I guarantee, outcomes look different.

When managers are left scratching their heads wondering why someone below them made the decision they did, it is because that organization doesn’t foster leadership, it fosters compliance.

Every aspect of all our lives is ready for some revolution—healthcare, education, democracy, capitalism, nuclear disarmament, climate crisis, food processing, water rights…Everyone is feeling dissatisfied with how things are. It’s time to introduce a little anarchy. However, we don’t need torches to burn it down and start over for this to work. What we need is to reimagine. Political thinker and Linguist Noam Chomsky defines what anarchism should be and that any system or person imposing authority over someone must be justified. If it can’t be justified, we must find something better to replace it. That’s it. If a system isn’t working, why can’t we replace it with something more fair? A parent can justify pulling their four-year-olds to get them out of the street when a car is whizzing by. That is justified behavior. Is it justified to work people to the point they get chronic illnesses in exchange for a few years of retirement? Is it justified to deny healthcare to another human being because they don’t have the correct insurance? 

Convenience is a relativity new problem in human history. For most of human history, convenience wasn’t an issue. To make bread, you had to bake it. You had to pull the grain, grind it, and prep it to bake it. It lasted for a couple days, and you needed to do it again. Now, you can buy a loaf of bread and store it for weeks. The industrialists saw this and created whole industries around the power of convenience. Now, convenience has turned to one-click shopping.

But it is also killing the only planet we live on.

We might need to take a step back to take a giant leap forward.