Generally, when problem-solving, you probably have your answer if you need to squint to see a path through.
If all these things need to be aligned and you need a couple of breaks to go your way to make something work, it probably won’t happen.
That’s not to say something isn’t possible. Projects are more fun; however, when they are not just possible but when they are probable too. The answer might be to step back and work on the tangibles before factoring in the intangibles.
Culture is everywhere. And yet, it is as invisible as the air we breathe. It dictates behavior, expectations, and decision-making.
If you want peace and quiet, go to a library. It is challenging to ask everyone to keep it down if you go to a bar downtown on a Friday night. Because the expectations are different depending on the establishment, that’s the culture at work.
Forces, often invisible, that tell us and signal how to behave—showing up in blue jeans to an interview may be appropriate for a groundskeeper position. But if you want to work on Wall Street, you must talk/walk/dress/eat/spend a certain way.
People like us do things like this.
External problems can be fixed externally or internally. Internal issues are different. Buying a new pair of shoes can temporarily make us feel better, but retail therapy doesn’t fix the internal problems we face.
You can plant seeds but if the soil doesn’t create the right conditions, there is no chance for growth.
Last I checked, we can’t place a square peg in a round hole.
Humans seek safety, status, and affiliation; they want to be heard and understood; they want to be missed when they are gone; they want connection and validation.
Ironically, the more we work to manipulate and control the people around us, the less we are to achieve what we seek. Instead of laying the groundwork for relationships to grow, we create the conditions we fear the most: distance, isolation, and disconnection.
A conductor doesn’t play every instrument. She leads and keeps a beat for everyone else to follow.
In other words, the harder you push, the harder they pull.
The difficulty with relationships is that status roles, affiliation, and fear get in the way and cloud so much of our thinking. After a while, we can believe we need to best the people around us. Someone doesn’t have to lose for us to win. Moral envy kicks in when we think everyone must struggle like we do. The reality is we all struggle. We all suffer—some worse than others. But heartache and pain can cross any imaginary lines we draw. Perhaps there is so much tension or friction in your relationships that you are framing it all wrong: Don’t play games you can’t win.
We came into this world with wonder. We don’t look at our exit with the same type of wonder. Because we are here now, and it is all we can see.
One approach:
Live as though you have three acts. That’s it. There is no need to speed through one to get to the next. Because one day, when the curtain calls, you can know you did it well. The best you knew how. (Fortunately, there was no right way.) Once we can accept that life is a play, we can be at peace. Once in peace, we can exit with the same grace that nature showed us to be here.
A promise communicates that you can trust me to follow through with whatever I am saying I will do. On the other hand, a threat is another promise, except there is a key difference with an implied form of violence. Where trust is diminished, we resort to threats.
Too often, we resort to using threats in the most important relationships. There isn’t much room for trust to grow when the relationship is in question. On top of that, it is difficult to walk away from some relationships. The relationship with a spouse, children, parents, and siblings differs from a bad boss and a dead-end job.
We further fracture and diminish what we imply in a threat when the other party understands and sees the track record. There’s a reason why we say an empty threat versus an empty promise. If one promise fails, you can make another. And yes, a series of failed promises can have consequences after a while. We can leave a hole. But not at the severity of empty threats where we actively tear down what trust is left.
All bark and no bite–empty threats are not a form of power. Ultimately, it is a symptom of a failing relationship. Instead of threatening, we can at least commit to promise to try again.
We think that means going to work and putting on our hats to play doctor, janitor, or accountant. We don’t say that I have to go to work as a human being. We are so much more than the narrow label of whatever we do from 9 to 5 for money.
Who we are doesn’t translate to what we do in the confines of our modern world. A carpenter over the ages might have done work in exchange for goods. But only recently have we forgotten how to put our personality into our work. It doesn’t meet the criteria to be the kind of person who produces something personal in a world that demands something ordinary.
Humans have this amazing ability to compartmentalize information so we can sort it. But it gets in the way when we want to find our identity. We are just too complex to simplify important things.
We spend so much time worrying about how to keep things from falling apart. The cycle of life, however, follows a rhythm. Things come together, and things come apart. Over and over again.
A star is born and then collapses. The forest grows until it burns, and the seeds sprout because of the high temperatures. All the cells in our body regenerate every seven years.
Our first impulse is to try to keep things together. When we invest in these outcomes, we can become disparaged when our world is free-falling. We spend an enormous amount of energy trying to avoid inevitable outcomes.
The trap is that we have convinced ourselves that we can tame our world. We can get to inbox zero or finish the work week and then start to live.
The alternative, then, is to learn to be comfortable in a world of chaos, where order is the exception.
Our imagination has no bounds. While we can walk a straight path, the mind will wander. In any direction, it so pleases. Impossible, it may be, to tame. Humans are so used to being on top of the food chain that it has made us believe that we can overcome the faults of the mind. But isn’t that what makes us human to begin with? We search for answers to conquer just like we did with animals, the environment, and elements. But the mind still alludes us. Some even say with the discovery of GLP1, someday we could even eliminate mental illness.
For now, let’s stick with what we have. Humans did not evolve to sit 8 hours a day typing TPS reports. They didn’t evolve for assembly line work. Suggesting the problem is for people to be better in a world where people are desperate. With a clear unequal distribution of resources, with everyone starting lines a bit different from the next, it feels insulting. Instead of applying more pressure, the answer could be, for now, to not let your imagination be crushed by the pressures of modern-day life.
Don’t try to picture everything that can go wrong and the worst possible outcomes. For some with the capabilities to read this blog, life isn’t so unbearable that it can’t be endured. These are the products of our times. And the products of our time, just 200 years ago, were different and arguably worse.
That doesn’t mean we don’t live in a dangerous world. Of course, it is dangerous. Our imaginations, however, tend to make it worse. Worrying about careers, social status, and our futures mismatches the operating system we use in prehistoric times. Capitalism and industrialism indeed push against our evolution and nature. This tug of war is why we are left exhausted. But more dangerous today? That’s a tough argument when we can point to many things that show it is better. Better today, and yes, it can be even better tomorrow.
The power of collective imagination, invisible forces that only exist in the ether, dictate so much of our lives. They don’t even breathe, but we know they exist. Anyone in debt can feel its presence even though it doesn’t have a heartbeat. The individual can feel powerless in these circumstances. Invisbile frces, however strong they may appear, are not invincible. We have mastered the idea of humans working together, to create something out of our imaginations, and head that direction.
What’s in jeopardy is more than just democracy or convenience or resource management, but the collective power of working together. It is one of the most essential human assets, yet it is in jeopardy in the name of profits, status, and ideological politics. We can try to send another rocket to space. But we miss that while we have mastered the external realm created only by imagination (shared and realized by those around us), the internal landscape remains a frontier that resists collective solutions and demands personal navigation. In other words, you have agency in all of this. You still choose the terms. You dream the dreams. And you decide which to follow, promote, and inspire others with.
The past doesn’t hold us, and neither does the future. We are here now. Including you. What are you going to do about it?
Josh Allred's Blog 