A world view on work
1300 words to say why the world is strange right now
There's something in the air in the world of work. Can't put my finger on it. Like a radio that receives all frequencies but must be tuned to a single one, I have trouble arriving at a coherent view of what it all means.
I'll try to do it nonetheless. Welcome to another installment of “The Weird Part”.
What the entire universe is thinking about
A core premisse of my world view is that we, as a species do most of our evolution on cognitive and cultural terms instead of biological ones. Our ideas move faster than our genes. Memes vs Genes, right? We are all a big brain learning about itself and where it lives.
On top of this, I stack the idea that the bigger question this brain is constantly thinking about is “how to get more, with less". It's what Nature would have wanted. Conservation of energy and increasing of options, all pointing towards fitness. How much more adaptable can a thing be, without sacrificing too much energy?
Directing efforts at a planetary scale
A third piece of how I think about the world is related to coordination and its challenges. Humans have such a massive impact on the environment because we can coordinate across time and space. Ideas that came to be centuries and miles away from you shape how you run your life. No other species can do this. Our social connections are like tendrils or hyphae ( a word I just learned).
A fourth piece of how I conceptualize the world is our capacity to imagine. We can simulate and preview events that did not happen and sometimes could never happen.
These ideas can indicate a way things could be. A path forward, away from how things currently are.
We can place our own guiding stars in the firmament.
I cannot imagine anything more sublime than this.
Mixing both ideas together: Humans can direct actions of other humans (and other species) at a distance and we can also choose what is important to us.
Time for a fifth notion
There is no single definition of "Good”
In an environment made of quasi-independent agents, governed by different values and subjected to various experiences, participants will disagree. People believe in incompatible things. And so they need ways to resolve this tension. My fifth piece is the idea of “conflict theory". It is not so much that there is a single Truth and if we could all see it things would settle into peaceful cohabitation. There isn't a Truth. The sky is bubbling with the millions of guiding stars we've all placed there. How to choose one if none is real? "Conflict theory” is opposed to “mistake theory” in the sense that it does not believe that this age-old conundrum can be solved with information, education and convincing.
While we debate, the core law of Nature hums along, whispering "Get more, with less”
Are you with me?
We evolve mostly on ideas,
our ideas naturally investigate variations of "how to get more, with less”,
we can shape action far away from us,
we can create our own ideas,
the ideas we create can influence others,
there is no way to pick a winning idea based on its ultimate Truth status, we must resolve this tension,
we fight to settle this matter.
while we fight "how to get more, with less” is still directing everything
Putting it all into place now.
How far can you stretch a sinapse before it ceases to be one?
A species spends millennia trying to get more with less. This question drives the discovery of fire, the invention of language, the birth of agriculture, the onset of trade, the abuses of colonial exploitation, the voracious hunger of international capital, the corrosion of social contracts and the sucking void of complete social atomization.
How can such a species not arrive at some limit?
The dangers of learning too much
As a species, we learn. We are very good at this.
The current weirdness we feel in the air is because we have learned too much. In the past couple of years, especially we have learned dangerous things.
We've all learned that there is no Truth. Post-Modernists knew it and got a little crazy for it.
We've learned that opinions are an output of industrial processes, not just our own individual volition.
We've learned that persuasion techniques reserved for propaganda have become mainstream. We can learn these weapons-grade discourse tools and apply them ourselves. Forget 3D-printed guns. This is a much deeper societal transformation.
We've peeked behind the curtain and realized that it was set dressing all the way down. The cynics are not surprised, but for most of us, this is a deeply isolating realization. The world is a set, sure. But all of it? All different sets? Not a single, unifying set? Difficult to swallow.
What has been seen cannot be unseen
The world of work is not isolated from this, of course.
What blue-collar workers knew for decades came for knowledge workers and the LinkedIn class: when the entire planet is thinking about how to do more with less, one day, you will be the “less”.
Companies that believed they could be different by the strength of their convictions alone suddenly see that low-interest rates held the key. Their coolness and purpose-based entrepreneurship was not their personality or culture, they had just been lucky.
They had adapted to an environment that changed too fast for them to adjust.
Some coral species in the boiling and acidifying oceans must feel vindicated.
We feel that the world of work is cold and uncaring because it is. And for millennials, fed the narrative that purpose would guide all and with more than a decade acting on this belief, this change comes at a terrible time. Our worldviews are set, our habits are ingrained. We scream and shout and demand what was. But it really wasn't. It was a temporary illusion.
Betting on self-reliance away from corporate
In the last year I realized that this cycle will pass, of course. People will find jobs. Layoffs will subside and we will forget the disappointments of recent years.
But then, they will return. Deja-vu is the only promise.
After the markets turn and recover, they tumble and regress. Incredible people will be fired, competent professionals will leave jobs for no fault of their own and it will be evident again that we have less agency that we are led to believe.
Only we will all be older.
This is the main reason I'm creating my business.
Winter will pass and winter will return. And then, I don't want to have spent my years developing a career that depends on the decisions of structures that optimize for “more with less". It's not that I blame them. I understand the incentives.
And it's because of that that I must build my job, my occupation, my livelihood today.
Losing bad habits
As you can tell, I have a natural tendency to think of life in terms of zero-sum games.
I do think that this is accurate (depending on the zoom level).
But I'm surely too strict with it.
In a world of self-reliance, the truth is that you still need friends and partners.
This is difficult for me to adjust.
This whole post is a bit of beacon.
If you connect with this, please say hi. I'd love to meet others on a similar path.