now they ask me why I am empty

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“They told me to pour my heart into everything I do. So that’s what I did, I poured and poured and poured. Now they ask me why I’m so empty.”

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“Don’t get down
Good things come when you stop waiting around
Good things come when you stop looking
Don’t get down
You’ve just got to stop looking “

Kathleen Edwards <from song Good Things>

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Individualism, and the overriding belief that everyone is solely responsible for their own success or failure, is very much a uniquely American characteristic. And individualism’s hero, if there is such a one, would be Ralph Waldo Emerson. When you hear a self-help expert adamantly stating if you change your way of thinking, you will change reality, that’s Emerson. It is all captured in his essay “Self-Reliance” (1841). Generally speaking, good stuff, but there is a bit of a “do what you believe is right instead of blindly following society” which tinges individualism and in how ‘self’ gets framed and THAT has had ripple consequences for decades, i.e., “me” always knows what is best for ‘me’. To be clear. I firmly believe in hard work, accountability for self and self-reliance.

That said. Self reliance runs into two basic problems.

The first problem is a sneaky one. Self-reliance gets tied to self-determination which implies no matter the circumstances, no matter the context, no matter the power structure within which the self struggles, well, ‘where this is a will there is a way.’ As with most superficial wisdom like that, there is certainly a fragment of truth. A fragment. But from a whole perspective this attitude leads to disappointment over 90% of the time (I made up that statistic). This leads to one of two things:

• With failure the unraveling of this self-reliance equation occurs and maybe you weren’t determined enough, or reliant enough, or just not enough, and, well, you fucked up your fate. You just didn’t have enough ‘will’ to take advantage of some nebulous way, or,
• You excessively celebrate the less than 10% where your will did find a way, even if the outcome is inconsequential, inevitably using the exception to suggest it is the rule, i.e., convincing yourself self-reliant, determined, ‘will’ will find the way if only I am good enough.

The second problem is far too many people make it the ‘end all, be all’ for judging personal success/failure and it becomes a binary ‘me versus we.’ Yeah. The self reliance thing gets a bit tricky when all success is due to individual grit because then all failure is, uhm, due to lack of individual grit. Maybe worse is that attitude gets applied to all the I’s in the larger We issues, as well as when the collective society attempts to alleviate some of the issues. Look. This is a problem because sometimes ‘me’ can work hard, make mostly good choices, and the ‘we’ (the system, institutions, society) doesn’t reward the ‘me’ – & often penalizing for often random, inconsistent, reasons. The truth is self reliance is only one factor affecting the probabilities of success. Success more often aligns with a variety of external factors; yeah, circumstances and context play a large role. In fact, time teaches most people (if they are paying attention) the value of cooperation is key to success; even if you distrust the game itself. Or maybe think about something Stewart Brand wrote: “in the long run saving yourself requires saving the world.”

I begin there to talk about emptiness.

Well. I believe we all know good things don’t really come to those who wait.

** note: albeit I tend to believe the quote is meant to suggest sometimes patience rewards you

I used to believe if you gave it all, focused on doing good work, being good <generally speaking> you would be rewarded – even if you made some poor/poorish decisions on occasion. Maybe not rewarded in kind, but not completely fucked over.

I don’t really believe that anymore.

The business world, in particular, is a taker – not a giver. It will take whatever you give and not offer much in terms of guarantees with regard to what it gives back to you. Sure. You get a salary, not always commensurate to what you ‘give’ in terms of value created, and there are some perks offered <healthcare, 401ks, etc.>, but you can give a lot and still lose it all and there is nothing but, well, nothing.

To be clear. I never really understood the concept of emptiness while in the midst of doing the business of doing business. I never ran empty. Tired? Sure. Empty? Never. Maybe I didn’t always pour exactly the right things into the business of doing business, but I poured.

So, when I looked at what I had after I had given and saw, well, emptiness, I began to understand simply because you had poured everything into what you did, didn’t mean that there would be something for you FOR all that pouring.

This isn’t to say that business, or your work, is responsible for your non-work personal decisions. For god’s sake, we make a shitload of crappy personal decisions and business can only hope you are better at making decisions in the workplace. That said. HOW you pour yourself into business work – ethically, with accountability, responsibly, empathetic – should matter. I do know, personally, pouring in left a lot of big fat empty in its outcomes for me, uhm, but not who I gave it to. By the way, this is why I think pensions are good things. It is kind of like acknowledging that the work you did then is contributing to the ongoing success happening now.

But this isn’t about me.

This is about emptiness and business.

Business is about numbers. Oh. They may tell you “it’s all about our people”, but, well, that’s not true. They may not be lying (because they believe in the present, they fairly compensate people), but, well, they are lying. The problem is no employee ever gets compensated for long term value; you get paid for present value. So, if you make errors, you don’t get paid as much. But if you make grand successes, you usually get paid the same amount and you certainly don’t get paid equivalent to what you provided. In other words, for many, many, people you get some money, and end up empty. You poured everything in, and were left empty as a consequence (remember, most people invest over 1/3^rd of their life to work). I am not suggesting business , or Life, is always fair and should always be fair, just that maybe if it were a bit ‘fairer’ there would be a lot less emptiness in those who work and have worked a shitload.

Look.

Self reliance is a wonderful concept. And if the future existed of one scenario for each ‘self,’ to aim, and work hard, toward self reliance would have a higher probability to generating less emptiness. Unfortunately, life, and time, is made up of a shitload of unforeseen scenarios AND it’s a bit unrealistic to believe a ‘self’ can be self-reliant, and successful, in all. And maybe that is my point. The unforeseen scenarios, maybe some scenarios you weren’t the best skilled to handle, are the ones that empty you. And they are very (very) often scenarios business puts you in. in addition, business justifies not paying people on an ongoing basis, post working at business, BECAUSE they believe business future is unforeseen and they worry people will want to see a linear cause & effect. Business won’t and workers won’t and numbers won’t. But if you have injected a good dose of self-reliance into your daily acumen, and worked hard, the business is less empty today because of what you did yesterday. Maybe that’s why when someone is asked why they are empty now, they get annoyed. Ponder.