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“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

Henry David Thoreau

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Well. Discussing price is always interesting. Whether it is about price in life or price as in wallet or I imagine even price of soul <head, heart, wallet>.

It’s all about the expense.

It’s all about the exchange.

Which, I imagine, ends up being about the value.

Look.

We make many decisions in life.

Every day.

Every hour.

Every minute.

In fact, I believe we make about 30,000 of the suckers a day.

And each decision is an exchange.

This is not only an exchange of doing something versus not doing something, but maybe more importantly, or of value, is the exchange involved in ‘what you have sacrificed in order to do something.’

Uhm

Yeah.

I typed the word ‘sacrificed.’

I use that word because, well, life is finite <unless you are a vampire>. To be clear, I am not speaking of “time is money”, this is more life is experiential and by doing something you will have sacrificed something else.

Yeah. I am speaking of “the exchange.” You hand over something and it will give you something in return.

Yeah. I am suggesting all your choices involve some exchange with Life and in doing so you are actually sacrificing some of the finite available to you, the Life line item on your balance sheet, as an expense for whatever choice you make. I am certainly not suggesting this is a zero sum game exchange, simply suggesting you are making a deal with Life.

I could argue this is the truest of true exchanges.

I say that because you do not get it back. You have sacrificed it. It is gone. You may find higher value in other ways in the exchange, but the cost to you, the expense, the sacrifice, the deal you have made, means it is expended and gone.

All that to say there is truly only one value you can control in all exchanges. And that is what you do. You control your decision <or your choice>. You control your part of the deal.

Which leads me to ‘not sucking’ as the criteria in thinking about it.

Because if you are going to make some exchange then, well, you can, and should, control, or manage, not sucking. This can mean not sucking as a person as well as doing some non-sucking thing or even making some deal to be able to actually do something that doesn’t suck.

“Life is about doing things that don’t suck with people who don’t suck.”

John Green

Is that too simplistic?

Shit.

I don’t know.

What I do know is we often over complicate Life.

We think, and think, and overthink, pretty much everything.

Therefore I tend to seek some simple guidelines for judging behavior <or choices>.

Not sucking seems like a pretty nice simple guideline.

It seems to feed into a more ‘higher thinking’ type criteria in that by ‘not sucking’ you seem to tap into what appears to be some of the main sources of happiness: Pleasure, Challenge and Meaning.

Some psychologists have identified these as ingredients of happiness.  They can certainly be separate paths as well as combined in a variety of ways. I imagine, ideally, we would spend most of our time doing things that incorporate all three ingredients, but, alas, that just isn’t too realistic. So, in my mind, attempt to not suck.

In fact, ponder this with regard to not sucking and the sources of happiness:

Pure Pleasure: An immediate positive sensation <a derivative of hedonism>. Activities that are pleasant <but not challenging or meaningful as in purpose> like laughing at a joke, eating chocolate, walking in the sunshine, a good memory, reading, swimming in the ocean, listening to music, anything that feels good in that exact moment.

** not sucking maximizes the pleasure.

Pure Challenge: The sense of accomplishment we get after we did something that required us to use our skills to solve a problem or meet a challenge. Exercising, job projects, writing essays, reading a challenging book, even running for the bus. You may not enjoy the activity, but you feel satisfaction afterwards.

** not sucking enhances the likelihood to meet the challenge.

Pure Meaning: Any activity that we consider to be worthwhile and that has a greater purpose. Contributing to a social cause, working to pay the bills, helping your neighbor, going to school to get closer to your dream job, generally improving yourself … or even practical activities which are not difficult to do and not pleasant either, but have a higher purpose.

** not sucking translates into ‘I don’t suck as a person.’

I went through all that just to try and prove that ‘not sucking’ is actually quite a viable objective.

Well.

Maybe not a true objective, but rather if you believe Life is an exchange, than ‘not sucking’ is a viable value to put on a choice when considering you are sacrificing a portion of your finite Life in the exchange. Ponder.

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Author’s note:

I have a vision of Thoreau spinning in his grave over the fact someone associated his wise words with ‘not sucking.’

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“The coming struggle for power will increasingly turn into a struggle over the distribution of and access to knowledge; not just consumption. Power seekers’ will use this struggle to further their power ambitions. While mass media could have been seen as sweeping generalized manipulation of attitudes and beliefs, technology is using fragmentation to have those with power divide and conquer.”

Alvin Toffler, 1981

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It is too simplistic to suggest any society, or nation, is divided. The reality is that society, and communities, have become fragmented, each isolating into its own cocoon of mindsets, attitudes, beliefs and even performative metrics (proof). If we step back, this is a natural consequence of years of rhetoric and unhealthy narratives. What else would we do after years of businesses suggesting business was a war and the other businesses were out to get us and it was a battle of us versus them, kill or be killed. Or your church is telling you only you will go to heaven and everyone else is designated for hell (or heathens). Or some Cause suggests it is Armageddon if you do not agree with them and if you don’t you are part of the problem. Even issues like climate change, abortion and vaccinations have become battlegrounds of us versus them. And the politicians, well, they are an onslaught of ‘the other party is evil and will destroy this country” or “that country is evil and out to destroy us” or whatever us versus them derivative they can create. Each, individually, divides, and each contribute to fragmentation. There are two main consequences to all this which leads to the creation of smaller groupings, communities, of like minded people:

• –         The more dividing issues occur, the more complex the world seems and the more inept, or unable to contend with, any centralized center of power is, which leads to decentralization (of everything) which only compounds the sense of lack of coherence.
• –         From a whole cloth perspective this cacophony of dividing creates an overall sense that everything is out of control and the world is spiraling downwards into the depths of despair (this is the roots of cultural despair).

But then we get too technology.

Technology, in and of itself, is nothing. Without people, without people generating content, it is a passive tool regenerating itself to its own purposes. Yet. Once humans become involved technology begins to amplify – amplify divides, fragments, communities and tribes. It is within the fragmentation aspect in which we begin to pause on the benefits of technology with regard to society. The fragmentation, the phrasing of ideas, ideologies, values, norms and actual ideological commitments just begin to blur the greater truths associated with each. Fragments get emphasized to strengthens pieces of views all the while blurring larger issues and societal coherence. The extension of technology into our lives has only seemed to accomplish the fact that people everywhere sensing their control over their lives slipping away as the world becomes increasingly complex. With that mindset/belief people begin discerning specific scenarios within which they can find meaning, self identification & success and then go about creating a subsystem, a likeminded community, where desired actions and direction are created, further intensified by a sense of their own survival within the larger system. There is a general feeling of remoteness from the centers of decision making so they create their own decisonmaking centers. These choices are supported by a feeling (which becomes a belief) that those in power don’t care what “people like me think” which only increases an increasing sense how little capacity individuals, alone, feel they have to shape events. Individuals recognize they cannot flex power to manipulate any meaningful levers of control, they end up groping around almost desperately for ways to bring back some order and sense to their lives, and inevitably smaller likeminded communities are forged. What ends up happening is that society becomes an interaction between these likeminded communities and their changing micro boundaries at a community level all trying to exist in a macro larger system attempting to shape boundaries and pull levers itself for the collective good. The consequence of this conflict/tension tends to make the likeminded communities only double down and increase close identification with those within that particular group. This means that society has become fragmented and not divided.

To state again, a major part of the issue is that people have come to believe that whole systems are simply too complex to meet their needs or serve their wants. So, they’ve sought to regain control by turning to subsystems, in likeminded communities, less complex relatable groups, in the hope that their interests can be better served and some control is regained over the distant impersonal forces that intrude upon their daily life. Simplistically, people have simply given up on the distant big structures of power striking a “big is threatening” and “small is effective/beautiful” pose. Technology has simply taken a gentle sloping trend rising towards skepticism and doubt, laced with some conspiracy theories, and exponentially made it a steep climb.

This has become a period of cultural despair and creation of likeminded communities is an active response to fight despair. I say that because this smaller group creation is an adaptive response to the problems of complexity; not an abandonment of responsibility. The creation of likeminded communities should not be equated with indifference nor is it an expression of apathy or cynicism. Development of smaller communities is simply a search for new structures around which to organize scenarios and which the individuals’ micro needs can have macro consequences. I highlight this to make two points:

• –         This is active participation in society, not a passive reaction. These people are not retreating, they are going on the offensive toward things they actively care about. This is important if we attempt to engage with a collective future in mind. As with any self-decentralization if we seek to regain some centralization or, at minimum, coherence, the fragmented communities must be solicited with sincerity, not disdain or a belief they are not ‘smart enough’ to know better.
• –         Technology feeds on active participation. This is more a warning than it is anything else. If a likeminded community ‘feels’ something, the internet will feed that feeling until it hardens into a belief. It will also actively feed other likeminded people into that community. Contrary to opinion, technology can create blindness and will actually encourage people to go blind.

Which leads me to proof in a complex world.

In order to have some legitimacy and just survive within the larger system the likeminded communities construct scenarios, assume responsibilities, and assign analytics to everything they are involved in. In other words, likeminded communities have their own analytics, they have their own narratives and, unfortunately, sometimes they have their own facts. In fact, the larger the macro societal crisis the more likely it will involve a shift at the subgroup level performance criteria that they will attach to their own legitimacy. This expanded use of metrics may dispose people to rethink what has long been taken for granted and decide to shape their own performance criteria themselves. I would be remiss I remiss if I didn’t point out that media plays a role in subgroup performance criteria development. For example, what Fox News cites is important can often become a community criteria. This criteria becomes a measurement for the larger system – even if the larger system may not have the same criteria. So, while the larger system may actually be quite effective in totality, if not the very specific issue at hand, the performance analytics are not aligned and the conflict only creates further dissonance between the groups and the system.

Technology is the ally and the enemy.

Information should be intrinsically beneficial to society and, yet a fragmented flow of information and communication results in increased knowledge AND fragmentation. Technology plays a role in where we go from here, but first, people need to think about the future they desire which, typically, rests on the most fundamental assumptions we make about reality. In the present competitive view of the world, we often think that the most capable are those who are the most competitive, and accordingly that competition creates and secures long-term viability. On a societal level, we have essentially adopted a zero-sum dynamic behind most of the things we do. This separates everything, and everyone, into a binary 0/1, yes/no, good/bad, this way/that way design world (software, algorithms, business individuals and even countries). This current design belief has only made the divide between winners and losers constantly grow and this polarization leads to radicalization (of ideas, opinions, behavior) and, well, society does not benefit. A fragmented society is not one that will effectively build a future good for the collective whole.

We do need technological advances, but our humanity and society must develop at the same speed as technology develops. As our technological ability to impact the world is radically scaling up, our human ethical choices as to how to implement that power must scale up accordingly.

The solution resides in being able to see clearly.

It may be difficult for a likeminded community, from all views within a healthy community, to recognize that humanity – even theirs – is lagging our technology. It may be difficult for a fragmented society, specifcally the smaller communities themselves, to see beyond their loose talk about obsolescence and the rot at the core of our society and institutions and business when the existence of that community may be grounded in some apocalyptic view about every systemic crisis. It would behoove each of these smaller communities to understand it stretches credibility to extend each individual systemic indictment to the entire structure of business, government, justice, and institutions. Every debatable action does not demand some mandate to destroy the entire system and every disappointment or concern about the larger system is not a mandate to shrink away to a smaller community mindset. We need some optimism, not just in humanity, but in the grander systems and institutions. Not blind faith, but optimism. I always recommend reading Rutger Bregman’s Humankind to remind everyone about humanity. I recommend for the ‘We’, those who seek to find solutions to what seems like a dysfunctional society, we need to recognize the difference between fragmentation and divided because the solutions are different for each. Divided is about building bridges and fragmentation is about building coherence. Ponder.

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cesiumadventures:

i just have this persistent feeling of “i’m not doing enough” combined with “i don’t have the energy to do anything” and it just really fucking sucks

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“Many people are busy trying to find better ways of doing things that should not have to be done at all. There is no progress in merely finding a better way to do a useless thing.”
Source: Ford News
11/15/1922

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Ever get the feeling you are doing a lot of ‘somethings’ and, yet, you look around and it sometimes looks like nothing? I tend to believe a lot of people feel some version of this. I have a stack of unanswered emails to people I really would like to respond to and, yet, I always have something to do. I rarely have an open minute, by my choice and I like it that way, but some of those minutes mean not doing something else. And therein lies ‘nothing.’ Nothing IS something. It resides in the choices left behind. I am doing nothing with all these emails and people who I genuinely like and conversations I genuinely would like to have and, yet, I have done nothing with them. They are something and what I have done is something and have created nothing in doing so. This may sound convoluted and slightly absurd, and it should.

It is indicative of the slightly warped pretzel logic we place to justify our productivity madness.

It is indicative of something generally happening in work.

Work never stops, we never stop, other people never stop, there are no stop signs, and yet with all this ‘not stopping’ productivity and productive performance has, well, stopped. Okay. Not stopped, but certainly hasn’t matched the amount of non-stoppedness it appears business is doing. I imagine I could say a bunch of things here but I would suggest the nonstop world costs us some creativity and absolutely costs us some critical thinking.

We are paddling so hard we can’t see where we are going or if we are even making any meaningful progress. It’s not like people aren’t trying to give is more advice on how to actually be productive because if you go to Amazon there are something like 100,000 books telling us how we can achieve more. If you don’t want to read, just pick one of the 1000’s of apps you can download onto your already nonstop 24/7 smartphone internet feed. The ‘hustle culture’ (and economy) is more a hamster wheel than hustle. While any ideal business progress trip should be one in which you reach some far-reaching destination, in today’s world it is just a circular treadmill encased in a cage.

This worship of productivity comes at the expense of everything else. It’s kind of like purposefully implementing mediocrity. Now. Within the productivity ideology they can’t see the mediocrity because their scale is biased – they don’t see the sacrifice; they see the achievements. They don’t see lost outcome possibilities; they see pragmatic outcome gains. This self-defeating behavior means a bunch of people are doing a lot of somethings all the while doing some nothings. There is no ebb and flow of imagination or creativity, it is all directed toward the God of Productivity. This God wields metrics of productivity to measure output and achievements, but also, we as human beings.

Look.

I don’t really need to share some research to be able to say, generally speaking, most workers are overworked <this can be time driven or task drive> which, generally speaking, lessens job performance, hence, productivity. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that technology adds on an additional burden to individual productivity stress – we also now compete against automation, AI and algorithms. We fight against the system and technology – in other words “the black box against us.”

Which leads me to the battle between more and zero sum.

More.

Growth, scale, expansion, higher, all are synonyms for “more.” Business is obsessed with more. If you did something yesterday, tomorrow can only be better if there is more than yesterday. It’s absurd and unhealthy. Let me use the business buzzword of the day, Transformation, to point out even that is never really about becoming better; it is always about producing “more faster” (better is a pleasant addition if it happens). ‘More’ simply begets an obsession with continuous output and THAT obsession arcs toward the worst of Taylorism in which Lillian Gilbreth-ism trumps Follett-ism.

The models of work are rewarded if they generate more regardless of whether it is true progress or not.

The models of work get rewarded if they generate more regardless of whether it is meaningful or not (because meaningful means ‘meet outcome objective.’

The models of work get rewarded if they generate more if they can simply be well oiled, or fine-tuned with more oil, thereby supporting the concept of human machinery.

But maybe even worse than treating people like machines is how business treats their work. I will talk about “achievement attitude” under zero sum, but suffice it to say that if achievements are all people truly get measured on <which feeds into what a person will identify as value and meaning> and More is always yelling in your mind, well, all you will focus on is more achievements – quantity not quality. “More” is a horrible corrosive productivity concept. “More” is actually a horrible corrosive concept for the world <invest some time reading Limits of Growth; Meadows/Meadows>.

Zero sum.

I am not sure, but it’s possible “more” could have worked okay in the models of work if we weren’t simultaneously stuck in a zero-sum mindset. In that mindset universe ‘more’ comes at the expense of someone else and, worse, if someone is getting “more” that means less for you.

It’s corrosive thinking and, paradoxically, reductive in nature. The pendulum in society has swung all the way over to achievement is all that matters. In fact, we are in a society where the Value of a person seems to be either driven solely by their outcomes/results or weighted so heavily by the outcomes/results that the ‘effort portion’ has minuscule value.

That’s … well … uhm … bad. Bad for individual meaning. Bad for society. Bad for Life lessons. Just bad.

It is bad because that means many people will ignore the price they will pay to achieve the outcome because the outcome, in and of itself, will contain all the value.

Yeah.

Think about that.

Taken to an extreme that would mean the attempt has zero value and trying and failing has zero, if not negative, value.

Ok.

That is bad.

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“But he did not understand the price.

Mortals never do.

They only see the prize, their heart’s desire, their dream … but the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted.”

Neil Gaiman

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Which leads me to how zero-sum plays a role. That achievement attitude becomes even worse, for society, because it also suggests “what are we willing to do to get what we want” is a zero sum game.

What do I mean?

Well.

You are willing to do anything it takes to get what you want <the achievement>.

The hell with rules … they are for people who don’t value achievement enough.

The hell with guardrails and guidelines … they are for people who are scared to do what it takes.

This attitude cleverly steals away freedom of choice in that it suggests the only choice is the one that ensures achievement.

“Measures of productivity do not lead to improvement in productivity.”

W. Edwards Deming; Out of Crisis

This attitude strips choices of anything truly worthwhile like dignity and respect and humanity because all of those things are not criteria for what is the ultimate value – the result or outcome. Productivity is inextricably tied to achievement which also suggests productivity that does not attain some objective achievement has little or no value. It’s a horrible way of thinking that actually equates productivity with gamification theory. Horrible.

I say all this because zero sum belief sucks the oxygen out of meaningful ‘doing’, or productivity, by sucking out the true freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances and to choose one’s own way in doing things. There is no freedom because only one type of productivity is deemed the winner and anyone not achieving that is a loser.

In the end.

Some people suggest we need to prioritize new ideas rather than productivity. I am not so sure. I think we should be prioritizing meaningful progress – for both individual and the business. While this version of progress is not attached to any direction or quantity of things, it does accommodate productivity <which I believe if it isn’t worshiped can be a valuable aspect of value creation and meaning>. I would suggest the future is actually not about more, nor less, nor any quantity. But. I am not suggesting a business doesn’t have to sell some ‘quantity’ in order to sustain itself, it’s just that any quantity becomes a result of a focus on progress where doing something means something. This thought also suggests the future isn’t going to be solved by working smarter, but rather a smarter way of working. I would also suggest the current way of working is not a logical result of centuries of logical reasoned thinking about how work should be done, but rather a battle between ideas on a way to work. That last thought becomes a semi-important thought because it suggests we don’t need a new way of doing business, or a new way of thinking, or even some magical transformation, but instead we should be seeking out the ideas that exist and maybe lost a key battle here or there. It is not about a fundamental shift, but rather a revisit to the fundamentals. In doing so we change the concept of productivity and progress in business and that begets a shift in systems, policies and practices. Ponder.