Several
months of active job-seeking has made me an involuntary expert on the
kinds of employees that companies are currently looking for. As I do
with nearly everything, I've tried to learn some larger lessons in
the process that can better serve my values, as well as my survival.
Many
job posts appear to be recruiting the business equivalent of a
soldier who will be involved in a project that is like a battle with
high stakes that is part of a war with a cunning and powerful enemy.
Their terminology often suggests a competition in overdrive following
a strategy with no margin for error, learning, or realistic luck.
Several decades of experience have taught me that these impressions
generally match reality; and my investigation of its dynamics and
their larger implications has convinced me that the existential
threats now faced by humanity are direct consequences of blind
obedience to that reality.
As
I discussed in my blog post "Evaluating
Competition," a sustainable and healthy competition must
have goals and rules that support values that everyone –
participants and those impacted by the competition – knows about
and agrees to. Our current economic competitions arguably do not meet
this test, especially since a few participants with an excess of
power have corrupted them in order to acquire more power with the
goal of dominating everyone and everything. To just keep what we
have, the rest of us must follow their lead, with predictably
disastrous results since we are already critically degrading and
depleting the ecological resources needed for the survival of our
species and many others on the verge of extinction at our hand.
I
have personally struggled to act according to my values, whose
definition has also been a struggle in the wake of proving to myself
that there is a horrific lack of dependable guidance in my culture.
In my writing, I have been building a case for those values and a
body of guidance that can be used to serve them. In the rest of my
life, I've experimented with what guidance I have, learning from both
my successes and my failures along the way. Hovering over the whole
process has been the need to keep what I have until I can find and
enable a better way to live, which has meant flirting with the path
to disaster and thus becoming more familiar with its many potential
incarnations.
The
simplest guidance comes from what might once have been common sense.
People should work together to meet everyone's basic needs over the
longest possible time, and use only what's left to increase personal
happiness. Knowledge should be accumulated and used to predict the
influence of their environment on them, and predict the consequences
of their actions on each other and their environment. To enable all
of this, everyone must understand and share common values, the
pre-eminent being the lives of all people and respect for the
creatures on which they depend. If what people do can affects others,
they should make them aware of it; and if it potentially affects the
survival of others, the others must agree to it. Clearly, our present
way of life, embodied in economic competition, does not meet any of
this guidance.
Other
guidance involves details, and the latest installment applies to the
use of knowledge. It comes out of research I started a decade ago
while trying to predict the time it would take to complete various
projects. While it remains little more than a partially-tested
hypothesis, its
predictions are consistent enough with my experience to present
it as a means of evaluating more than what I originally intended
(which is also a way to test it). One important prediction is that it
is unlikely that any project or task attempted for the first time will take less than twice the minimum possible amount of time, and it
will most likely take at least four times that long. If an
organization claims to be able to achieve the minimum time, they are
equivalently claiming that they have access to the less than 50
people in the whole world capable of doing so, which is extremely
unlikely. As a corollary, if an organization does take the minimum
time, then the quality of the result is likely much less than
advertised. These first-time projects are the ones that make
businesses competitive because of their uniqueness (based on the
economics of low supply and high demand), while projects that have
transitioned into full-scale production with several thousand times
the minimum time invested in the process will have maximum quality
and lower cost, but lose their uniqueness quickly, especially if the
minimum time shrinks so much that other organizations – competitors
– can duplicate it.
One
of the business buzz words I've seen pop up recently is "disruption,"
which I read as the intentional and continuous conversion of an
organization's activities into a set of unique projects so that
competition can be accelerated. If coupled with super-optimistic time
projections, this virtually guarantees the end of high quality, as
well as lack of employment for the vast majority of the population
(since only a very few people can come close to achieving the desired
results) unless there are roughly as many businesses as there are
people. Thus, the term matches all of its meanings: fracturing
society through income inequality; requiring dishonesty to confuse
the meaning of quality; sabotaging the health of business
participants and their families by locking in a perpetual level of
stress; and further destroying the Earth's habitability by
multiplying resource-intensive and waste-producing activity.
To
me as a world citizen, our greatest imperative as a species is to get
back to basics, which starts with meeting everyone's basic needs,
which includes leaving resources for other species so they can
maintain our planet's habitability. The remainder, if there is any
(and I doubt there is), can be used for the purpose most of our
current economy is geared toward: increasing personal happiness
beyond the basic level. Doing so requires examining our lives as
objectively as possible in terms of basic values, which
includes first identifying and agreeing to those values. Living any
longer in our present state of apparent limbo (or increasing anarchy
of meaning) is not optional if most of us wish to survive much
longer; we may in the interim be able to justify to ourselves
continued service to the system we know, but it ultimately won't be
worth the cost.
To
me as an individual, my present course is becoming rapidly
indefensible, much as I felt as I was wrapping up my book Death
Stoppers Anthology. An acceptable alternative is not yet in
sight, but I'm learning quickly and am confident that I'm on the
verge of discovering it.
