Disruption

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.

Conscience And The Kings

As more of my time necessarily has become consumed with job hunting, I have discovered that the options are not much better than the last time I tried to be selective based on my values and preferred work environment. This is despite the fact that I am more aware of what I want and need based on last year's breakthroughs in research and self evaluation, making the search's filters much more refined and reliable. Having intentionally framed my values around the needs of my community, global humanity, for surviving and thriving as long as possible, the issues I'm finding with my search parallel the issues I identified on a global level, and in about the same measure.

I have resisted the urge to compromise on these issues, in line with my commitment to become a "death stopper," but I now realize that my focus has been too self-centered, striving as I have for an optimum personal situation where I am with people who share similar values working toward similar ends. Instead, I may need to do what feels like climbing back into the trenches of war, and use my new-found vision and courage to make positive change wherever I go, but in a more obvious and straightforward way than I now realize I have attempted to do in the past. Essentially, I would focus on approximating an ideal world in as many situations as possible, and make my intentions clear in the process. Realistically, I expect a lot of resistance.

I have recently been studying the field of human ecology (the research variant, rather than the "making a better life" variant), which looks like the best fit to my independent research into population and consumption, and it finds evidence that healthy societies are like healthy ecosystems in that they tend to grow to take advantage of existing resources and then to resist change. Ours is not healthy. A considerable amount of scientific research has shown that as people gain more power, they are inclined to lose their natural empathy and increasingly treat other people as objects to be manipulated to gain more power. This consequence is reflected in my population-consumption model as a mechanism for people with extreme happiness to attempt increasing it despite limits to their own ecological resources. Simplistically, conscience is short-circuited by happiness, ultimately leading to lower population as perhaps one of Nature's safety mechanisms for preserving habitable environments.

A functional government would tend to offset the negative effects, using laws to replace conscience as a protective force in people's interactions and keeping power from being too concentrated, but our (U.S.) government has been sabotaged by the powerful people who want to take more than is healthy for everyone else. This has been enabled by an economy which rewards the manipulation of money with the creation of more money, resulting in an obscene wealth distribution that is further locked in by our approach to the limits of ecological resources. A small part of the population now has enough economic power to potentially own all of the resources everyone else needs to survive. Even if all of the people in that group had fully-functioning consciences (and some likely do, since these trends are statistical, not individually determinant), they could not have the information or the time to make decisions that avoid harm to some fraction of the people whose lives they can affect. Since too much happiness has a pathological effect that makes even well-meaning harm unlikely, the underlying cause needs to be addressed soon, even if we don't consider the ecological impacts that pose an existential threat if we continue exceeding healthy consumption.

If my analysis is correct, creating an ideal world could involve something like global drug addiction treatment, perhaps by creating a safe replacement as an intermediate step that would buy time for ecosystems and social systems to recover to a more healthy state, while weaning the wealthy off their happiness high. Reshaping values and reactivating consciences would have to be built into the "replacement" so it doesn't become a permanent substitute. To some extent, the entertainment industry currently serves to give the illusion of living in a different environment, and religion manages values within an imaginary construct of reality; perhaps the replacement could use components of both to achieve the desired results, and even educate people with a more accurate understanding of how the world works. Care would need to be taken so such a tool is not misused, by for instance further concentrating power among a few people.

This and other possible remedies should be openly debated before a global roll-out, following a debate about what the common core set of values should actually be (I am presenting my own preferences here). That doesn't mean such debates and remedies can't be attempted on a small scale to judge their efficacy, as long as it is done honestly and openly with all concerned; such is the essence of the focus I suggested I might personally take in the interim. To be globally useful, though, such attempts should be coordinated and analyzed, perhaps by an academic entity as part of a science project, and I would be absolutely thrilled to take part in the project at that level (I would even love to translate the results artistically, to reach a wide audience as part of the debate over broader use).

Employment and An Ideal World

Having accepted that common values and understanding are critical requirements for an ideal world (or even a healthier one), and the likelihood that crippling stress would return if I didn't contribute toward creating that world, I decided to look more closely at the kinds of employment that would help meet those requirements and meet my near-term financial obligations while my writing business was ramping up.

Nonprofit issue-oriented organizations are an obvious source of employment that addresses values, especially religious ones. I prefer organizations whose values are most in line with my main value (preservation and proliferation of life for as long as physically possible), yet provide opportunities for open-ended discussion about them and others while not undermining understanding of reality in the process.

Science is my principal model for understanding reality, so organizations that promote science are a clear choice for working toward meeting the associated requirement. There is, of course, a lot of subjective reality we all experience as humans, which needs to have common interpretation (understanding) identified, and I see psychology as a promising means of achieving that.

It would be great if I could find an organization that promotes both values and understanding, which I'm trying to do with my own business. Many issues-based organizations do this within the narrow range of their interests; but by doing so, they tend to discourage participation by people who don't share those interests (I admit being guilty of that myself). More research is clearly needed into finding or creating a viable alternative.

Finally, regarding the remaining requirements: I have for a long time considered joining organizations involved in environmental cleanup and renewable energy, which deal with the requirement involving management of the commons; but I recently realized that they are fighting a losing battle against a complex and cunning enemy enabled by not meeting the first two requirements. I'm therefore less likely to pursue work with them, though I won't rule it out entirely. The same goes for government, which has the theoretical power to enforce responsibility for maintaining the commons and ensuring that only extra resources are allocated by the economy, without detrimental effects; that power can be properly used if everyone supports it and its use, which again depends upon common values and understanding.

Overload

Yesterday something happened which gave me hope that I and others might be able to overcome one of the worst habits imaginable – shopping: I freaked out while walking though a Denver mall to get to a movie.

In retrospect, it may have had a lot to do with the fact that I've been spending a lot of time at home, mostly looking for a job. Nonetheless, I was in a state of sensory overload and disgust at all the stuff practically bulging out of the shops and the signs ordering or begging me to buy stuff I didn't need and would likely never use more than once. When I got to the theater, I sat through a continuous infomercial that was followed by countless previews, such that I felt I had seen three movies before the one I paid to see. Afterwards, I couldn't wait to leave, and believed for the first time that when I finally got work, I would be able to fight off the pressure to spend my earnings on that crap instead of paying off the debt I'd used to buy the barely-more-than-crap that I already own.

When I got home, I did what I often do. I turned on my computer. From that (er, this) expensive box, the Internet showed me a lot of useless crap I could get through the mail, festooning the almost-news and job descriptions I was really interested in reading. Next to my computer was a book I haven't finished yet, which discusses the why and how behind our interactions with each other, our artificial world, and the natural world as part of a larger ecological system that has shaped us as much as we've shaped it. But, as usual, I couldn't resist being exposed to the imaginary world inside the artificial world that is killing the natural world on which it all depends. It probably counts for something that I at least had a similar reaction to the ads on the screen that I had to their cousins in the mall: Yuck!

Later that night I got a headache while working on the sequel to my novel, which is being informed by the insights I've gained since being laid off last year. I interpreted it as both a reaction to spring pollen and chronic stress about both my future and the future of the world. Just as one of my book's characters was wondering if she could keep up with her husband and his pursuit of threats she could barely fathom, I was wondering if I could ever reclaim a sense of security in a society that is tearing itself apart. The ads insisting on my getting more stuff, and the job announcements promising high stress and heavy workloads so I could make it possible, effectively mocked such a desire, and were actively recruiting people to make sure it would be forever out of reach of everyone.

Luckily, I had cold medication to push through the symptoms and get some sleep, so I could process it today with a fresh perspective in front of the expensive little box that I bought in another mall when my defenses weren't anywhere near so high.

Almost Too Late

Last night, I watched the on-line version of Nicole Foss's presentation on the collapse of the global economy, which was somewhat different from the presentation she gave at the Transition conference, and surprisingly even more depressing. Foss focused mostly on the financial situation because she believes it will be at the leading edge of the catastrophe that's coming, while the energy situation – specifically peak oil – will drive the majority of it. Her prescriptions were the same in both presentations; among them: avoiding debt, home ownership, and banks; accumulating cash, food, equipment, and survival skills; and, above all, becoming part of a community.

While at the conference I was thinking globally, this time I was overwhelmed with how much the details of how people's live will need to change, especially mine. Like many Americans, I'm unemployed and in debt. This isn't the first time. I've worked myself out of worse situations before, and if the economy had a chance of rebounding, I would no doubt be able to do so again. Unfortunately, there have been deep structural changes in the past few years that will make it much more difficult to recover this time, even if I get one of the many jobs I've applied for since the last time I was working. Those changes, like most of the threats facing us, are tied to the relentless pursuit of growth. When you can't get enough new stuff, you start consuming the stuff that you used to process that stuff, and that's what the world's business leaders are doing, except the “stuff” they're now consuming is effectively composed of people. Those people, right now, are disproportionately among what was the middle class, and I and most of the people I know are among them.

There's still a chance that I can work my way out of debt before things get too much worse, but it will probably mean taking the highest-paying job I can and hanging on for as long as possible, even if what I'm doing with that precious forty to sixty hours a week isn't helping to lay the groundwork for a better future given the realities I've spent the past seven years discovering. In “Titanic Choices,” I likened this to bribing the crew of the Titanic to let me out of my cabin so I would have a better chance of convincing those steering the ship to avoid the iceberg, warning the other passengers, and helping to build more lifeboats.

If Foss and those in Transition are right, we're too close to avoid the iceberg, and we'll be lucky to get a few lifeboats launched before the ship sinks. I've so far resisted this conclusion, which is reflected in the career choices I've considered so far (along with the assumption that I even have the freedom to choose my next career). Their case, right now, is holding more sway with me, especially as unrest here in the United States has started to spread like wildfire. Given that possibility, my career choice will need to be much more practical. Permaculture design, perhaps?

Green Filter

Yesterday I was reintroduced to our society's version of a “green economy” while attending a training session sponsored by my county's main workforce center. While it was really just a plug for a local community college, it reminded me why I've shied away from enthusiastically seeking a job in the field: the green economy, as presently defined and practiced, isn't likely to significantly improve our chances of avoiding the global catastrophe I see lurking in the near future.

There's a popular expression, which I hate, that pops into my head when I write things like that: “Don't let the perfect be enemy of the good.” Sure, green jobs aren't going to solve all our problems, but they're better than what we're doing now – or so the logic goes. That's like saying, using my Titanic analogy, that turning the ship so it hits the iceberg at a slightly different angle is better than turning the ship so far that the passengers think you aren't taking them to their destination (assuming we can even do so, and in enough time to avoid impact). Sorry, but maybe perfect is what we need right now, along with a lot more lifeboats.

When I got home from the “training” I got a call from a recruiter about a contract-to-hire position as a technical writer, the transitional career I've been in since the late 1990s. It was a not-so-subtle reminder that cash is running out, and to use another expression I hate, “Beggars can't be choosers.” As idealistic as I am, as committed to trying to fix whatever I can, homelessness is not an option I'm willing to consider, especially since I'm not alone in this. If I get a chance to interview with an organization that isn't full-bore trying to kill the planet (involved in oil, global finance, war-making, or supporting right-wing politics, for example), I'll probably take it, and figure out how to use the job to do more good than bad.

In the mean time, I'll continue to use each new experience to narrow my search for what I want to spend most of my time doing. What I've learned so far is that I want to focus on increasing biodiversity, or at least curbing its loss. The key to this is the famous HIPPO acronym that I learned about by reading E. O. Wilson's work, which nicely summarizes the negative human impacts on other species. I've generalized this in my concept of consumption, which is proportional to the global ecological footprint. Reduce the footprint, and we can increase biodiversity; it's that simple. The big problem I've grappled with, of course, is the possible (and I consider likely) loss of human population that would accompany it, which appears to only be solvable by increasing the planet's natural carrying capacity (its “natural capacity”), or, more simply, the amount of other life. What this would practically translate into is the subject of my ongoing work (er, hobby) of defining an “ideal world.” From a career-search perspective, it confirms my inclination to move toward anything involving ecology, such as ecology with a conservation focus, human ecology, or social ecology.