The Work Of Our Time

Can we talk plainly about something?

Here it is: the things I write and speak about can be really difficult to DO.

The challenging reality of what I ask you all to ponder and take action on is not lost on me, and I want to just call this out today, y’all.

I generally talk about 3 core ideas:

The future is something we create
The primary duty of leaders is to focus on systems
We need a revolution to flip us from an extractive approach to an energizing and regenerative one

If you’ve been reading my work for any length of time, these themes probably sound quite familiar.

I’ve come to believe the challenge isn’t really one of understanding any of these things.

Given a bit of time and space (which is not always easy to come by, I realize), these declarations are reasonably straightforward and, I think, self-evident with even a tiny bit of exposition.

Let’s go through each, briefly:

What we call “the future” is really just the present of tomorrow, and we see evidence all around us that plainly teaches us how this happens. We plant and care for seeds now and they sprout tomorrow. We use compound interest to grow our money tomorrow. We teach our kids to make good choices so they become constructive humans tomorrow. This is how the future works, and we know it, but it’s easy to forget how we are actively creating the future within the busy-ness of today.
We don’t actually make very many choices; we choose systems and they make choices for us. And, because of the hierarchal way we’ve organized the world, there are only certain “levels” of people who can change these systems — I call those people leaders. Therefore, the job of leaders ought to primarily be the making of better systems.
What we call “the real world” is actually pretty fake. We’ve created a false substrate called “work/business” that lives on “top” of the actual, biological world. We then take energy from the biological world to power this construct we built, and externalize any costs of this extraction into future biology. This sounds complex, but it’s actually right there in front of our faces every day. We literally extract things from the earth that we literally burn to power the way we work. We extract energy from humans to make our companies function. We extract actual people from our companies whenever we want (we call these extractions “layoffs”) to boost the bottom line now, with no real consideration of the cost that ripples into communities. Then, to top it all off, we talk about this entirely made-up layer as “the real world” and proceed to discount our actually-real, biological world as somehow less important than this thing we literally made up. It’s all very backwards.

Despite how logical these points are when laid out, as a species I would currently give us a big, bold, red “F” for knowing how to actually address them practically in our day to day lives.

Here’s a few reasons why doing something about these 3 things is so damn hard:

We might intellectually understand that we’re creating the future constantly, but life already feels really difficult so we tend to make choices that DON’T create the kind of future we want. We do this individually (when I don’t go to the gym or when I eat yet another cheeseburger… damn, I love those things) and we do this collectively (when we do things like defund health research and dismantle social safety nets).
Most of us don’t see systems, but just live our lives at the affect of them. We are victims, sufferers, and sitting ducks on the receiving end of systems that dehumanize us constantly. And do we put up with these systems? No, actually we don’t — we celebrate them. In the world of work, we are case studies in Stockholm Syndrome, lauding our captors with magazine covers and normalizing wealth hoarding like it’s not some disastrous form of ecological cancer. NOTE: There’s also intersectionality between #1 and #2, because our default work systems suck, incentivize shortsightedness, and generally make it difficult to make good choices.
No one alive has experienced a dominant reality that isn’t extractive. The colonization epoch seems to finally be coming to an end, but death is hard, even when it’s a clear harbinger of a new beginning. This point is particularly difficult because our current “way of life” is so inherently draining and exhausting that it leaves very little energy in our emotional and spiritual “tanks,” which means our imaginations are grossly, deeply inhibited. Most of us simply don’t have the time or space to even attempt to picture a reality that doesn’t suck like the current one.

So, whatever are we to do?

Goodness, isn’t that the question.

Here are a few ideas for us to start with — please stick around as I’ll keep elucidating more of what we DO about all this… for now, I recommend we:

GET CLEAR ABOUT THE FUTURE WE WANT. I suspect most of us have some vague notion about the future we would like to have — we’d like our kids to be better off than us, we’d like a world with more love, better health, cleaner air, less disease, etc. — but generally speaking, most of us have a much clearer picture of the dystopian, shitty future we DON’T want than any kind of utopian, ideal future we DO want. We must explore, dream, imagine, and practice focusing on something we actually WANT instead of all the crap we don’t. How can you create a slightly clearer picture of the future you desire?
NOTICE THE SYSTEMS. Noticing that systems exist is actually a really good start. We can’t do a damn thing to change them if we don’t even notice that they exist! So start noticing them. Start pointing them out. Start bringing them up in conversations. Then, practice steering conversations you’re having away from complaining about symptoms to digging deeper and confronting the systemic issues.
STOP CELEBRATING THE EXTRACTION. Don’t buy the “success narrative” bullshit — and beware: once you see it, you will see it everywhere. At the macro level: billionaires shouldn’t be celebrated, they should be made extinct. At the micro level: don’t put up with shitty workplace systems that suck the life out of people. Warning: this will be most of your systems, so choose your battles wisely and don’t sit on the sidelines. Pick a battle and fight!