Overload is built in to our economy. Poor us.
A post popped up on Inspiration Nation discussing the article on Overwhelm I wrote in 2005. If you haven’t tried it, I also created a free companion email overload assessment to figure out how many sushi dinners worth of time you’re sacrificing to the Great Gods of Email Overlaod.
The overload situation hasn’t improved since I wrote the article. The 40-hour workweek is widely considered to be a thing of the past. Corporate profits continue to reach all-time highs, so we’re definitely making more money. But so what? Wages are flat or, if you adjust for inflation and higher energy prices, falling. Why does a “good economy” matter if we have to give up our free time and relationships for a falling standard of living? The outgoing MBA graduates I occasionally coach assume they’ll have no life in their pursuit of … the good life?
I’m very puzzled. I’m puzzled that we’ve been so thoroughly trained to confuse buying stuff with happiness (and the two just don’t equate). I’m puzzled we believe it makes sense to give up time with friends and family so we can earn enough to … take time off and spend it with friends and family. And I’m puzzled that even when we are being more productive, we aren’t more outraged that the benefits of that productivity are accruing to people who already have so much money they can’t possibly use any more.
It’s puzzling. And it’s a world we’ve made for ourselves. And if we want change, we’ll have to change it ourselves.
I think it’s a natural progression of our underlying economic system. Our success measures are all growth measures: economic growth, profitability growth, productivity growth. As long as we require yearly growth, it has to come from somewhere. We must get more productive to have productivity growth, and corporations must retain a greater percentage of that gain each year to produce profit growth. That means cutting back on little expenses like healthcare or payroll.
There’s nothing wrong with a nice, stable business that makes a consistent profit year after year, but somehow, we’ve decided that’s not enough. Which is a shame, because thanks to our imperative of growth, many of us have less and less of a life each year.
Thanks for being (for the most part) a voice of sanity in a world where hysteria feasts on our better natures…
Keep it up.
Hear I might some latent socialist calling..?
October 16th, 2007 at 11:36 amSocialist? I don’t know. I don’t know what words like that mean except as excuses for people to have knee-jerk reactions and use them as excuses not to take other people’s ideas seriously.
I’m in favor of creating an economy that generates enough wealth and spreads it around enough that people are happier, healthier, safer, and more relaxed than they would be otherwise. If that’s socialism, then yeah, I’m all in favor. To a point, capitalism fulfilled those goals, but it seems like in the last 15-or-so years we passed some kind of change point and now it seems to be it’s actively moving us further from all of those goals.
- Stever
October 16th, 2007 at 11:40 amA socialism in the form of the formula, Kapital = Kunst, in which the “true capital” is on the level of *capabilities* (with perhaps an emphasis on the capabilities that engender [or generate] other capabilities).
Most other forms of “capital” seem to involve behavior-environment pairing. For instance: pointing guns outward from a plot of real estate where there is the possibility of drilling for oil. In other words, most other forms of capital involve violently holding onto some piece of material which is arbitrarily in the possession of one with the means of violence.
Information economies have created problems for this model, however, just as the entertainment industry has always done. Hence, oil mongers (the material/financial elite) often describe the entertainment industry as the “cultural elite.”
I’ve heard the term “propeller head” sometimes used to describe people in information science. This from people who rule imaginary real estate, with imaginary violence, but with enough influence that it can often affect people’s lives the way violence does.
In a sense, you are in the entertainment industry as well. Your capital is purely on the level of capabilities, which makes you suspiciously (heh heh) on the side of the socialists.
On the other hand, some socialists who happen to be CEOs (or other execs) tend to over-evaluate their capabilities, distorting the whole system by a feat of mythic/monolithic narcissism.
Not all CEOs.
I realize the average CEO doesn’t think of herself as a socialist.
October 16th, 2007 at 11:45 am