You and I face the difficult choice of trading meaning for money; we weigh the searing moments of real human accomplishment against the soul-sucking "work" of earning the next car payment by polishing up another meaningless PowerPoint deck packed with tactics to win games whose net result is the creation of little of real value for much of anyone who's not a sociopath. This is the deepest kind of theft; not merely prosperity having been looted from societies, but significance having been stolen from human lives.
Yet, the unforgiving truth is: the trade-off between meaning and money is as real — and as toxic, as characteristic of our post-prosperity present, and as strikingly intensifying — as climate change. And, like climate change, while you can argue that it's existed throughout history, to do so is a weak argument; so has, say, human trafficking.
In the simplest sense, the very point of a "capitalist" economy is to minimize the trade-off between meaning and money. So, for example, you and I don't have to spend a lifetime building, stone by stone, a Great Wall or a Pyramid — to satisfy the whim of an Emperor or a Pharaoh — and so burn through our one invaluable precious life. Every life has worth; and because it has worth, so it must seek, and discover, meaning.
So what can you do about it? There's only one good answer, and it's simple. Stop trading meaning for money. It's the worst trade you'll ever make.The Harvard Business Review | HBR Blog Network
Making the Choice Between Money and Meaning
Umair Haque | Director of Havas Media Labs and author of Betterness: Economics for Humans and The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business
(h/t Scott Fullwiler via Twitter)
"Betterness: Economics for Humans"
ReplyDeleteLOL. You can't make this up Tom... what a bunch of morons we have running things currently... rsp,
This sounds like some of that dangerous individualistic hippie stuff from the 60s that Dan Kervick warned us about. We must ALWAYS be subservient to the group and groupthink!
ReplyDeletehttp://tinyurl.com/9jzddnm
It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. We have broken the laws. The laws say that men may not write unless the Council of Vocations bid them so. May we be forgiven!