Posts Tagged ‘new work’
Last night at town hall Juliet Schor walked her audience through a short history of the economic convulsions that have brought us to this point of high unemployment, environmental degradation and market decisions made with indifference to both. This model she calls the business-as-usual economy. In her new book, Plenitude: The new economics of true wealth, she carefully details market assumptions that keep the consequences to natural resources out of the equation when assessing the cost of production and consumption.
This key flaw leaves the consumer in a state of ignorance.
“…it is important to recognize that consumers have been cut off from the material realities of production. Producers and retailers prefer that consumers not think about the damage their purchases are having on the earth, so information is not typically available, especially at the point of purchase.” p. 47
In order for us to rescale our consumption to appropriate levels she brought up the ideas of the honorable Frithjof Bergmann, whom I’ve mentioned in a previous post. I’ve often been intrigued by the idea that he calls “high-tech self-providing”. Ms. Schor takes this idea and gives examples of how some people are already taking advantage of their own capacity to create enterprises for “modern off-grid, resilient communities”. Other examples might be mushroom farming, beekeeping, raising chickens and many forms of urban agriculture. She also mentioned fab labs, or fabrication laboratories, which appear to be the holy grail of community-supported production means. Here is a description from MIT’s FAQ page:
“Projects being developed and produced in fab labs include solar and wind-powered turbines, thin-client computers and wireless data networks, analytical instrumentation for agriculture and healthcare, custom housing, and rapid-prototyping of rapid-prototyping machines.”
I left the lecture feeling upbeat about the future in a very unexpected way. After nearly a year of unemployment, the urge to become involved with a meaningful exchange of ideas overcame me with enthusiasm. The need for something to make sense at last fulfilled. Looking for work felt like complicity in a game I no longer wanted to play.
I read authors who connect the dots, and bring together the issues of behavior, environment and the economy. So when there is an opportunity, I listen to the works of:
Juliet Schor, Richard Thayer, Cass R. Sunstein, Tyler Cowen, Paul Krugman, Raj Patel, and Gary Hamel, among others.
I listen for the buzzwords and pay attention to who else is using them. If these eight are just a handful of the thought leaders behind recent critiques of the economy, then I want to be as informed as possible about what they believe are the solutions to unemployment, for example.
There is a famous quote out there that makes the rounds in cyberspace. I think it is attributed to Kahlil Gibran, it says: Work is love made visible.
That being the case, it is pretty easy to see where the love is this year. In fact, issues surrounding work are increasingly a central focus of my life, as I’ve joined the jobfully team, a start-up in Redmond. I’m very excited for the prospects of this endeavor, not only because it gives me the opportunity to use my native strengths in writing, but just as importantly it gives me plenty of good reasons to increase my networking.
While I will continue to use this space for a greater variety of discussion topics, I will be focusing a lot of attention on the employment counseling field via jobfully.
So please join us through all the usual social channels, be part of the discussion, and share the love.
Yesterday I spent the afternoon with a friend reviewing our resumes and bemoaning the state of working for a living in a world gone mad. We compiled all our collective wisdom, and painful experiences, and advice we’ve gathered from others, and still could not make sense of it. I concluded that the only comfort one can derive from this situation is in communing with others for whom the experience is the same. When you can bear witness to other brave souls finding a way to live without losing their humor or desire to be who they really are, then there is hope. There are millions of us. Yes, it is unfathomable.
That leads me to yet another realization. The business of giving aid to job seekers is a mushrooming industry! No surprise there. In fact, I find myself part of it as well, and I have to admit it intrigues me.
After reviewing my resume Chris told me: “You’ve reinvented yourself.” I quickly added: “Yes, but I’m still in the process, and I’m still not ‘there’ yet.” And here is where the real object lesson comes into play.
Are we now, as many people have already concluded, living in a world where long-term employment of say, three years or more, is a thing of the past from here on out? If that is true, are we ready to live in a world of constant work search? If that is also true, then war, health care, the elderly and the recurringly unemployed could easily suck the economy dry in our life times. If we could delete just one of those, say, war, we could fund the nation’s well-being so much better. But I digress…
I love being part of this industry. My reinvention has been transformative in ways I can hardly comprehend. Five years into it and I can finally say it has been for the better, but I’m still in uncharted territory, and I’ve got lots of company.
The other night I was at a networking event and more than one person I was talking with was wondering: How can this economy settle into anything reasonably sustainable when you have literally millions of adults constantly going in and out of cycles of work and non-work?
This much is certain: No one knows.
Yes, I’m looking for “new work” as Frithjof Bergmann would put it. I’ve been a collector of his ideas long enough to know when I’ve found a kindred soul of sorts.
Consider:
“Our view of human nature is diametrically opposed to the platitudes of our culture: human beings are not by nature rapacious and intent only on their own advantage. Far from it, the vast majority is frail, easily intimidated, and has great trouble even answering the question, what is it that you seriously want?”
And where work is concerned:
“The Protestant work ethic has deluded people into thinking that “anything can be good work if you do it well”. We should throw a Molotov cocktail at this idea.”
He had me at cocktail. Here is a teacher of philosophy who understands the corrosive effect of boredom at work, and actually has functional ideas on how to rethink the “job system”. He calls it “high-tech self providing”.
I am heartened when he says:
“People need the chance to do work with a purpose, to experience something as a calling. A little bit of job work is okay, but everyone should have a calling – it makes for a vastly different life.”
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