Hello dear reader,
Since September of last year I’ve poured many a brain dump on these pages. I’ve had fun and learned alot. Along the way I have at last discovered an enduring theme that I want to pursue relentlessly. So with that in mind, I’ve decided to move my musings and reportage over to TFCC.
This site may dissolve or morph entirely into a new form of self-expression. That much remains unclear. I hope you will make the leap with me to this new format. The arrival at a new decision warrants celebration, and my renewed energy for blogging will soon be evident.
Ciao bella,
Marcella
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.
The MVO blog attempts to follow trends in emerging economic theory as they relate to jobs, creation of livelihood and our collective, general well-being.
Did you happen to catch Conan O’brien on 60 minutes last Sunday? You’re not missing anything. He admitted that he believes that: “Everything happens for a reason.” Really?
I suppose some people would nod in agreement. I’m not one of them. That one-liner has never appealed to me. It smacks of desperation. It smells like human spirit gone sour, now needing a catch-all phrase to unpack its guilty burden. So why don’t we just say: “I can’t make sense of this so I’m just going to imagine a force greater than myself has access to an infinite wisdom that ultimately will act in my favor. So there!” After all, isn’t that what it really means?
I’ll have none of it. I prefer pith that is a little harder to divine. I go for bold mystery and audacious assertion instead. Try these on for size:
Failure is impossible!
Or another favorite:
Do not fear mistakes – there are none.
Who needs to understand a thing? Armed with these verbal shields I can leap tall buildings in a single bound, walk through walls, and basically achieve anything to which I put my mind. Who can so sheepishly waste time feeling disappointed in the absence of failure and mistakes?
If I need a one-liner to live by these do me just fine, thank you very much.
I just read a short retrospective of the original Earth Day 40 years ago. I did not fully realize that it spurred on events that culminated in the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. Fast forward to 2010, and a couple days ago the front page of the Seattle Times ran a story about a beached whale. The story reported what they found in the whale’s stomach: 20 plastic bags, a pair of sweat pants, etc. The writer said the whale took seriously the mantra to eat locally.
A whale is dead and someone is making a joke about it. That makes me sick.
‘Nuf said.
Get to the point quickly and clearly. No problem. If you’ve dipped into my blog you’ll also notice I have an appreciation for humor once in a while, too. In fact, and maybe there is no secret about this, I would love to cultivate the use of humor more widely. However, you have to pick your medium carefully and do it just so. That is the part I’m working on. Once you’ve exposed yourself online so-to-speak, you really have to decide – OK, now what do I do with this? Last summer this began as a way to get myself adept with WordPress and take it from there. Now I’m feeling the tug to do greater and bigger things with it. No doubt 2010 will be when that happens. The process of refinement begins in ernest when you can answer the question: What does that say about me? and: Do I like what it says?
My criteria is: Does it put a smile on my lips after I’m done absorbing it? If the answer is yes, then I know I’m on the right track.
Some people have ALL the fun and the rest of us just embed their code. Oh, well.
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.
