May 27th, 2020 - Category: Change
I love to work. My first paying job was in high school typing detailed football statistics on a manual typewriter. After 40+ hours of work, I was surprised to get my first check for $73, icing on the cake. This was an all-boys, Carmelite high school that was a decade behind in technology yet they jumped ahead and purchased one of the first IBM PCs. Then they created a computer lab which I worked in for free for the rest of my years there, including summers. Fast forward a decade and I was managing a whole team of sales and support engineers, all of us working from home offices. There was never a question of “monitoring productivity,” we all loved what we were doing, helping customers solve difficult technical problems with advanced measurement systems. Another decade later and now I have my own business and when I’m not working on client projects, I’m volunteering at the local Maker Space fixing 3D printers and teaching basic electronics; or supporting our local First Robotics Competition Team; or studying how X, Y, or Z works. Yes, I enjoy non-work activities as well: nice evenings with my wife sharing a good bottle of wine, a video game now and then, tennis, and working in the garden or around the house. All this means that being “in quarantine” has not radically altered our day to day life or resulted in boredom.
However many people’s lives have been radically altered with unemployment suddenly at an all time high. Even our previously minimally employed acquaintances are receiving stimulus checks, unemployment checks, or working from home for the first time with varying degrees of success. Everybody seems to be questioning work at the moment: If we can survive without an income, what do we do during the long hours of the day if we’re not “going to work?” Why do we separate work and living spaces bothy physically and psychologically? How much financial / quality of life benefit is there to not commuting to an office? One of my favorite quotes on the subject of earning a living comes from Buckminster Fuller who famously said in the 1950s:
We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
Fuller was way ahead of his time. An architect, author, inventor, and futurist, he published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms such as “Spaceship Earth”, Dymaxion, ephemeralization, synergetic, and “tensegrity.” The geodesic dome was his invention and “Dymaxion” combined the words dynamic, maximum, and tension to sum up his goal of, “maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input.” He is still way ahead of us now.
So I’m beginning to see the crisis we are in today as a wake up call, a “life-reset,” a chance to make some structural changes to our lives and society that would never have been possible during the previous status quo. If you’re an “inspector’s inspector,” maybe it’s time to pursue that online degree in fashion you’ve always dreamt of. Personally, I’ve always been interested in chemistry so I’ve applied to an advanced degree program. Maybe you don’t have a college degree at all. You might find it’s easier and cheaper than ever to get started on one. Even if you continue in your current career, this is an opportunity to do it differently, whatever it ends up looking like. Pay your employees better, start a collaboration with a competitor to standardize something in your industry, shift focus from competitiveness to cooperation. Also, this is a global crisis and solutions might come from China or Russia or Cuba, so isolationism is more of a danger than anything that might come from “out there.” By the way, Cuba is not so far fetched, they have one of the most advanced lung therapy programs in the world which is one of the reasons US / Cuba relations warmed several years ago. Something to think about…