A common reaction when I tell people what I do for a living [After “So you travel around the world doing trust falls?”] is that it must be nice to be able to afford to care about how much you like work. It’s true, I mostly deal in the problems of white collar workers – I’ve been where they are, and I can relate to them.
They’re not the only people who struggle to find humanity and value in their work. They are certainly not the only people who deserve those things. Meaning is not a first world problem – or a first world privilege. It’s not merely the concern of people who already have “enough” to sit back and think about the luxury of meaning in their lives. Umair Haque, as he so often does, says it better than I can:
What happens in a society that calls meaning a luxury, like a fleet of private jets, a dalliance reserved for the ranks of the idle rich?
As “consumers” we shop for the “everyday low price”without regard for the vitality of the butcher, the baker, and the barber bring to our communities, our families, and our lives.
As citizens, we reduce our civic selves to “voting” for the “candidate” who represents our most immediate, narrowest, perhaps self-destructive self-interest, the common good be damned.
As “workers,” “executives,” or “leaders,” we become little more than instruments serving the glacial goals of blind machines; puppets of shareholders, marionettes of markets, much less than thinking, feeling, judging beings, who stand tall for a more enduring and worthy ethos, even in the face of adversity, hardship, and disaster. And so our economies, societies, and polities; our cities and towns; our culture and principles; our imagined future and intended present begin to fray and buckle and crack. That, of course, is the timeless parable of right here, right now, the dismal, failed status quo.
Umair Haque
Fortunately people living in the poorest areas of the world, like the Mumbai slums that Haque’s questioner mentions, don’t buy into the idea that meaning is a luxury, either.
- They’re changing the future of education.
- They’re making complex informal economies.
- They’re mapping cities based on those ideas.
- They’re becoming engineers and tackling new energy challenges.
- And hey? They’re recycling. (click on the “CC” button to get translated subtitles)
In other words – meaning isn’t a self-indulgent luxury. It’s not something you – or your team – should wait for, until it’s easier, the business is in less trouble, until people are feeling rich. It matters right now.