Umair Haque

The Next Big Thing

Do, 05/03/2012 - 19:16

What's the next big thing?

Is it 3D printing, personal genomics, cleantech, hydrotech, self-driving cars, augmented reality, wearable computing, microcurrencies, big(ger) data, faster drones?

And now for something completely different.

What makes us human? In one word, preferably.

It's a question, that the other day, out of sheer orneriness, I decided to ask my Twitter followers. The most common answers were: empathy, consciousness, compassion, love.

So here's another question, given the results of my thoroughly unscientific anti-experiment. Will any of stuff in the first list necessarily, automatically bring about any more (or better) of the stuff in the second?

And yet few of us go the office, the classroom, the bank, or the clinic to expect, evoke, elicit, or enjoy anything resembling empathy, consciousness, compassion, love. I'd bet the farm, the house, and the Apple shares on the following proposition: Our institutions are failing not merely because they're bankrupting us financially, but because they're bankrupting us in human terms — that, having become something like Alcatrazes for the human soul, they fail to ignite within us the searing potential for the towering accomplishments necessary to answer today's titanic challenges.

Here's how an organization designed for empathy might work. I'd go one step past "Undercover Boss", and institute a new rule: Every year, anybody with the word "chief" or "senior" in their title spends two weeks at an orphanage for children affected by war crimes (without a retinue of liveried footmen and tuxedoed butlers). Here's how one designed for compassion might work. I'd go one step past philanthropy, and institute a new rule: that should a series of real-world social objectives fail to be met, bonuses are slashed by fifty percent, and reinvested in said social objectives (I know, so unfair). Here's how one designed for love might work. Don't like it? Don't do it? Not feeling it? Stop working on it. Love it? Pitch it, seed it, build it, live it. Sounds a little crazy, right? Not if you're Zappos or Netflix.

Now, you might — and probably do — object to some of my quasi-designs; and that's fair enough. They're just idle napkin scribbles I jotted down over a quick cappuccino. Here's the point.

In the journey of human progress, there are still undoubtedly whole new continents — perhaps literally galaxies — to explore. Yet, as we continue our voyage, it's all too easy to get caught up in the technology, the technique, the formula, the algorithm, the mechanics and the method, the how and the now, the excitement of the moment of discovery, the exhilaration of sighting terra incognita — and fail to peer not merely over the horizon, but inside our own horizons.

Perhaps we've gotten a little too seduced by the quest for the Next Big Thing. While it's certain there will be a (smallcaps) next big thing — 3D printing, personal genomics, etc, that will redraw the boundaries of productivity, efficiency, effectiveness — perhaps, the biggest thing we need to face next is us.

Not "us" in the vague, internetzy sense of "the collective." But "us" as in the even more imprecise, yet razor-sharp sense of what pulses through you and me when we feel most alive; what ripples gently through us, when we feel alone, hurt, small, afraid, taut with grief. The stuff that makes us us: not just well-behaved, obedient, productive atoms in the economic world, but feeling, thinking, doing, living beings in the human world.

If you want to reduce it to a caricature, then sum it up thus: "the next big thing is meaning; mattering; the art of human significance". But if you want to take a second to wrestle with the weft and weave of my message, then let me unpick the nuances thus.

There are existential questions searing every human life, burning billions of times through every second — and while five seconds of either reality TV or cable news might suggest they're trivial, disposable, or superfluous, they are what give us, in the brief moments we enjoy here, a sense of imperative.

I don't suggest our institutions be designed to give us neat, clean, sterile answers to them — that they offer us a kind of pre-packaged, by-the-dozen, commodity "happiness." But I do offer the heretical proposition that the highest purpose of human life isn't merely turning disposable diapers into designer diapers, but, fundamentally, to discover a sense of possibility, to expand the boundaries of human potential, to earn and offer one another that which means something. And in that case, the first great concern isn't how we organize — for surely there are infinite permutations to be explored — but why we're here: what, as a first approximation, elevates you and me in the human world. What makes us, in the dismal, clanking, haywire logic of the industrial age not merely productive, efficient, or effective — but searingly, painfully, achingly, enduringly, joyously human.

If there are routes to productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness, the heavens know we've found more — imagine a Neolithic hunter-gatherer walking from a Walmart to an Apple Store — than our forebears ever dreamt of. And here's the paradox: they're mightily solved problems — but pretty poor solutions to the questions that matter.

Hence here's a minor challenge. Unless you want to spend your valuable life painstakingly eking out barely better solutions to problems we've already solved which give us answers that fail to matter in the enduring terms of the questions which do, consider the following: If we're going to reboot our institutions, rethink our way of work, life, and play, then what are we going to redesign them for?

Or, more sharply: what makes us human? One word, preferably.

Kategorien: Umair Haque

You Don't Need This "Recovery"

Di, 04/24/2012 - 17:01

What happens when one reaches the limits of a vocabulary? Consider, for a moment, the curious case of the "recovery." 93% of gains so far have flowed to the top 1%. Median incomes in recovery are lower than they were before recovery. The bulk of jobs are concentrated in low-wage industries. If this is a recovery, then, it's a little like zombifying a patient and pronouncing him "healed" might be said to be — a "recovery" not composed of what a reasonable person might call "health," but more like a creepy reanimation.

What, then, does it mean for an economy to be "healthy"? Consider, for a moment, a few very different numbers.

• 9.8% of adults strongly agree that their life is close to their ideal.
• 19% of adults strongly agree that they are satisfied with their life.
• 21% of adults strongly agree that their life has a clear sense of purpose.
• 30% of adults strongly agree that on most days they feel a sense of accomplishment from what they do.

Surprised? Here's what I'd suggest: we might be in a eudaimonic depression. The real depression isn't merely a temporary lapse in economic "output" — but a depression of human potential; one of human significance squandered.

I'd argue that it's time to update the way we conceive of "an economy." Every traveler sees the road through the lens of his journey, and I'd bet most of us still see the economy through steaming, glowing industrial age eyes: a "healthy" economy is one that's buzzing with...billions of man hours spent at monolithic institutions mass-producing and mega-marketing rapidly commoditized largely disposable mostly trivial junk.

But perhaps there's more to the "health" of an economy than how many McWidgets it can churn out, more bigger faster cheaper nastier. Perhaps the health of "an economy" is better represented by the mental, physical, emotional, and social health of people's very real human lives. Perhaps what matters more than (yawn) the stuff we can buy is the stuff we can't. And, if you want to take the argument to the limit — as I'll argue in future posts — perhaps the very idea of "an economy" is itself an idea built in and for the industrial age.

Further, perhaps yesterday's logic of plenitude's "health" has run its course, just as the logic of bloodletting did for yesterday's physicians. This, after all, is what a paradigm shift means — not merely the naïve assertion that "stuff is gonna change"; but the conception that the dominant logic of a domain has broken down. The reason this "recovery" isn't much of one is because the economy itself is in transformation. Perhaps performing the mute steps of the clockwork dance above can no longer yield the bounty we once cheerily took for granted — because the more we denude ourselves of purpose, humanity, and meaning, the less demanding, capable, and able to realize our potential we become. Perhaps, at some threshold, having ascended into minimal material plenitude, eudaimonic depression yields material stagnation — and the more lost, alone, and bereft we feel in the human world, the less capable the gears of prosperity are.

So what can you and I do about this eudaimonic depression?

If we face an imperative, perhaps it's one as timeless and worn as bedrock: not merely to employ our selves to make the most, but to make the most of our tiny selves. Perhaps it's this imperative that is the bedrock of the human world, the only firmament solid enough to support the foundations of meaningful lives. And to this imperative, there are no easy answers — just hard questions. The questions we've been uncomfortably failing to ask for a long, long while. Hence, if you want some tiny advice, I'd say: craft a purpose. Find yourself . Mean it. Matter. Better.

Yet, let me confess. I make no claim to know how to live well. And each of us should rightly be suspicious of those who do, too frequently and too loud. If there's something resembling a catalog of mistakes, you and I know: our messy lives have been rich with them. Yet, that's the point. Condemned as we are to living in the human world, we damn ourselves if we reject the human world and substitute its painless, comfortable, sterile, calculated caricature. To be inhuman, yet exist in the human world — this is tragedy; the tragedy of exile.

Perhaps, like me, you feel it — the total weight of this exile — sometimes. The blues creep up on you, in the unlikeliest places, at the unlikeliest moments. Yet, sometimes, it's a sense of feeling desperately lost that grounds us in what it might mean to be found. At my favorite café, I often see the same scene: a dad slowly, lovingly feeding his palsied son with unremarkable, silent — infinite — care. It seems to me not just a tiny act of unconditional love, but a titanic kind of thankless grace and strength; an act of incendiary rebellion screaming into the moral emptiness of the smallness of our biggest choice, the choice to casually discard life, to toss aside the act of fully living, to be less than one's whole.

I don't want a revolution. I want a million tiny revolutions. Revolts not merely against, but for, towards, into. In a cold universe, nothing matters more than a tiny spark of life; living fully, wholly, incandescently, not merely "happily", but full of significance, infused with belonging, rich with meaning, seared us with love, spent with grace, consumed with purpose, hinting at the closest you and I have to a truth: none of us will be forever. But each of us is right here, right now.

We've spent a lot of time looking for the promised land. Building utopias, worshipping idols — these are amongst humanity's most natural, frequent aspirations. Despite ourselves, we haven't reached the end of our journey: I'd bet the farm that there will be whole new economies to model; whole new continents to explore; whole new worlds to save. Yet, perhaps the fact will remain: for you and I, in the living moment, there are no promised lands. Perhaps the human world is all we've got — and all we're sure to have. Hence, maybe, if there is an answer to the question "Is this all there is?" then the contours of that answer — mperfect, imprecise, painful, sharp with color — outline the shape of whom we are, have been, and will be.

Perhaps, from here, you and I can see all the way to the end of that vocabulary, project the limits of today's paradigm into the unborn future — observe, despite tomorrow's conquests and triumphs, exploration and discoveries, inventions and enterprise, like the speed of light bounds the physical universe, the constant that grounds the human universe: being, belonging, and becoming will, in the truest sense, remain what makes us human.

And maybe that's enough.

What happens when one reaches the limits of a vocabulary? Life. Live.

Kategorien: Umair Haque

The Great Collision

Mo, 04/09/2012 - 16:57

Here's a tiny question. What do you think most people really want? What do you think the average Jane — or even the less-than-average Joe — is capable of?

One view is: most people don't want much, and are capable of even less. People — usually (pardon me for saying so) old, rich, white, privileged males — have been advancing this notion for centuries. The funny thing is, the world has made explosive jumps forward to increased prosperity. History has revealed that the less-than-average Joes and Janes of the world weren't just capable of working all day long hammering wood into railroads, and they didn't merely want not to be trapped in grinding poverty forever — it turned out the people that were the world's poor just a few decades ago were, by the 21st century, eminently capable of, for example, designing microchips and mapping genomes, and doing so because they wanted lives materially, emotionally, and spiritually rich. Hence, I'd say: sure, you can argue that the vast majority of humanity is and has always been dumb, loutish, brutish, and stupid — but if it's the future you want to be a part of, then a better bet goes something like this: each and every one of us has human potential that while not unbounded, is infinite, in the sense that we haven't begun to explore its outer limits yet.

So here's another question. What happens when limitless potential crashes headlong into boundaries, prison bars, and maybe even self-imposed limitations? What happens when it's not just stuffy, sneering (mostly) old (mostly) rich (mostly) white dudes who believe you, I, and everyone else not named "J. Thurston Stubbleforth, IV" aren't capable of better — but when we sell ourselves short?

If you accept the proposition that societies and economies are heading off the rails, then here's my hypothesis: we're about to careen into a Great Collision — people bumping up against the self-imposed perimeter of their own carefully constructed lives; human potential crashing headlong against choices that make the least of it. It's a collision of values against value. It's a collision of preferences against expectations; the lives we want versus the choices we're willing to make; what we give versus why we take; what we find in each other versus what we seek from each other. It's a collision that's going to happen inside each of us — and then, maybe, result in a collision that happens outside each of us. It's a collision first of people versus the consequences of their own decisions — but then, perhaps, of people against broken, entrenched, savagely dysfunctional institutions.

Here's what that looks like.

We want work that fulfills — but we're not often willing to spend an extra penny, let alone a dollar, euro, or yen, to ensure others can take on fulfilling work. In the sagging, tube-lit aisles, it's the everyday low price that we chase with a vengeance.

We cry out for better leaders — but it's rare that we take the dangerous, decisive step to lead ourselves, choosing instead to remain obedient, pliable followers.

We want education, healthcare, and transportation that works — but we're reluctant to pay the costs of these public goods. When it comes to the bare-minimum building blocks of a functioning society, they're someone else's responsibility.

We hunger for inspiration, purpose, exhilaration — but mostly, we settle for lives of annihilating boredom, alternating with sheer panic. Perhaps we get our fix of "life" through the finely honed narratives of the hundreds of channels of reality TV and "news" we're smilingly offered night after pixelated night.

We want contracts that don't steal our future — but we're often unwilling to walk away from those that already have. Perhaps we feel a sense of moral responsibility to pay our debts — but I'd suggest the greater, perhaps greatest moral responsibility is choosing to live.

We want thriving, diverse cities — but we self-select into neighborhoods of like-for-like. Witness, of course, the rise of the gated community.

We don't want narcissistic Machiavellian sociopaths to helm our institutions — but at the mall, on the high street, at the gas pump, we seem to barely, if at all, consider whether those we're choosing to patronize have interests solidly opposed to any rational person's.

We want basic human rights to be respected — but mostly, we yawn when habeas corpus, the fundamental political building block of a minimally enlightened social contract (remember that 13th century document called the Magna Carta?) is rolled back.

We want communities that cohere, full of relationships that blossom, and in turn, nurture the social soil. But we spend more time and energy on Facebook than on making a lasting, tangible human difference — unless it helps us gain that corner office, promotion, or bonus.

We want a culture that doesn't dumbify us — but at the end of the day, we're willing to settle for poking fun at one that does, instead of building one that doesn't. But the former is not the latter.

We don't want the future we're getting — but most of us shrug our shoulders at the end of the day; only to wake up panicked, the next — and begin the cycle all over again.

Welcome to the Great Collision. In the aggregate, our preferences are savagely at odds with our expectations; the future we want is at odds with the present we choose.

It's easy to construct a narrative of victimhood; and a narrative of victimhood is as easily palatable as a Big Mac. Sure, you can argue that the modern condition is a finely jawed trap: bound by the chains of debt peonage, our horizons have been ineluctably delimited. But I'd say we're equal parts victims and victimizers — preying not merely on one another, but our own better selves. When it comes to real human prosperity, in the crudest terms of political economy, "demand" is about what people have the impertinence to, well, demand — and perhaps the simple fact is that we've become a society that's simply not demanding enough.

What I'd say "we" want is to escape the toxic tradeoffs of the industrial age — now savage dilemmas, choices between bad alternatives, that drive more and more of us into a sense of crisis, leave us feeling lost and unmoored in the human world. But what we choose, over and over again, is the vicious cycles that make up the grinding gears of the blind machine that's remorselessly devouring not just a prosperous future, but maybe even, bit by bit, our better, higher, truer, worthier selves. Local, personal choices are colliding with their global, social consequences — and the result is futility, frustration, and fury.

So what's the way out? In the great tradition of self-help gurus, I could offer you ten quick, easy bullet points, or a seven-step program. But I believe our quest for neat, easy answers is exactly how we got into this mess. Consider one tiny example. Sure, anyone and everyone worth less than $40 million and/or under the age of 35 should protest, if for nothing other than the experience. But protest alone has been subsumed by the system; not just carefully controlled by hovering choppers and rubber bullets, but I'd say almost designed to let people evade the uncomfortable truth that institutional choices matter; to offer a kind of spectacular experience that commoditizes the art of rebellion into a neat, disposable, transaction, offering a cheap, quick, affordable catharsis for crisis — instead of a hinge for transformative change.

Here, I make no utopian call for a glorious revolution. If there is something like a brotherhood of man, too much blood has been spilled for one to believe that it doesn't often resemble Cain versus Abel.

But I do call for a revolt. A rebellion against the emptiness of the lives we choose, over and over again. I believe you and I are capable of better; I believe each of us deserves better — from ourselves. As the great historian and parliamentarian Edward Gibbon once wrote: "when the freedom they wished for most was the freedom from responsibility, then the Athenians ceased to be free."

If the above falls prey to the glittering sin of idealism, then think again before you pronounce me guilty. The great collision isn't (just) tides of protestors crashing into barricades manned by helmeted riot police: nor is it billions of tiny choices to defect from yesterday's broken institutions; to no longer play by a viciously exploitative set of rules that, if obeyed to the letter, will probably leave one broke, miserable, and broken. It's not a global Arab Spring, nor simply the millions of human awakenings that must precede it — but a collision against the self that's the result of an inability to rebel; the collision of the conformist with the need to create the future.

Yet, I will confess. I have a longing to see these awakenings come to fruition. As Albert Camus once noted: "the opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love." If you and I have become something like the opposite of idealists — weary cynics, dejected fatalists, lost — then perhaps it's because the love of a searingly well lived life has been defeated in us. But no one can half-live and feel fully alive. That's what I really mean by "Great Collision." And perhaps it's there those who wish to create the future must begin.

NB: If you want some simple life or biz advice, here's a tiny attempt. Tomorrow's great institutions will be built — as they always have been — not merely by answering today's preferences with the lowest common denominator, but by seeking radical, transformative paths to resolve the contradictions between preference and expectation, past and future, value and values. Want to build one? Take a hard look at the Great Collision — and blaze a trail that doesn't end in social, personal, economic wreckage. Don't just make a difference.

Kategorien: Umair Haque

Overthrow Yourself

Do, 03/29/2012 - 19:58

Here's a tiny question. When you boil it down, what's the human purpose of enterprise? Of industry and ingenuity, effort and toil? When it comes to life, what's the point of work — and when it comes to work, what's the point of life? What's the point of "business", anyways? Is there one?

You might answer, having spent years in combat on the war-torn front lines of commerce, countless hours ensnared in soul-sucking conference calls, endless days enticed by corner offices and promotions, something like: "Making megabucks, by the most efficient route possible. Hey, dude — got an iPhone7?".

And you'd be perfectly right: the purpose of enterprise is chasing megabucks. If, that is, the outer limits of your ambition screech to a grinding halt at spending your days fine-tuning the just-tedious into the shinily banal.

But no one's going to look back on their deathbed and wistfully remember "Man, I was the person responsible for the lime-flavored energy drink!"

While it's arguable whether humans have immortal souls, deep down, we all know: to thrive at the art of living, at some point each of us has to take a deep breath, step outside the rusting prison or gilded cage, plant our feet in the soil and reach towards the sky. Life feels actively, furiously lived when we love, trust, wonder, care, believe, dream, think, feel, do, count, matter.

Sure, you can argue that the right, true, and best purpose of enterprise is selling more stuff, at a greater profit, to benefit the already privileged more, through pure financial gain — and the human consequences are merely an incidental, almost irrelevant afterthought; nice-to-have, but as disposable as a plastic razor. But it's a weak argument — and it's getting weaker by the second. Roger Martin has elegantly and brilliantly argued why maximizing shareholder value's a destructive goal; Jack Welch has called the single-minded pursuit of shareholder value the "dumbest idea in the world;" Teresa Amabile has cogently chronicled why higher purpose leads to better performance; Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Tom Peters have both found time and again that the organizations that thrive amidst turbulence are those that aim higher; Gary Hamel has devoted now two must-read books to examining why management's hit a human wall, and what to do about it; Richard Florida has untangled the pulsing link between creativity and prosperity; and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have pointed to institutions that extract value from people, notably middle classes, as the prime mover of the collapse of societies. And that's just the very short list of my intellectual heroes and their findings.

Here's what we already know. If it's the greatest gifts you want to receive — whether from the people that work for you, invest in you, or buy from you — then you're going to have to come up with a more meaningful answer to the great existential question of enterprise than "another million units of toothpaste — but this time, with heart-shaped light-up tutti frutti polka dots!!" Hence, any variant of the answer to the question "Why are you here?" that goes thus: "selling more stuff to people they don't really need to buy with money they don't have for reasons that don't count to live lives that don't matter" is about as relevant to humans as a pair of ultra-luxe designer sneakers is to a goldfish.

I'd put it like this: at its best, the purpose of enterprise is to evoke the highest human potential. The instrumental, calculative, deterministic view of enterprise, of human effort, of the role work plays in life, is in its twilight. Not just because it's been debunked, but because it just doesn't square with the most basic, shared essentials of a human experience. Allow to me say it kindly for a moment: Unless, you truly and deeply believe that the majority of us should spend the majority of our days during the majority of the best years of our lives being emotionally and intellectually waterboarded in order to satisfy the whims of narcissistic Machiavellian sociopaths, because since they're meaner and nastier than the rest of us, we owe them the moral debt of our McFutures — enterprise, and by that I mean your very hard work and ideas, your talents and gifts, your capacities and skills, the raw stuff of your fragile human potential, has got to be employed with a higher purpose: one that speaks to what it means to be human.

So here's my advice: overthrow yourself. I'd like you to develop a view of enterprise that's not merely instrumental, calculative, and deterministic ("Work, money, stuff, power, status, rinse, repeat") — but humanistic, constructive, and nuanced. And to get there, it just might be time to square up to your own paucity of ambition, take a deep breath, and admit that while the point of what you're probably doing might be good enough for obsessive-compulsive sociopaths seemingly stuck below the emotional development of a second-grader hell-bent on beating his bffs at an endless game of Monopoly forever, it's nowhere near good enough for humanity — as in both "the people inhabiting the earth" and "the set of built-in emotional and logical wetware that elevates us above the feudal, militaristic, and bestial."

Consider, for a moment, the uselessness of the corporate "vision statement." If it's a difference you want to make, try crafting an ambition instead. A vision statement is egocentric: it's about an enterprise's vision for itself ("our vision is to provide the world's best customer service at the lowest cos—" SNOOZZZZE). An ambition, in contrast, isn't a picture of the enterprise you see in the future, but a portrait of the human consequences that your enterprise (not just your "company", but your ideas, effort, time, ingenuity) creates. How do you want the world to differ — how do you want life to be meaningfully wholer, richer, better? A vision is meaningless in human terms, but an ambition is only meaningful in human terms. A vision might be about "the cleanest restaurants", or "the most fashionable sneakers". But an ambition is about "the healthiest lives", or "the fittest runners". (I give some real-world examples of ambitions in Betterness.)

Argue with me if you like, throw your gilt-edged copy of the collected works of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ronald McDonald at me if you must, but I'd say: when it comes to the role of work in life, and the role of life in work, there's something akin to a grand ladder of purpose, stretching from the deepest subterranean depths inhabited by the lowest common denominator's immediate gratification up to the snowy peaks of making a lasting, positive, perhaps radical difference in the world. It's at the top of that ladder where the act of enterprise reaches its apex; finds its possibility; becomes its highest self; because it's there that human potential fulminates and culminates in what matters. That's where it becomes possible to earn not just money, but the stuff money can't readily, easily, imperiously buy, because it's not a beige, interchangeable commodity: trust, self-respect, adoration, fidelity, passion, dedication, maybe even a tiny bit of love, fulfillment, and, at the outer limits, a searing sense of meaning.

I'd suggest: it's time to begin firmly scaling that ladder — or get ready to be overtaken by those who can, will, and already are. If your answer to the question "what's the purpose of business" is as sweetly, tenderly naïve (did I say "naïve"? I meant "totally clueless") as "selling out and cashing in my chips by pushing more disposable plastic junk, dude!!!! High-five, my broski!!!!", then odds are, your days are already numbered with a clock counting down to the nanoseconds to zero hour — you just don't know it yet.

Kategorien: Umair Haque

The Economic Roots of Your Life Crisis

Fr, 03/16/2012 - 18:52

I know: it's not manly, dignified, or barely mentionable in polite conversation. But here's the thing. Lately, I've been in the middle of a full-blown omg what-the-hell-where-is-it-all-going-and-what's-the-point-anyways life crisis. Dragged kicking and screaming to a party where I couldn't handle the small talk, after a while I finally just blurted out: "I'M HAVING A LIFE CRISIS AND I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT!!!!111"

After staring at me pitifully for a moment or two, my friends admitted one by one: "So am I."

Which left me a little puzzled — because, of course, I thought I was the only one lucky enough to be having a life crisis. A few days later, I asked on Twitter: "Who's having a life crisis?" Result: an angst-ridden tweetstorm of "me!!!!"

This thoroughly unscientific result has led me to ask: are we, just maybe, in the midst of an epidemic of life crisis? And if we are, why this tsunami of angst rumbling across the globe?

Is it a generation spoiled by excess, too narcissistic to care whether Homeless Hotspots cross a line of basic decency? Is a life crisis the ultimate emblem of privilege, bastion of those who don't have to worry about subsistence? While it's true that none of us are perfect, I'd suggest that there's a reason — beyond the infinite power of human superficiality — for our collective angst.

Here's my hypothesis. We're not having life crises (just) because we're a little bit spoiled, vain, and shallow — but also because we live in an era of titanic institutional failure.

All around us, yesterday's institutions are buckling and breaking, creaking and cracking (markets, governments, universities, corporations). The point of institutions, their social utility, if you like, is to guide and shape human interaction in authentically beneficial terms — to provide well-lit, familiar paths to living meaningfully well.

Institutions are a little like highways, whose destination is
prosperity: get on the highway, take the right exit, and voila. Or at least they were: today, those highways are crumbling, and more and more of us are slowly beginning to find out — sometimes, the hard way — that too often, they just might be roads to nowhere. Consider: decades of stagnant incomes (except for the richest); political gridlock reflected in dismal "approval" ratings; low rates of job satisfaction (nevermind actual fulfillment); record lengths of unemployment; marriage rates on the decline (again, except for the richest). No wonder only one in five parents think the next generation will have a better life.

Today, while our institutions might just barely keep the people formerly known as the middle class from hunting large mammals with stone axes, they're tarnished when it comes to many of the facets of a meaningful prosperity — security, fulfillment, connection, humanity, purpose. And that, I'd bet, is what's really behind today's life crisis epidemic. As yesterday's institutions continue to fracture, stutter, creak, and collapse, in the human world, it often feels as if we're left adrift on the open ocean.

Today's logic might be summarized thus, as two of my intellectual heroes, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, have recently argued in their new book, Why Nations Fail: "Join us — we're here to take advantage of you." Acemoglu and Robinson call these extractive institutions — and according to them, institutions that extract value, instead of creating it (in my language, institutions that don't create thick value), are the roaring engines of decline.

A life crisis, I'd say, is a crisis of human potential foregone. It's when you know you're not living up to your potential, but it's frustratingly difficult to see what, if anything, can be done about it. So what does one do about it?

I think we dream big, and act bigger. For example: remember my tiny list of broken institutions? Put one in your crosshairs and reinvent it — not just in your own town, but so that your own town sets an example for the globe.

I think we have to subvert the rules. If institutions, as Nobel Laureate Douglass North once famously described them, are the "rules that shape human interaction," then the rules are broken. You know it, and I know it: if you play by the rules today, you're probably going to end up broke, lonely, miserable, exploited, and empty. When the rules are broken, never play by the rules. Maybe you should walk away from that underwater mortgage. Maybe that degree doesn't have to be in something "employable," like finance — and maybe, if you push, it doesn't have to take four years to finish it. Maybe you don't have to get married, don't have to get a "job," buy two minivans and a McMansion, pack it bulgingly full of stuff you'll never use, and call it a life. Maybe it's only by breaking the dismally broken rules that you can rewrite better ones.

I think we have to invest differently. If the future looks uncertain or desolate, perhaps that has as much to with what we don't consider part of "the economy" — love, trust, purpose, passion, human growth — as what we do: money, machines, and shiny stuff lining the beige exurban aisles. Maybe it's time to invest in the soft stuff — people, experiences, ideas, your own human, social, and intellectual capital — instead.

I think we have to stop conforming. If you hate coming into work at 9AM, stop. If you don't like going to pointless meetings, don't. If you don't want to work on (or watch) the latest Hollywood blockbuster, don't. Twenty-first century institutions aren't going to be built by 20th century worker bees slaving away to keep the crumbling pyramid propped up at all costs. Instead of converging to the grey-suited, hair-parted mean, start diverging. Challenge the way things are done with the way you believe they should be done.

Yesterday's institutions ask us to make increasingly bad tradeoffs, riddled with painful dilemma. It's one thing to offer a life of meaningless work in exchange for a huge paycheck; t's another to offer it in exchange for a stagnant median wage. Want that education? Here's a lifetime of crippling debt. Want to serve society? Great! Here's the pittance public servants have always received — without the security. If we really want to smash through the straitjacket of life crisis, we must recognize the deeper dilemma and refuse to settle for anything less than breaking it. One tiny, trembling, but decisive step at a time, we can arc our own journeys towards a life searingly well lived.

It's not easy. I know. It can feel paralyzing, debilitating, panic-inducing. But here's the secret inside the secret. Institutions fail. But life goes on.

So here's my (slightly embarrassing) first question: are you (like me) having a little bit of a life crisis? My second question: how many people do you know are having life crises? And here's my third: how would you define a life crisis, in ten words or less?

Kategorien: Umair Haque

Why Love Matters More (And Less) Than You Think

Mi, 02/15/2012 - 01:14

So, how was your Valentine's Day? Me? I had an anti-Valentine's day at my local bar with the ghost of Albert Camus, an existential crisis, and a decent bottle of wine. Here's what occurred to the four of us while we were angsting out.

I've made the point before that our economy seems especially good at mass-producing toxic junk. Food that malnourishes us, entertainment that bores us, "news" that isn't, finance that blows up our economy, et cetera. So somewhere into the bottom half of the bottle, I found myself sinking into the well-worn mental ruts that are probably familiar to anyone who has ever hated Valentine's Day: how it's a suspiciously consumerist celebration of cheesy pink-tinged coupledom that exists for the sole purpose of selling pink (or blue) fuzzy (or smooth) disposable crap (or overpriced blood diamonds). Smile winningly, pledge your troth, and log into the intertubes to breathlessly proclaim "Life goal achieved!!!!<3!!"

Throw The Art of War at me if you must, waterboard me, glue my eyes wide open and dress me in one of Rick Santorum's sweater vests if you have to, but I'd suggest, when it comes to real human prosperity: the truest denominator of a life searingly well lived is love. And that has nothing to do with pop songs, rom-coms, or candy hearts.

Hence, here are a few things I've learned along the way — thanks to a long string of catastrophically failed relationships, imploding corner offices, living in between multiple cities, a couple of fistfights, and long evenings of solitude at the bar. These aren't the only lessons — or even the "best" ones; just a few of mine.

Experience. There are many kinds of love. The Greeks distinguished between agápe, éros, philía, and storgē. Consider: five millennia ago, a more nuanced conception of love existed than the McLove that surrounds us today. Without experiencing the many forms of love — evoking them in one another, and elevating them for one another — we'll probably always feel a little empty.

Act. Love is a verb, not (just) a feeling. Love is investing in, sacrificing for, and caring about; seeking what I'd call higher-order returns — igniting the creation of real human wealth in others (and reciprocation in kind). The former without the latter is to love what Mission Impossible 4 is to great film: banal, disposable, and shinily vacuous. Love, above all, must be lived.

Suffer. Love transforms, and transformation hurts. Hence, you probably won't love if you can't surrender to a little bit of suffering. You can't love your work if you don't suffer for the art and craft in it. You can't love your partner if you don't suffer a little bit sometimes when you see them — as if the act of seeing them reminds you of the heart-stopping fragility of life. And I'd bet you can't fully love if you can't deprogram yourself from the cult of consumer not-quite "culture" and its relentless cycle of self-loathing. You have to take a deep breath and plunge into the arduous journey of figuring out why you're really here, who you are — and why it matters.

Mean it. Erich Fromm, after a lifetime inquiring into the meaning of life, famously concluded: "Love is the only sane and sensible answer to the question of human existence." To which Woody Allen tartly replied: "Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer sex raises some pretty good questions."

Sure, it's possible to divert yourself for a long, long while with money, power, fame, toys, and the other assorted fun and games we've used the institution of a consumer economy to produce. But love is not a commodity. Love is the messiest, most singular, least interchangeable, and most transformative idea our species has yet invented. Unlike the humdrum, yawn-inducing stuff our institutions can offer us, love can't be bought off the shelf in a neatly packaged twelve-pack.

But it can, if you're very lucky, be earned. So don't front. At the end of the day — and especially at the surprisingly short end of life — there's no such thing as a substitute for the real thing. And there's no better way to miss the real thing than to tell little white lies to yourself about it. So love your partner. Love your friends. Love your family. Love your life. Love your job.

Despite our attempts to trivialize it, commercialize it, and strip-mine it of meaning, love is still dangerously, incandescently meaningful. While we may try to reduce it to a mass-made quasi-luxury we purchase on credit once a year, obediently, in the form of chocolates, flowers, and dinners, it remains vital. While we may try to turn it into an option — one more choice to be plucked off the shelf, depending on whether you prefer the red label or the blue — it remains necessary. And it must be evoked and created, nurtured and renewed, tilled and cultivated — because without it, life is little more than sleepwalking.

Perhaps our celebrations of "love" are so often tinged with a quiet desperation because what we're really pursuing is a caricature of love. And perhaps by endlessly redrawing that caricature, we ourselves are lessened, little by little; as if we feel we don't fully belong in the human world, but can't quite understand why.

None of us belong here. But we are here. And there's not enough time. Cut the bullshit. Love.

Kategorien: Umair Haque

Create a Meaningful Life Through Meaningful Work

Mo, 01/30/2012 - 17:03

In case you haven't been following my tell-all confessional — I mean Twitter feed — lately, I've been in Manhattan for the last few weeks. Hanging out in all the wrong places (read: painfully hip power hotels), I've had the questionable privilege of overhearing more than my fair share of Very Serious Conversations from the movers and shakers of the world.

And boy, have they been tedious: mostly, about eking out slightly sharper terms for deals for more yawn-inducing stuff (whether flicks, financial instruments, or kicks) that's destined not to matter. So here's a tiny hypothesis: maybe the real depression we've got to contend with isn't merely one of how much economic output we're generating — but what we're putting out there, and why. Call it a depression of human potential, a tale of human significance being willfully squandered (on, for example, stuff like this).

If that's the best we can do, no wonder our economy is falling short of its potential — and no wonder our lives occasionally feel empty, even meaningless. (Even star quarterbacks married to Brazilian supermodels occasionally say to themselves, there's got to be more than this.) Hence, If we want to do better, I suggest it's time to get lethally serious about doing stuff that actually matters. So here are three questions to ask about yourself about what you're spending your life doing:

Does it stand the test of time? Ponder this for a moment: the vast majority spend the vast majority of our lives sweating, suffering, and slogging mightily over stuff that's forgotten by next quarter, let alone next year or next century. Call me crazy, but I'd suggest: mattering means building stuff that's awesome enough to last. Maybe not forever, like Giza's Pyramids — but surely more than a couple of months, before it's absent-mindedly tossed into the dustbin of history along with the rest of the flotsam and jetsam of the age of disposable plastic junk. I'd give you a handful of recent real-world examples, but beyond the labors of love a new generation of artisans are working on, whether microbrews, novels, or games, here's the hard truth: when it comes to the stuff our largest institutions are invested in, I can't think of any, so poor is our cultural performance at standing the test of time. (Just ask yourself: is anybody really going to be watching Mission Impossible 4 a century from now, except a handful of irony-soaked action-movie-worshipping 22nd century hipsters?). Of course, all that really means is that since nearly everyone seems to suck at standing the test of time, you've got a tremendous opportunity not to.

Does it stand the test of excellence? In most boardrooms, the first and last question asked is: will "the markets," financial and "consumer," like your latest shiny trinket slightly better than the next guy's? Of course, that's a perfect recipe for mediocrity: to have barely satisfied weary, oppressed, jaded "consumers" already trained to demand the bare McMinimum is to have furiously smashed the glass ceiling of the lowest common mass-market denominator — and little more. Here are some higher bars: do critics, scholars, aficionados, and diehard enemies pan it, or love it? Mattering means recognizing that everyone's opinion is not created equal — some count more than others, for the simple reason that some opinions are more nuanced, educated, sophisticated, historically grounded, and self-aware than others.

Does it stand the test of you? Sure, I can understand why the dudes and gals I've been overhearing in my little Manhattan adventure are so energized by the stuff they're "working" on — it feels exciting to be part of a buzzing milieu's in-crowd. But let's face it: on our deathbeds, the accomplishments that matter most to most of us probably won't be recounted thus: "In 2012, I sold another thousand copies of someone else's middle-of-the-road blockbuster to an overweening VP with really bad hair and worse manners at a giant monopolistic corporation that was destroying my grandkids' futures. Man, I lived." So while I too sometimes feel enchanted by the seductive power of glittering fantastic excess that seems to have mesmerized my little informal sample of Manhattanites, I'd also like to challenge them — and you — to consider the questions of mattering in a slightly more sophisticated, humane, considered way. It's one thing to work on stuff that seems sexy because it's socially cool and financially rewarding. But fulfillment doesn't come much from money or cool-power — all the money in the world can't buy you a searing sense of accomplishment.

Being human is never easy. But that's the point. Perhaps as an unintended consequence of our relentless quest for more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now, we've comfortably acceded to something akin to a minor-league contempt for the richness and grandeur of life unquenchably meaningfully well lived. Hence, call this post my tiny statement of rebellion. Hex me with all the bland management jargon in the world, zap me with all the perfect theories and models you like, but I'll never, ever accept the idea that triviality, mediocrity, and futility are appropriate goals for any human being, much less our grand, splintering systems of human organization.

We're all built differently — but none of us is here to not make a difference. So what are your three questions for getting lethally serious about doing stuff that matters?

Kategorien: Umair Haque