The journey to confront the truth about our work
The following story describes me over many years.
I was captivated by an idea for solving a significant problem, applying myself wholeheartedly and unreservedly to this idea, and giving my all. Being squeezed out emotionally, spiritually and physically in the process.
Awakening, after a while, to the shocking realisation that I had been dedicating my life force energy to re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic after it had hit the iceberg, hoping my work would keep the boat afloat.
I wanted to feel like I was doing something good. I wanted to be a social entrepreneur. I wanted to change the world. I wanted these things with every fibre of my being.
I also wanted the accolades of being seen doing good. The good girl, alive and well. The heroine. Risking everything for the world.
My identity was invested in this story. My friendship groups. My reading material.
Yet, scratch not so far below the surface, and I did not want to rock this boat too much.
Rocking the boat looked like being too edgy. Too far out on the fringe to be part of the ‘acceptable group.’
The fear of being an outcast rattled my interior to the degree that the change I was creating was just enough to appear BIG but insufficient to make a backlash from the incumbent system. Who wants that? To be targeted. Hated. Ridiculed. Trolled. Threatened. Not liked.
I wanted to be seen doing a good thing, a right thing.
So I played at re-arranging deck chairs and polishing guard rails.
It sucked, and I was miserable living a nice safe half-life, deceiving myself that I was content. But, some part of me knew what I was doing.
Yet, along the way, I learned so many things.
This was not the wrong path for me. It was a training-for-the real-change path. Battle-scarred. Through the eye of the needle. Broken down into an ‘ideas compost.’ All the necessary preparation for real transformative change to emerge. One where my fear of being liked, accepted and seen as the good girl doing the right thing became a relic fear.
Eventually, the call to do something for real transformative change became far more significant than my small egoic self — out beyond me, you, or today.
If we take a beautiful idea about the transformative change of anything and then reach into the business-as-usual tool kit for the same systems, structures and tools used daily by businesses, how can we expect transformation?
This would be like changing the costume of a predator and expecting the costume to change the predator into a kitten.
Here are a few items that live in the business-as-usual toolkit.
Limited Liability. Traditional Accounting. GDP as a measuring tool for economic success. Economics detached from a bounded home planet. Monetary finance that is predatory and cares less about anything but the ROI in dollars. Leadership that dominates and diminishes. Technology that has exploitation woven in, often so subtly that we do not notice. Technology as the wunderkind, the great solution, ignoring the complexity of beautiful humanity in the process. The precessional effects. The consequences. The externalities are forgotten as we rush to disrupt for the sake of disruption.
Yet this is what we do every day. Never question the substrate of the tools we use. Like the fish that doesn’t examine the water.
https://syntropic.world/deconstructing-illusions/
I did this for years.
The intrinsic driver was longing to be seen as smart, cool, and brilliant.
During this time, I spent hours coaching executives in major financial institutions who admitted, in the very private moments of our conversation, that they knew they were perpetuating the very system that was breaking Earth and her creatures down. Yet, they also knew they would not stop participating even though they knew.
Children to educate. Mortgage to pay. Status to maintain. Investment portfolio to increase. Power to accumulate. All valid reasons. Until they are not.
As Anand Giridharadas has written — Winner Takes All -the elite charade of changing the world — many of our current billionaires attempt to make themselves feel better for creating the very companies that have cost the Earth by now becoming philanthropists. We might honour them for finally doing good. Or we might wonder if this is a guilt tax. As he writes, I agree that the world does not need a single billionaire. How about we not screw the Earth and her creatures in the first place.
The journey to confront the truth about our work is an inner excavation. Yet, at the same time, we apply ourselves to learn what our operating system ‘water’ looks like.
This journey commonly begins with denial. No! This is not possible. (When I first read Buckminster Fuller’s GRUNCH of Giants, I thought he was a conspiracy theorist regarding global finance. Yet Bucky never wrote about a cabal of men, the 12 or the Illuminati, so common in the whispered voices of ardent conspiracy theorists. Still, he did write about the design of human systems creating the ecology for the outcome our Earth and her creatures now face. )
When we awaken to the harsh truth that only transformative change will work, we might go into a funk of helplessness. What can we do? Is it too big? Too hard? Too painful? I could never make a difference. I am too old to start. It will not happen in my lifetime.
In an interview with Krista Tippet in 2015, Grace Lee Boggs, aged 100 years, said this, demonstrating that all of our excuses are simply another clutch at staying safe.
The opportunity that we now have to reimagine everything, to reimagine work, to think of it as productive not only of things, but of well-being, to think of governance in a different way, to think of education in a different way. What an opportunity, what a time to be alive.
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There are so many creative energies that are part of human history that have been lost because we’ve been pursuing the almighty dollar. … We no longer recognise that we have the capacity within us to create the world anew.
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There’s something about people beginning to seek solutions by doing things for themselves, by deciding they are going to create new concepts of economy, new concepts of governance, new concepts of education, and that they have the capacity within themselves to do that, that we have that capacity to create the world anew.
Grace, as an Asian American, chose a life of revolution because she was Asian American during a time when her skin colour was not acceptable. Revolution or diminishment.
Real transformative change takes time. Decades, Centuries. It is messy. Unpredictable. Chaotic.
What can we do?
After we have confronted the truth and identified the water we swim in, we might start right where we are, with what we have.
Educate ourselves. Ask the impossible questions. Seek others. Find a purpose far more significant than our desire to be liked, to be the good girl or boy, the hero or heroine.
Take the first step. Pause. Review. Consider consequences. Keep learning. Listen with exquisite attention to the multiple feedback mechanisms. Look for synchronicities and flow. Work together synergistically.
Repeat. One small step at a time.
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