I often come across stories and comments from various people defending how influencers and content creators do a lot of work in order to be successful. And I get it, because unless already famous, yes, they have to do a lot of work, but is that work valuable? Yes, for the content creator who gets paid enough, sure. But is there actual value in the work being done?
I don't think so.
Because I think that most of the work we do as a species is busywork. It is akin to hammering a nail through thick woollen fabric until it drops, picking it up and doing it again, and again. It is work, but it is pointless. With all the resources and tools at our disposal now, we should be improving the world and our experience in leaps and bounds, yet we aren't. *If anything, average life experience is getting worse with more and more people dissatisfied with the state of the world, and their own affairs.
Perhaps this is part of the reason people accept nothing-work as something meaningful, because there is little meaning in much of what we do. Sure, we can apply it liberally to anything, but that doesn't actually make it meaningful, does it? To actually be meaningful work, it has to go beyond the individual in my opinion and have positive impact on others, whether family, friends, community or the world as a whole. "Making money" doesn't make a job meaningful.
In fact, if we are looking at positive impact, a lot of the money-making endeavours have a negative impact and probably more negative than positive overall. As most money-making activities do a lot of harm through the supply chain, or the effects on some large group of people, so that a small group can benefit. All the money in the world is meaningless if it isn't used in an economic way to improve humanity. It is not that every action will end up being positive, but that should be the intention and general direction.
In the system we have, the incentive isn't to improve, it is to control. Control resources and people. And it isn't some mythical benevolent control that has the best interest of the people at heart. The heart is only seeking for more control and more ways to consolidate and solidify power. Each individual amassing wealth to generate more wealth might not see themselves as part of the problem and will likely justify their behaviour through something like philanthropy, but philanthropy wouldn't be needed in a healthy economic system.
A healthy economic system is one that incentivises growth of resources and wellbeing across all sectors, so that people can thrive with opportunity that is available for their individual skills and traits. Where they can be their best doing what they are good at and likely enjoy, bringing real meaning into their lives in ways that will provide support to others. We shouldn't be consolidating wealth, we should be maximising positive opportunity.
Numbers are meaningless.
Life existed before number systems, and it will exist well after we have driven ourselves into an early extinction. If we could see "the numbers" on the existence of all past species before going extinct, I would predict that humans will be the shortest and probably the only one which will cause its own extinction, knowingly. But it doesn't matter what numbers we have, without behaviours to back them up and turn them into something meaningful, they are useless.
It is about 385000 kilometres to the moon.
Knowing that, doesn't get me any closer to the moon.
Money is much the same. Just meaningless numbers that we add meaning to in terms of trade. But the interesting thing is that the way to make the numbers go up, isn't actually through trade, it is through speculating on numbers. Making meaningless money by speculating on meaningless numbers.
What a sick system.
As said, if the goal is a healthy economic system, then the numbers have to be tied to healthy, real-world actions, not speculating on theoreticals and the imaginary. Wouldn't it be great to get the definitive numbers on what positive or negative impact an action has? With the technology we have today, every step of the corporate supply chain should be 100% transparent, so that the "health" can be independently evaluated. We should also have the real numbers on the positive or negative impact of the products on endusers, the effects on the environment from thought to end of life and disposal costs.
Everything. All the numbers.
And once we see them, decide if what we are spending our time on is worthwhile enough to keep spending resources upon, or should we shift the focus to something more meaningful. But we are conditioned to continue on this path, pretending that what we are doing, matters. It does matter in one sense.
It is costing us a huge amount of opportunity to do something meaningful.
If it is a job worth doing, it is a job that makes a positive difference.
Taraz
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