Been a while. It's been summer. I think I may be the least
digital I have been in decades. I think it's possible the time I
spent on the machines over the summer can be counted in hours.
Not to say that as some sort of accomplishment. It was not
premeditated. I am in a different place, that's all. The complete
disillusionement.
It was a very social summer for me. I think we had some sort of
guest almost all time. There was a weekend I had for myself and
I used it to finally get the kayak I bought many many years ago
for an overnight trip.
I thought I'd be paddling some 50 kilometers in a few days, but
it happened that I underestimated the amount of time it takes to
get through these little rapids that were on the way. This was a
route that I didn't know about and that had no information about
it online. It just seemed on the map that it should be possible
to get through.
It turned out I was carrying the boat and the gear through
unknown bushes, wading through some shallow rapids with rocks
rolling on the bottom, racing a thunderstorm to a possible
camping spot. Stuff like that. A bit out of my league.
And the weather turned as well. It had been extremely warm for
over a month, so I didn't even think about taking my serious
sleeping bag with me. On the first night I didn't sleep at all,
as I couldn't get any reasonable sleeping arrangement built.
On the second night I was doing a lot better, deciding to ditch
the hammock and use the inflatable kayak as a bed. Even so, I
woke up a few times for the cold.
In the end I decided to stop at the point when I had cleared the
river system. There was a bigger road there and a rest stop where
I could get a meal while waiting for a taxi to pick me up.
All in all I was quite happy with the trip, even though I didn't
get to where I thought I'd get to. Learned a lot, as I never
tried this before.
Now it's behind me, the boat is in need of repair, and another
season of work is ahead. There were some news that made me
question the reasonableness for this workplace to satisfy me
in some rather deep motivational way. During the summer about
half of my team quit. They all had their individual reasons, it
seems, but still, I think it is very much a feature of the
workplace.
I am not sure if I have told about the workplace that much. It
is a charity organization, so they are really not into rewarding
payment schemes. More for the good cause, right? I didn't think
of it as a deal breaker before, coming from freelancing, where
you literally don't know where your next month's rent comes from.
Compared to that it seemed like an improvement.
Now, though, I see it like this: If you are not willing to pay
for the talented people to stay in, then who are the ones that
are left? It's not necessarily that no talented person will stay,
but it is quite clear that there is a price to be paid. For
example, now that we lose these people, the collective memory of
our team drops by something like eight years, as the most senior
member is gone. This is pretty serious, I would say.
Another very real price is that this attitude with not respecting
your employees for the good work they do is pushing the workplace
culture away from "excellence", whatever we mean by that. Is it
not in line with the goals of a charity organization to have
talented and committed people working extra hard for the common
goal? The answer seems, they are expendable. There is always
another talented idealist waiting on the sidelines.
I bet this attitude isn't all that different from the profit
based corporations. It's just that the idealism adds one extra
layer to be exploited. In a regular corporation you can always
say "let's be real here, no one is going to die if we don't
produce the quota" but this is not the case when talking about
humanitarian organizations. So, it makes it seem very selfish
of me to talk about things like personal motivation and salary,
doesn't it, as people are actually dying, in some probabilistic
way, if more money is spent on a communications person instead
of the actual program that the organization is responsible for?
Well, lets say that by giving people a raise once in a while,
you make them stay one year longer in the company than they would
have otherwise. That could be 30% or 10% more out of that person,
who already knows how the stuff works. You take a new person, you
need to spend a year to get them to a level that this other person
already was. So, practically you have wasted two years of
productivity. How much is that in euros? A lot more than it would
have been to give that raise.
And what about that poison seeping into the workplace culture?
If the workplace starts to look like a stepping stone rather than
a career, what then? Only beginners and the nearly retired will
stay. It's a downward spiral, even if the beginners were very
talented. There are things you can't learn in school.
It is a strange challenge for me. I don't really see a clear way
forward. Are there workplaces where a worker is valued? Isn't the
mission, whether it's making money or saving the world, always
going to be more important than making sure you keep the best
people in? I've been thinking about this some days now, and the
most realistic option for me might be to just start looking for
side gigs in worthwhile enterprices. Not even as a full time
employment, but as the sort of work where I could do something
to the limit of my capabilities. That in itself is rewarding,
but this has also been taken from me with the full employment.
You see, it is never reasonable to take any project to it's
artistic limits or even to some technical limit. If you make
it 10% less "perfect" you will save 30% of resources or something
to that effect.
So I am thinking if it was possible to offer my services in an
extremely niche way. In that way I could bootstrap myself out of
this situation, possibly. There are ways in which I could be
extremely useful that are not in fact marketable at all, in this
day and age. There is always this gravity pulling all the
individual expression into these easily marketable slots, but
the stuff that is left out of the slot is the most profitable.
Well maybe that's enought of work for now. The last point
relates to some of my more philosophical thoughts of late.
The one-size-fits-all world. It's this tension between how
business as usual is still working towards this world of
replaceable units, while the ego trip of social media is pushing
towards ever more defined personal identity, with all the
associated group identities tagging along. It will just clash
more. I would guess that these two are fundamentally not
reconciable. I suppose the best possible scenario is that some
of the most evil companies will have to change or go under.
I doubt that. It's more likely that people will keep working
under conditions that they would not otherwise tolerate, telling
themselves a story of themselves as moral beings, while silently
going along with the company goals. This will be paid in mental
illnesses, which will be suffered by the individual, not the
company, of course.
Another little droplet of wisdom: You know when they say that
the pendulum has to swing the other way? It sets this image of
the two things being 180 degrees apart. Well, it seems to me that
whenever the pendulum swings, there is some secret force that
makes it skew off it's mark and hit someplace else that happens
to profit someone who might have had enought power to make that
skew happen. This is another way of saying, I am really tired of
any structured information, since it gives the presenter of the
information with this power of the fake pendulum. Like, a debate
as a structured information presentation, for example. What
went into selecting who is on the other side of the issue? And
what is "the other side"? There could be 360 different
perspectives of disagreeing with the argument. Why is that way
the way?
After detoxing your information intake of the structured media,
stay on guard, as you still have the problem of echo chambers.
It's hardest to avoid the truly well meaning people from pulling
you into their chamber.
