Reclaiming the Meaning of Money & Time

A friend and I were talking the other day about how we’re so used to thinking, as employees, of everything as net. The company takes out taxes and healthcare, and what’s left – that’s what you live on. But when you’re self-employed, you pay self-employment tax on top of your income tax, and you have to bank that out of every deal. So If you made $400, you really only made $200. And then you’ve got to buy healthcare out of that. If you made $400 only 10 times a month, and sock away half for taxes, and pay $250 for your half of the insurance (that’d be really cheap),  your $400 is now $150 “net”. $150 of employee-equivalent pay.

A lot of employed folks would look at this as a good case for not going out on their own. It’s actually the best case for why freelancers need to charge high rates. You just can’t do it for nothing. And what, freelancers aren’t supposed to have healthcare, or savings, or be able to eat? So, the goal is to figure out how to bring those fees up. Seth Godin offers a great quotation (don’t remember his source): “There are two kinds of companies: those that want to lower prices, and those that want to raise them.” Those who shoot for the bottom, price-cutting, price-selling, appealing to price shoppers, and those who look for ways to add value, be the best, and raise prices. I’m with the latter. And I encourage my family members to hold the line on that, too.

I looked in on a conversation in LinkedIn where a person offered a service for $100, no conditions, to anyone, regardless of criteria. I provide the same service, and I can tell you it’s twice that, minimum, to do it right and do it consistently. I didn’t respond – no need – the entire community of freelancers jumped on him, asking if he realized that this wasn’t sustainable, that by aiming for the bottom he’s just appealing to the guy that wants it at $95, and encouraging the person who’ll do it for that, and not have healthcare, and not eat right. They ate his lunch – I couldn’t believe the amount of traffic pounding this guy down. He didn’t get it either. Bills himself as the president of his company but made a crass, rookie mistake in public, and should have copped to it quickly but wouldn’t. Who hasn’t done that kind of thing in one form or another? So you have to feel sorry for him, but wow – he made the 2nd mistake too: he just kept holding the line. “If someone doesn’t want my services, they don’t have to buy them.” He was missing the point.

A lot of us have had a prospect walk away because the price was obviously too low. And they’re right to. You can’t sustain good, consistent work that way, and companies that are in this for real want good, consistent work. They don’t want to watch a price cutter self-destruct, which is where it leads. A family member is a hairstylist, and a friend of hers comes from the Supercuts environment. The price difference is shocking. And you can’t invest in growing your business if you’re geared for the bottom. And once you do that, it’s really hard to break out of it. You can’t win, without retooling, infusing your business with some funds and a lot of effort, and changing the way you do business, willing to lose some clients. It’s a rough road to hoe if you’re taking care of a family and depend on repeat business; I don’t envy it. But that’s what Supercuts, superstores, super-anything does to an industry – it leaves its people scraping the bottom for the cheapest prospects there are, without decent health care, with an impoverished diet that takes years off their lives, and having to explain to people that work is worth something.

There’s a related principle. Not only is the compensation model for freelancers really fundamentally different than for employees… and we all know this, but when you’re rearranging your life accordingly, it’s something to meditate on and ponder… but so is this model for time. If you spend 8hrs at the office, your ‘work’ is presumably done, because your work is defined by the man. Your work is your job. But it’s really not done. You still have to pick up the kids, wash the car, buy the groceries, go jogging, and all the other things you do. What the freelancer realizes is that these are work too.

Occasional clients think a freelancer should be waiting at his desk at all times, when they get back to their office, ready to respond in an instant. “Where were you yesterday?” You don’t take vacations, don’t take a day off, don’t go to the gym. You work when they work, and you work when they sleep, because 24-hour turnaround is in demand, too. But that’s not sustainable. What, freelancers shouldn’t get 8hrs sleep or go to the gym? You can’t hire an assistant to work out for you, or get proper rest so you stay healthy for another day. The real story is that the model of work has been distorted somewhat by separating it from the home. I’m not suggesting there’s something inherently wrong with office work, just that it doesn’t explain, describe, or account for everything. The truth is that when a freelancer cooks the meals, provides the transportation, goes to the gym to stay healthy, or just engages in personal hygiene (how long does your full regimen, day and night, take from your day?), that’s work.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Work is what you do when you wake up, and what you do before you go to sleep. Not that there’s not room to go read a book and rest, but that rest is part of the work, too. If you read, it’s fuel. If you rest, it’s preparation to work – it’s restocking the shelves. When you relax, it’s to be ready for the intensity and energy. Same thing if you blog, folks. That’s the truth. In my case, without it, I can’t think at the pace that’s necessary to do what I do for clients. We’re *whole* people, and we need a *whole* life, sustained by work, involved in work, and linked to our work. This is yet another reason work had better be a primary source of meaning your life.

Income, though, is not what’s left over after the things that sustain your life are taken out – like healthcare. Income is what you use to take care of your whole life, including your health. When you short the one, you’re shorting the other. Likewise, time for work is not the time spent on a task someone else makes you do, or a task that you have to drive to get to, or a task that directly impacts your client. Time for work is time spent on the entire person, the *whole* source of work, your whole life. It needs to be balanced, thought out, and reasonable – you can’t just sleep for two days every week and expect, in most freelance scenarios, to be successful. Even if that’s the sum of leftover time, what about riding your bike and, again, personal hygiene, etc.? Time spent on work is, appropriately, time spent on your whole life, precisely on *keeping* it in balance, keeping it functioning at optimum, and in keeping with the very things you need to get paid for. I get paid so I can buy healthcare. I spend time and the gym so I can stay healthy. You can’t throw either one over your shoulder.

Get paid a lot, work 16 hours, not 8 (or acknowledge that it’s work) and, though you’ll then realize that our taxes really are obscenely high, you’ll at least be able to explain what you do without feeling quite as harried. A little harried maybe, but not because there’s no reason for half of it. And no, you’re most likely *not* overpaid.

The Power of Negative Thinking

I tend to solve problems like Sherlock Holmes. Negatively. By removing things. By denying and rejecting things. As Sherlock said he did, I eliminate all the impossibilities and am left, for whatever it may cost, with the truth. But sometimes, when you’ve eliminated all the impossibilities, there’s nothing left. The problem is simply impossible. At that moment, you can dream the impossible dream, or you can decide it’s unsolvable. I prefer, against all advice from the Norman Vincent Peale types, to decide there’s no solution. I find, when I do that, in fact, it’s an incredibly powerful problem solving tool. Immediately, upon deciding there’s no answer, a weight is lifted. There’s no need to agonize like the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there. You’ve taken off the blindfold, light has filled your eyes, and there really isn’t a cat. Thinking negatively, accepting the negative, accepting the absence of hope is actually a key to the next thing.

Some of the best solutions to problems have come to me, because I decided they were impossible to solve. And I was right, they were. Now, now some of you sticklers will immediately try to point out that I merely *thought* it was impossible. Nope. Have you ever tried to turn a rusted bolt with nothing but a spaghetti noodle? It’s impossible. Don’t say “nothing is impossible”. Yes, it is. Don’t say that negative thinking will guarantee failure. Thinking you can turn a rusted bolt with a spaghetti noodle will not only guarantee failure, but believing with all your might that you can do it will leave you with a different kind of failure – bewildered dementia. Don’t be neurotic – don’t believe for the sake of believing – just let go. It’s impossible. “Because you’re using the wrong tools,” you might say. Well, duh. We didn’t say turning a rusted bolt is impossible. We said it’s impossible with the tools you have in hand. We didn’t say rusted bolts cannot be turned. We said that real problems, problems we really experience, as we really experience them, have certain parameters, certain essential characteristics – and they are sometimes truly unsolvable within those parameters and characteristics.

And that’s no light thing. Don’t go “aha!” and then proceed with the psychobabble, which is really the lingo of the neurotic who’s been given credibility by quoting books written by other neurotics who managed to earn PhDs. No, it’s huge. Telling a child slave in Thailand that if you just believe, you too can be free, is like a kick in the stomach. Telling the mother whose uninsured child is dying of leukemia that if you think positive thoughts, a solution will appear (and presumably, if it didn’t work, you didn’t think hard enough) – that’s just obscene. It’s no different than faith healing for petty witchdoctors who want your pocket change and any smokes you’ve got on you. No, sometimes there are no solutions. Accepting that is actually incredibly helpful, sometimes.

It’s only when you let go of the impossibilities of the unsolvable problem, acknowledge that it’s a catch-22, rock and hard place, conundrum, paradox, or what have you, that you are truly free to begin to reconfigure the problem altogether. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to sell you some Tony Robbins always-smiling pitch about how that, miraculously, will be the salve for the grieving mother. I’m not selling the schlock that if she just adopts a different mental attitude, or a new perspective, or looks at in a different light, she won’t really feel irrevocable and life-crippling grief, and that the loss of her son won’t matter. And neither should you. If you are selling that stuff, you’re a bonehead, and you need to spend a night or two sleeping under a bridge and get a clue.

What I’m saying is that sometimes some problems really are impossible, really don’t have solutions. And that accepting it sometimes, not always, but sometimes leads to a new configuration of the problem. Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to solve a pretty important problem, the results of which have really been devastating to my life. I have racked my brain. I have constantly made runs at the impossibility of it. I have attempted the impossible, knowing it was impossible, so important is this to me. None of the solutions panned out, because they never really were solutions. They were attempts to create reality, rather than accept it. Recently a pretty darned good solution came to me. I woke up one morning, the wheels of my mind having been turning all night in my sleep, as they so often do, and I knew.

It’s not the solution to the original problem. The original problem was unsolvable. It took the power of negative thinking. It took deciding there’s no answer. And in this case, as it would not with the grieving mother, the solution came as both a solution, and a reconfiguration of the problem so that it could be solved. Distinctly, though, the answer came first, the adjustment to the problem, so the answer would fit, came moments after. By rejecting positive thinking. By thinking in a decidedly negative manner – eliminating all the illusions, the faith, the wishing, the insistence that there must be a way, I paved the way for the problem to be reconfigured to meet a solution that was better.

Some would have me go back and sit in the unsolvable problem and squint, grunt, and groan until I give birth to a proof of their theory. That all things are possible, that every problem has a solution, that every question has an answer, that all things can be solved, so that all of reality fits neatly arrayed on an organized shelf, put away in time for dinner. This need to insist that the world can all be rainbows and that the fundamental human problem is not enough belief – that, to me, is a self-defeating and world-defeating argument. We have aeronautical flight precisely because it was impossible that the first aircraft could fly. We have warning labels on cigarettes, because the human body can only withstand so much abuse. Did you see Supersize Me? It’s impossible to eat at McDonalds as much as that man did without doing serious harm to your body.

The world is full of wonderful impossibilities. And it is only by accepting these that we are free to discover the fantastic potential in that which is actually supported by logic and the laws of existence. Psychologists have a word for people who see everything as possible, which is to say that anything is also plausible (it really is the same thing). Neurotic. When you believe it’s possible to jump off a roof and defy gravity, just as you believe it’s possible to make a tuna fish sandwich out of tuna and bread, you are not living in a way that’s productive, or beneficial. You’re living, if you live long at all, in a self-destructive way. The most positive thing, sometimes, is to be negative. The most productive and helpful thing is to have a healthy view of the impossible.

Once you do, you are free to find things of value in life that may be far more significant to you than either making a tuna sandwich or jumping off a building. You are free to find an incredible wealth of possible things. You are liberated from the impossible; you are liberated unto possibility. And that, my positive thinking friends, is the gift of a certain negativity. Of a certain rejection of what is not, never was, and cannot ever be. You can say I’m crushing hopes, but I say that I would prefer something more important than hope – I would prefer the thing that one would ask me to hope for. Why would I want hope, for hope’s sake? Hope, in and of itself, just for the sake of hoping, is closer to torture. The man in the room hopes to find the cat that isn’t there. The prisoner hopes for the water that is instead poured out on the floor in front of him. Hope itself, for its own sake, is no great shakes. But the finding sight instead of the cat, for the light to go on, rather than to search and hope in darkness, to be freed from the prison rather than hoping for the water, that’s real. That, in my book, is better than hope. Sometimes hope *should* be crushed. I don’t begrudge it to that mother whose son is dying, to the child being trafficked in a brutal country. But the notion that it’s somehow more important than reality, more important than the thing being hoped *for*, is an obscene thought too.

I’m not saying “it is what it is”. That’s obvious. A=A. That’s Aristotle’s Law of Identity. It means that there are a finite number of solutions to any problem, because any problem has a finite definition, a finite set of parameters which you settle on when you articulate or conceive of the problem. When you’ve exhausted them, if you haven’t solved it, it’s unsolvable. But I’m saying that, even if you missed one, even if you overlooked a possible solution, sometimes deciding that you can’t solve the problem, not within the parameters (after all, your own memory, ability, intelligence, and energy are parameters of the problem, too) – even then, it can be helpful to decide it’s impossible. Some of my best insights start with “I dunno.” Some of my best problems – the wonderfully solved kinds – come out of an unsolvable problem. And some of the answers to ones that I have solved, came from deciding they couldn’t be. All it takes is the willingness to keep one’s mind open to the impossible, while not being willing to jump. Standing on the edge of possibility, without going over into the abyss of all things being equal.

It’s easy to think an unsolvable problem is the end of the world. I prefer to be OK with it, and to deliberately keep an open mind. I might have missed something. The world and all solutions are finite, but so is my own mind – I’m fallible. Besides, I might not always need the problem solved. Another problem may come along and make it superfluous. How you’re going to afford a new orthopedic mattress with no income just doesn’t matter anymore when your house goes into foreclosure. And no, my mattress is fantastic, please do not mail me one. What I’m saying is that there’s a certain creative and intellectual freedom that comes from saying, “this can’t be done” and letting it rest at that. I find some of my most creative material comes that way. “I can’t get out of corporate life in the next 6 months. I’ve worked out all the possibilities, all the angles, and I’m stuck. It just can’t be done.” I was right about that. Absolutely right. I got out in two. Six would not have worked. But until I accepted it, and tooled up accordingly, for another year or two in the corporate sector, I didn’t come up with the path to transition almost immediately. I’m so, so very glad that I accepted the impossible. My negativity came to the rescue again.

The Tribe and the Lords of Flatbush

I’m not officialy a social entrepreneur. I aspire to be, but I’m not, yet. As a micro-entrepreneur, it’d be a stretch to suggest otherwise. I do have people that work for me all over the world. And my contribution is to treat them with justice and fairness. To be honorable. Arguably, I’m not changing the world except in a microscopic way.

Still, that microscopy has some value to me. I look at my people as my people. They’re like my family. And what does it matter if it’s a family of one, or two, or twelve? Does it have more or less value?

They’re not a family though, not really. What’s the adage? You can pick your friends, but you’re stuck with your family. Actually, they’re my tribe. People move in and out of the tribe. It’s that way in a internet-connected, globalized world of free assocation. And free association, while it may undermine traditional ties, etc., also offers more opportunity for freedom and justice. At least I think so. So I don’t mind, that people come and go. I don’t want slaves, or people bound to me by caste, and I don’t want to be bound to them, except by feelings of honor and dignity and loyalty.

I met with an old friend last night, and we talked about our old crew. A bunch of young men who could remember a lot of good times together, causing a ruckus, but who aren’t really seeing much of each other anymore. Some of us moved on and made families that took us away, some went to school or pursued careers, others dived into a world of continual amusement. We agreed that we missed it, the good times, our escapades – we were like the Lords of Flatbush – but we also don’t want to stop moving and try to manufacture something that implies we can’t grow any more. If growing means the groups falls apart, then it’s not our tribe. Not really. However sad or painful that may be.

I miss those friends, but I have a mission to carry out, and I’m willing to do it alone if need be. Thing is, I find the relationships with people I employ much more resilient, and often there’s more depth. In truth, you can’t really compare relationships, not if you’re being honest. But I suppose, taken from an aerial view, I still think that a relationship based on exchange of value for value, is the most just, equitable, rational relationship one can have.

One of the reasons I work for myself, and hire others, is that I waited indefinitely for someone like that to come along and hire me, and they never showed up. I was stood up by the culture of work, and I had to remake it, in the form of my own microcosm, so I could breathe free air, and let the emotion of love, the attitude of peace, and the conviction of honor stream forth from the place in me that longs to create and make something. A friend once said that we can either make our lives a sword to attack the evils of the world, and lose our identities in that process, or else begin with ourselves, and create the world as it ought to be, and moving outward from ourselves, include those who want to be freely involved.

I’ve practiced a little tyrrany in my life. I’m a religious person, and religious people become either tyrants, or libertines, or peacemakers. It’s hard being a peacemaker, when you are sure you’re right. It takes time to learn to move beyond tyrrany – it’s too easy for the young chiefs to cry out for sturm and drang, to go on the warpath, to straighten everyone out and keep all the “honor” for oneself. In fact, it was my business that taught me a lot about a tribe founded on justice and peace. People don’t understand – when they mourn the fact that I work on weekends – they don’t get it that I’m just being with my tribe, my people, that it’s good. It’s good work. It’s like being home.

It’s not a community, in the sense that it’s founded on proximity, culture, and so on – it’s something new – it’s something that operates on intangible principles – on virtues. It’s a community of virtue. It’s an atmosphere of taking people in and defending and protecting them, and honoring them for what they contribute to the tribe. A bit like being the silverback gorilla in the forest primeval. I don’t pretend to teach others any pristine truths. I’m just describing something – a kind of place I’ve found.

Of course I tremble at the thought of not being able to keep it together, of not being successful in business. Not mainly because I have to pay my bills. But because, I have to be the grandfather, the patriarch, whose mind generates the basis of income, so the tribe can be sustained. I have to provide the central idea, and do my work to ensure that the harvest comes in. Because I love the tribe. The tribe is one of the reasons I live and flourish emotionally. I belong to it, perhaps far more than it belongs to me. I don’t “own” the business in the traditional sense. And the people don’t just “work for” me. That’s all just paperwork. We are glued together by trading good for good, consistently. And anyone with any experience in that knows that it’s at its best when it’s a trade based on honor. Fools grasp at money without meaning. The business is one of the most meaningful bases of relationships I’ve ever had. I crave my business more than I crave rest. The pull of these relationships is even stronger than what is so often called friendship. Less than family, more than “friend”. I won’t pretend I don’t have personal goals, but I also find the business is a kind of end in itself, because it’s a nursery for meaning – the goal that all humans pursue, even if they run off of cliffs trying to deny it.

Work As Therapy, not Disease

So much of what passes for “professionalism” in a corporate environment is dysfunctional in life as a whole. In fact, when it begins to be believed, as a principle for life, it actually becomes mental illness.

Neurosis: includes the inability to separate perception from reality. “My perception is my reality.” You hear it in corporate staff meetings. The inability to distinguish subject from object – the objectifying of experience. It leads to every manner of megalomania, pride, and fundamental bewilderment, and yet it’s such a simple error. You can’t run a business that way – you can only ‘belong’ to one – you make a good cog when you can’t tell real from feel. This is treatable, but it’s going to take heavy doses of a different environment. Neurosis populates most office communications with the ever-present obsession with perception. Reality, long ago, took a back seat – which is why, in performance based cultures, you just get more done with less.

Cognitive Dissonance: knowing a thing is so, but choosing to live as though it were otherwise. The ingrained pretense at work in so many corporate environments leads us to praise mediocrity, reward mere presence, profess affection where bitterness and strife exist, feign respect where respect hasn’t been earned, pretend interest when time is being wasted for everyone, proclaim devotion to the current corporate platitude or HR dogma- even when it’s patent nonsense… The list pretty much never ends. It’s an unending exercise in unreality, and it’s a form of illness that does lasting damage to the soul. This disease not only infects organizations, it unravels individuals. One of the reasons I like Google is that, fundamentally, how they live and what they say are transparent and in agreement.

Fear: it’s the key tool in power-based relationships and top-down structures. “Cover your ass” is the catchphrase. Where rewards are based on preference rather than performance, on pleasing the priviledged rather than producing results, fear is the natural keeper of order. The contemporary cubicle city is a virtual hot zone of phobias that grip workers like grim diseases sloughed off of the virus of terror. Do x or y will happen, don’t do y or x will happen – that’s the theory of motivation that “leaders” have embraced to the point that it’s systemic – it can’t be repaired, because the promotion and reward system preserves and extends its influence. Fear makes people care less about whether a project succeeds than whether they can’t be blamed for its failure.

And to all these sicknesses, we say a resounding NO. Without needing to be shrill or pugilistic, there are a cadre of us, living within the culture, though not of it, who work in and around it, near it, but never capitulate to the infection. Our safe suits are the hard strength of our own wills to exist as whole creatures. Psychologists refer to the phenomenon as “integration” or “integrity” – by which they mean the ability of the individual person to exist whole and in himself despite overwhelming opposition, temptation, coopting, and all the other advances of the culture against the man. They refer to the opposite state as “disintegration” – the fragmentation, fracturing, and despair of the persona’s parts turned against one another by conflicting demands and competing epistemologies, by pressures to accept the unreal over the known, to exalt experience to the place of objectivity, to substitute terror and inhibition for freedom.

In fact, the sick don’t even know what freedom is anymore – the word sounds like a misty ideal. The experience of it is as alien as courage, by which likewise, we mean fearlessness, not merely momentary bravery. See how even our virtues are compromises, coopted, and redefined by corporate existence? Made fluffy and hollow and glazed over like a doughnut in the break room on Friday.

Disintegration is the result of the disease, but work is not the virus that causes it. It is rather a particular kind of work culture. In fact, work is the cure. The work of one’s life. Real work. The work that gives life not just to the body, when someone hands you a wad of cash, but the work that feeds the whole person, that defines their relationship with the world. Work should be the therapy, not the disease, the healing force in our lives, not the devastating one that leaves us frail and shaking like bed-ridden invalids.

If you haven’t experienced both kinds of work, then you are either enormously blessed or enormously tragic. Some of us have known both. There is hope, there is meaning for us. It is more often difficult to see, because of what our work has made of us, than it is impossible to obtain. The goal, in my experience, is always to see – and liberation follows. If you can articulate the problem – if you can define your enemy – you can overcome. It may be at great cost, but it will be to lasting reward, as well. In my experience, it’s so worth it. It’s not even a question.

The hardest thing is when you don’t see any other options. I could say that you have to create them, but it would just sound like a platitude, and we get enough of those on posters, don’t we? All I can tell you that may be of value, if you feel trapped, is that you can begin thinking through it. Thinking is a kind of light. I think, though I cannot promise, that if you respond to the light you are given, you will receive more light. If nothing else, light is its own reward. I contemplated the world outside the cage long before I set foot in it. It was just a dream, almost an unreality. And now, I will never be caged. But that’s me. Your situation may pose more hurdles. Still, you are a human being, worthy of liberation and dignity, if you will make yourself a person of integrity and decency. Don’t give up – not ever. Standing taller, a little at a time, within yourself, is too its own reward. All I can say is that I think it ultimately is the right road, and the way of darkness is letting others and circumstances define all that there is to you, which is really what these sicknesses are about. We all like to deny it, but we either bleed ourselves away a little every day, or we find ways to heal our wounds.

We’re going forward, you and I. I’ll see you at the end.

Unpopular Comments on Unpopular People

One of the things that a business can do is sustain the very notion of what work means. It can use its resources to uphold the meaning of work itself, and so its own meaning, and the meaning of the myriad of endeavours on which its participants spend the vital years of their lives.

Almost every culture has a large segment of people it has consigned, like the Moorlocks of HG Wells, to blind toil. Almost every society has attempted to convert a very large number of its own people or its neighbors into machines. Deep below the decks, slaving in the steam. Behind the wall in the cloth cutter’s shop, from dark to dark, in misery. Bought as children and given a tenuous thread to a painful existence in the stinking alleyways. Coopted as abandoned, widowed, or unprotected women and exploited, chained by the intentions of others to a vacant survival. Dashed hopes. Betrayed trusts. Pressed into jars like commodities. Nearly every culture still derives its prim face and proper makeup from the invisible suffering of slaves.

In my view, we owe. We owe even if we fancy ourselves ‘innocent’. We owe because the world is big, and somewhere someone is rinsing from a plate some sauce or gravy they will never afford to eat, and the act of that machine, that turning of their arms, over and over like a perpetual turbine, is holding up the system that allows me to sell anything to anyone. I owe. And so, i think, do the rest of us.

I also think we deny the meaning of what we do ourselves when we do not strive to secure meaning for the work of others. The indomitable humans in the chicken factories, isolated places of ofal and gore that we might complain to be down wind of – they are the tall people, and we become less human by the measure of our neglect, indifference, and unwillingness to discomfort ourselves to protect the meaning of work for all.

I’ve no one charity to point at; I’ve already pointed before to several – Global Giving for example. I’m willing to make unpopular statements and make them even less popular by not tying them to an easily dismissed passing of the offering plate. This is a blog about work. Not just about making a profit, tho that’s certainly a good idea. It’s a blog about work, and it is as much, for that, a blog about meaning. So I merely point out that the meaning of what we do is just theater, just a simulation, unless it compels and enables us to relieve the poor. If not for that, I have nothing else to say, and all work – yours and mine – is just arbitrary, inherently uninteresting, and frankly at best a form of narcissism. Sure, our families eat, but what does that really mean if families and their endeavours aren’t important in general?

Rule of work: Work is like fasting. It provides us something to give to the poor.