I have some hard feelings about work.
There is a kind of person that reflects who I am and who my friends are. Some things we like are to honestly inquire into our existence, try to grow in our consciousness and complexity, make space to attend to difficult feelings that we experience as we try to be agents in the world, and engage in relational and somatic practices to be more fully human and act from that place.
People like us don't really fit with the current culture at work where there’s not much space or encouragement to speak about what we feel and where relationships are oriented around shared goals and tasks, but not around our shared humanness and authenticity.
And where we are asked to commit to bigger actions that can take years to deliver without acknowledging that, as we collaborate and work, we grow and we change and we evolve, and what is right to do in the world changes too.
We commit to them because we promised investors that we're going to deliver certain results, we promised our leaders that we are going to deliver certain results and because we become identified with being a person who delivers certain results.
These are real, hard-to-track forces that make it hard for us to pause and dynamically notice what is actually happening and what is needed.
There's something about the way we do it that makes work unsustainable right now.
And it's very subtle.
On no given day, can you really notice the magnitude of a spiral that you might be in.
Each given day is just a little drop in the bigger ocean of what we call burnout, or self-coercion, or doing something that you don't actually want to do.
But within the scope of each day, it is somehow excusable, or easy to ignore. Or perhaps it is just hard to talk about how it feels like.
So we don't and we talk about things that we know how to talk about which are things we have done or haven't done yet, or the things we want to do, or the data that we have looked at.
But something is growing in the background, there's a certain accumulation of misalignment, offness, exhaustion, and a growing gap between who we feel we are and who we seem to be from the outside.
Especially if our workplace explicitly values the way we seem to be, there's even less of an incentive to actually be who we are.
And if our livelihood depends on this company liking us and paying us, then there's even less incentive to actually be who we want to be and do what we want to do.
So we do the things that we need to do or should do.
And it continues until it can't continue anymore, and we break down, we have a panic attack. We suddenly cry a lot. We just can't focus like we used to.
I believe something better is possible.
I believe that we can create a work environment that actually makes it easier for us to be with our experience.
Because what is locked up in who-we-actually-are and what-we-actually-feel looks like creativity, intuition, life energy, motivation, kindness, leadership, and inspiration.
And so right now, it's as if we try to squeeze ourselves into a box that is acceptable by the culture that we're in and deliver results from that place.
Another approach could be to make work a container where we can explore how all the different parts of us want to contribute to a bigger goal, a vision, or a purpose that we feel resonance with.
I think it's possible to actually be nourished through work.
But the paradigm would have to change a bit.
Right now we're in a paradigm where we work first. And then we can be and exist.
And I think a new paradigm is something like: you exist and you are first. And then you choose to work when it's appropriate.
And usually the work that comes out of that is pretty good.
But we just don't know. We don't know how that would work.
We don't yet know how to build planes in this way, and whether they would get built. Maybe we know how to be a coach, tutor, a writer in this way, but we don't really know how to do big action in this way.
And there's fear. There's fear of investing a lot of resources and things going nowhere.
We don't really know what to trust in the chaos of what it means to be a full human.
It's easier to trust, a very controlled version of what it means to be a human.
I want to find out what is it that we can trust in this new system and how can we learn to trust uncertainty.
There are some unexpected gifts to be found there. There's a certain level of collaboration and creativity that we need to actually attempt to solve our big societal problems.
I just don't trust that the system based on coercion and self-denial is going to help us solve these problems because they are caused by this very system.
I think we need to learn to trust it's only our humaneness that can reverse some of these patterns that are caused by in-humaneness in-humane forces that we have set in motion.
I believe that it's the humane forces that can help us balance things out.
And I think it's possible for us to create a culture where we can strategically use our humane forces to support problem solving in collaboration.
This made me think of the pre/trans fallacy! Post- is different from pre-, even if you seem to move "back" to the pre- state. In this case, moving towards a "natural", non-coercive state after a period in a coercive/systemic state can make it seem like the coercive/systemic period was a mistake.
I've spent a lot of time disparaging my christian upbringing, focusing on the harm and issues I've needed to unlearn. I've recently started considering the good things I've picked up - inhibitory reflex to deal with internet addiction, a liking of living according to virtue, etc.
I think the same might go here! What gifts have you picked up from the time you spent in doing mode? Are there traits, skills or inclinations that can be reforged into something beautiful?
Maybe this is the path to build planes in a human way.