Por Amor Al Arte #

The work we have to do is plenty. The day never seems to be long enough, the week goes by too fast, the quarter's end is always looming and by the time you realize it's the end of the year.

Adding more systems to organize the work seems to have the effect of more work being added rather than completed. Increasing the work capacity through people not machines always results in more work to be done because guess what, people have ideas and give you feedback which is amazing but it also translates into more opportunities which result into more things to do. Prioritizing has also fallen short of its original purpose to determine the one single thing that needs to be completed next and morphed into an unmanageable pile of tasks that get re-sorted every so often.

Some of this work gets done because tokens are needed for everyday life, some because it gives status points within the social hierarchy is important, some because of virtue signalling, some because the result messes with a competitor. Most of the work is done because it feeds into the illusion that once you reach a certain point you will have the time and resources to actually do what you would rather be doing now. From such ignorance suffers the one who thinks only their current job has an ever growing pile of work to be done forgetting that even in their previous role the pile only kept growing.

All the types of work we do are ultimately done to increase our survivability rate. When time is treated as a finite resource between what we get in exchange for what we give, of course our instinct is to have a myopic focus on these activities that gets us the most rewards for the least amount of effort. Unfortunately for us, we don't know when to stop, when enough is enough and so we keep accumulating, we keep optimizing the exchange until we squeeze the last drop out of the exchange. In our quest to maximize our survivability we forget the things that will survive us, outlive us.

The constant exposure to the highlights of other's best moments of life on social media has hijacked our reference points for what enough looks like. It's the same for all the breaking news in the world; wars, famine, catastrophes, political unrest has always happened but now we are constantly bombarded by it. Keeping up with all the innovation in the world is no easy task either. Everyday we have new things claiming to replace the old even if the old just happened yesterday.

All these messages translate into the question: "Are you prepared for tomorrow?"; a question everybody has asked themselves since we became conscious but nobody before us had so many data points to ponder about. Feeling safe means, for the most part, that everything stays more or less the same within your information reach. Now that all the information in the world is withing reach, our safety is under constant stress from maybe not having enough tokens for life, or maybe we are un danger physically, or maybe we don't know enough to make sense out of the world tomorrow. Not having a moment to tune out and get a break from this incessant stream of information has widened the Maslow's hierarchy of needs base so much that it might have invalidated it altogether. None of the steps in the hierarchy were defined with an absolute point to reach but a relative one to our close environment. The digital world has made the whole world our close environment thus putting us in charge of defining what our reference point is because without a reference point anything and everything goes.

How do you define good reference points if everyone is supposed to define their own? Everyone's needs are at least slightly different. Everyone's information reach is different. Everyone's motivations are different. You can't copy somebody else in order to hit the ground running. You can't even try to walk somebody's else path to orient yourself. Not even asking for advice seems like a good idea as for the premise is different. Everything meets the "It depends" instant reaction. Everyone speaks at different levels so no one can understand each other anymore.

When you have no heroes to copy nor people to collaborate with, the only option left is to bypass the rules of the system. Knowing there is no way to put bounds in place to determine what enough looks likes in order to know when is time to move higher up in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we ought to start at the top and work downwards. How much self-esteem do you need?, how much love do you need?, how much safety do you need?; in order to do the thing, or things, that you truly want to do?

The only way forward is doing things for the love of doing these things and figuring out the rest.

Por amor al arte.