B-Corps
Businesses do not have a responsibility to fulfill core human principles of belonging, purpose, community, and ritual. When they try to, the outcome is a simulacra of the real thing. Often cold, plastic, and disposable. Their goal is to make money, for their shareholders, and maybe after the fact look after their stakeholders. But what if their was a corporate structure that worked differently? A way of existing for or co-existing with the mission to fulfill larger human objectives, beyond what is socially of the moment.
Parental Leave
I can tell you that the three plus months were not enough. Expanding your family is hopefully an intentional event, and that change is fraught with complexities; both known and unknown. Getting an ample window of time to bond, settle, and form routines is a benefit that should be made a federal mandate and not just a luxury for tech workers.
Dinner for Eight
Near the middle of the summer of 2021 I sat down and have dinner with most of my team at work. There were exactly eight of us. The flow of the conversation and evening went perfectly. I started thinking to myself is 8 the magic number for a dinner party? Especially important as we restore a our social lives to a semblance of what was. But if we resort to the same old two step are we doing ourselves a disservice? Yes, this is an epistemological look at the structure of a dinner party. If experience is the stuff of life and dinner parties are an experience, than this is important stuff to ruminate on.
Banned Books
My parents taught us to read before we started school. Pizza Hut ran promotions that got us to read more in exchange for more slices. Reading Rainbow helped us explore new genres and and adventures at scale. Our treasured but not appreciated enough teachers guided us to find deeper meaning in every word and page. This reading journey has been one where we have peered from behind the eyes of protagonist of all shapes and colors. We have been with them as they conquered dragons, faced racism head on, rebuilt fallen societies, discovered their own self and identity, and weeped with them at every loss.
Eudaemonia Machine
I took on a long delayed challenge and wrote a novella during the quiet and solitude that the early days of the pandemic. By my estimation it’s nothing worth reading and unless I put serious effort into revisions, it won’t be shared more broadly. In the year that followed I also wrote a screen play inspired by a dream that consumed me one night. These creative outpourings were for me and me only. Long solitary swims out into a sea of imagination and wonder. The very doing was enough. I had reached a state of Eudaemonia (or Eudaimonia). The common link between these swells of productivity was space.
Technological Ghosts
I first thought about the idea of digital ghosts while listening to a podcast in which one of the guests on the show mentioned getting a voicemail from a deceased family member after that person died. The message had apparently been delayed by cellular network issues. That eery idea got me thinking about digital ghosts. The pictures, text messages, voicemails, documents, and more that could theoretically live on in perpetuity. I started to look around our house hunting down the sarcophaguses of the digital echos we have created. As I have been cultivating a minimalist practice over the years, I had already whittled down what little remained to a few devices. An external hard drive here and one or two other insignificant devices were all I could find.
The Freedom of Constraints
Some constraints are the result of our respective socio-economic situations. Others come from the compounding of unfortunate circumstances or bad decisions. And yet others come from self selection. The last is my favorite. The conscious creation of boundaries to set constraints in a given situation. I call it addition through subtraction.
A Meaningful Delta
I was once invited to attend a meeting to plan a meeting to schedule meetings. This was a real request from a Deloitte consultant to me while on a project in New York. I declined that invite and every single other meeting invite he sent. I wish I could say that was the last wasteful meeting invite I ever received but anyone who has worked in corporate America knows, meetings, whether meaningful or not, are all too common. They are death by a thousand paper cuts.
My Spirituality
To be clear, I am not religious. From the earliest age I needed too much empirical proof to make a leap of faith. I also could not accept the idea that any of my friends and family would be "excluded" in an afterlife because we did not share the same belief structure. If they are in fact good people, what God would no want them in their company? This question made me think that belief was asking me to make a choice between ideology and the people closest to me. I could not reconcile that and thus moved away from any religiosity.