Rebooting the systems | Part II
The existential crisis of work and re-defining technology | Vol. 24
Hello Familia - Welcome to Part II of Rebooting the Systems. A multi-part journey identifying our great discontent with jobs. The role tech plays in our daily lives. And how we can jumpstart to a new program on what we do tomorrow to make for better days ahead.
Fundamentally, my argument is it’s time for a cultural intervention with technology and what is good productivity. It’s time for a collective intervention in pursuit of finding better. A better in terms of how we treat technology and how we treat each other better. And what matters when it comes to doing work for your job versus work for your soul.
The controversial hero Winston Churchill had a saying about life being about change so to have lived a perfect life is to have changed often. I am unsure about the perfection part, but life is about change. If you stop to look around at the micro and macro aspects of life on our planet. Change the theme.
How we got here
I’m mostly interested in what kind of environments or ritualistic habits we need in order to thrive. In order to increase our chances of success. Success in terms of outputs but also in terms of our overall health & holistic potential. We are in a constant state of becoming. Of reaching a new potential.
Part I focused on the evidence surfacing on tech affecting culture in the form of the hybrid working/office attendance debate and the WGA writer’s strike. Both are revealing how an over-reliance on technology is causing issues with humans. Yet, from two different vantage points.
Part II looks at how people are having a hard time with work and a call to redefine “work” versus your “job.” A deep dive on brain research around screen addictions and hypothesis of such a high amount of screen addictions. And last getting wisdom on the definition of technology from Kevin Kelly, unlocking a dynamic conversation on how to see the hardware and how to see the supercomputers in our heads.
The status quo of work
Work is just work and what else is there?
If there’s been one thing that’s apparent pre and post-pandemic is that people are all up in their feelings when it comes to their jobs. This Erik Baker piece on The Age of Crisis of Work does a great job summarizing these vibes. As Kyla Scanlon summarized excellently in her newsletter dispatch What Does Gen-Z Think About Work?:
[Erik] compares work to benign tumors - something that exists, but isn’t a crisis within itself. Work has evolved around unnecessary provisions - the age of surplus created the jobs of excess. The only way to stay ahead is to produce, produce, produce, but that’s been increasingly weird. When people sat back after the 2016 election and during the pandemic, too many truths began to break the pattern of the story we had told ourselves in this age of Industrial Maturity about the work we do.
A very similar sentiment was captured right before the Pandemic hit in Derek Thompson’s Workism is Making Americans Miserable:
There is nothing wrong with work, when work must be done. And there is no question that an elite obsession with meaningful work will produce a handful of winners who hit the workist lottery: busy, rich, and deeply fulfilled. But a culture that funnels its dreams of self-actualization into salaried jobs is setting itself up for collective anxiety, mass disappointment, and inevitable burnout.
Finding flow and satisfaction in your job ought to be an ambition and is commendable. But the uncomfortable truth is even if you are doing what you love for a living, the self-actualizing aspect of life won’t likely happen within your 9-to-5. It will most likely happen by doing the work in other spaces and places of your self and life. Most often, work might have nothing to do with your job in of itself.
Realize this, no one on their deathbed says I’ll miss all the times I had at the job. Also know this. No one will ever say, man, I will miss all those times looking at my phone. I digress…but the assertion from Erik’s is insightful and speaks to the sentiment many young workers are realizing / settling for:
“A job is just a job,” argues a blog post sponsored by the workflow company Zapier. It is “an exchange of your labor for your employer’s cold, hard cash.” In the Financial Times, Lucy Kellaway argues that “the corporate obsession with happiness” is itself part of the root of worker unhappiness. If managers, influenced by the doctrines of the entrepreneurial work ethic, didn’t encourage their subordinates to seek fulfillment at work, their employees would, ironically, be less dissatisfied.
In short, you’re not going to self-actualize through your job. But also, I do think in certain regards work is a major opportunity for growth and practice. Even though you may never attain your highest sense of self through a job.
Yes, it’s just a job but within the work is opportunity
As the great Philip Seymour Hoffman put it in his response to a question on what advice he’d give to young actors, he said every audition is a chance to show up and be excellent.
“When you’re first starting out. You have to act wherever you can…even if your auditioning for something that you you’ll know you never going to get or you don’t even like it. If you get a chance to act in a room that somebody else has paid rent for then you’re given a free chance to practice your craft and in that moment you should as act as well as you can because if you leave the room or the theater and you’ve acted as well as you can there’s no way that the people who have watched will forget it.” - Philip Seymour Hoffman
What is fascinating about PSH’s quote on acting, auditioning, and “the work” is how it dovetails into many Stoics’ point of view on work which is constantly repeated by many Stoics:
There’s the work at your job and there’s the work of your life. Sometimes they get to overlap. Sometimes they are actually completely separate. The job might not get you everything you have ever wanted, nor might the work. But it’s all a matter of perspective. A matter of fighting for the most valuable elements for yourself. Truth is, if you find something you like to do and you hustle hard. Good things tend to happen in some shape or form.
Everyone is a creator. - Rick Rubin
P.S. How productive are the technology tools really?
I wonder if it’s not just our vibes around work making people feel bad about their jobs but what role does technology play? All of the tech we have to harness within and outside our jobs?
This interview with Cal Newport, a Computer-Science Professor at Georgetown is incredibly illuminating. The Digital Workplace Is Designed to Bring You Down. The long and short of it is that we’re still sorting out what optimal productivity is with new technology tools and how best to use them. Part of Cal’s argument is that we think they have made us more productive but they really haven’t.
I was pulling sources from the ’80s, when the notion of a chief information officer was being created. Back then, there was this real enthusiasm that we’re going to have this productivity explosion. But there’s a lot of evidence that didn’t happen. The main metric to look at is probably nonindustrial labor productivity. That has been largely stagnant throughout the period of these massive advances in not just network computers but in completely mobile high-speed internet. All these advances in communication, and we don’t see a big jump in nonindustrial productivity. Robert Gordon kind of gets into this. He points out that if you introduce computers to the back office, productivity as measured by this metric jumps up, because we can computerize our inventory systems. But then we put computers on the front-office worker’s desk, and we didn’t see it.
So all of this technology has in fact made us not as productive as we once were is the tl;dr there. At least per multiple deep dive studies.
So in looking at that we ought to ask: What role does communication technology play in changing our vibes in and around work? What happens when a complete focus on communications technologies in the jobs we have in turn make us screen addicts? Why are humans so prone to be screen addicts in the first place?
Neurotransmitters in our brains and screens
Before we talk about technologies propensity for addiction we first have to talk about the chemicals in our brains that drive much of everything that we do. Let’s talk Dopamine.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter. Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers in our brains.
Dopamine plays a crucial role in our brain's reward and pleasure system, involved in various functions, including motivation, reinforcement, learning, and movement.
Dopamine is released when we experience something pleasurable, such as eating delicious food, engaging in enjoyable activities, or receiving recognition for our achievements.
Neurotransmitters are important because they’re the code that drives how our brains work and function. In short, how we vibe and thrive as humans. We’ll come back to understanding neurotransmitters more in-depth later, but it’s very important to acknowledge them when we talk about our brains and technology.
Research on-screen behavior & humans says…
The research findings Mary Aiken lays out within her book Cyber Effect are quite revealing to the troublesome trends surfacing around screen usage and the implications of overuse of screens. This study of how it interacts with our brains and evolutionary biology is eye opening.
From Mary Aiken’s Cybereffect (an incredible book):
Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak Pankseep coined the term effective neuroscience, or the biology of arousing feelings or emotions. Through years of his research and work Panskeep has concluded that a number of our instincts such as seeking, play, anger, lust, panic, grief, and fear are embedded into the ancient regions of our brains. As he describes, evolutionary memories are “built into the nervous system on a fundamental level.”
This drive to seek and explore has kept the human race alive for centuries. Panskeep’s work provides us with a biochemical explanation. We are rewarded for exploring. And one can argue the very same reward systems in our brains has made human beings more adaptable to new environments people are discovering online.
Addiction is explained in Pankseep’s work as an excessive form of seeking Whether the addict is seeking a hit from cocaine, alcohol, or a Google search, “dopamine is firing, keeping the human being in a constant state of alert expectation.” With our evolutionary memory driving us toward exploring and making sense of this new environment, cyberspace are we trying to evolve at the speed of technology? And if the biochemcial rewards of seeking online are the very ones that can make losing the lottery feel like “fun” to a vast number of the population, what does this mean for individuals who struggle with compulsive gamblign or other addictions or ADHD?
Woah. What neuroscientist Pankseep is saying is that our neurotransmitters are directly tied to our evolutionary and survival tendencies in our brains. So are we triggering survival within our use of the internet or gaming?
And this point of view on dopamine & social media:
Dr. Eva Ritvo wrote in her article “Facebook and Your Brain,” social networking “stimulates the release of loads of dopamine as well as offering an effective cure to loneliness. Novelty also triggers these ‘feel good chemicals.”
With all of this research and perspective in mind: are we talking enough about the connection between our evolutionary biology and brain chemicals as it relates to the screen/technology in a way that encourages what’s best for human health?
Warning Sticker: Social media may cause harm
We are starting to acknowledge the negative ramifications on the surface level as seen by Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy warning that “social media may harm children and adolescents.”
Repeated studies are showing the negative effects, some of which are disastrous such as suicide, anxiety, and ongoing depression. Other issues arising for young people using screen/technology too much are poor academics, disorganized daily life, difficult personal relationships, and aggressive behavior.
We need to acknowledge these trending and fundamental realities, which at its essence is how communication technology manipulates our evolutionary biology to make us think “we’re connecting” and being “productive” when we’re maybe actually undercutting what makes us the most interesting and fulfilled as human beings.
Is that why young people are struggling with information overload or worse, going down negative information rabbit-holes and at times getting abused verbally by nefarious actors on social communication channels. That kind of stuff is happening more constantly than it’s being reported on.
And then there’s this: Dr. Martin Seligman, a cognitive behavioral psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania:
“The problem is that the outcomes over which they [technology] give us such exquisite control may be trivial…they promise more than they deliver. Rather than allowing us to get to the substance of life in a more efficient way, they have become the substance itself, crowding other matters-murkier and less responsive to be sure-out of the scene.”
The bottom line is this tech thing & usage can have negative effects
The information & data out there indicates use technology and screens with caution. Especially if you’re between the ages of 2 - 18. That’s why Tim Cook doesn’t let his nephew use social media and Bill Gates banned cellphone use for his kids when they were teens. The people who are in the culture of making technology for the masses don’t want young people in their family using the technology.
I’m not saying tech and screens ought to be banished. I’m not a maximalist nor am I naive. The evolution of technology is in many ways inevitable. I am asking if we ought to be encouraging a conversation on what is and isn’t safe in terms of time of use. In terms of expectations of what we get from this resource. In terms of what is really productive versus make-believe productivity. In terms of the right kind of balance that ensures healthy brains and healthy lives.
Technology is a tool just like our brains
Do we use a screwdriver and walk around with it in our hands all day? We don’t. Because it’s a tool. Tools have a use for a specific place and time. Yet, the tool of our smartphone is glued to our hands, our car dashboards, our desks, our pockets, and unfortunately on the table during meals. Yet if it’s just a tool, why is it following us everywhere we go?
I think we can reframe this thing following us everywhere (smartphone) or these things (screens) if we re-think what technology really is? The legendary Kevin Kelly on the definition of technology is profound. What happens if we acknowledge that technology is just a another tool?
My definition of technology is anything a mind produces, so I have a very broad scope of technology, and I would say that the first technologies actually came from animals. In a certain sense the collective mind of an anthill or termites can make a skyscraper. It's kind of like the external phenotype. You can have birds weave. They do weave. They weave nests. Beavers engineer dams, and that just as we had an external phenotype that we made with our own minds, we made technology and tools. It's anything that's being produced by our minds, and that would include not the individual works of art but the technologies of art, painting and symphonies. These were all, in some senses, technologies, they are products of our mind and not just a personal expression but something that's useful, and so intangibles like a calendar are a technology.
Software obviously is a technology. Infrastructures like roads and a library, these are technological inventions, and so it's a very broad definition. I would suggest that in the future when we have robots and AIs, the inventions that these minds will make will also be technologies. That's what technology is.
Tools are technologies, which can be intangibles and processes. They don't have to be hardware. It's useful stuff, and the best tools are tools that enable other tools. They're open possibilities, possibilities that unleash future possibilities, and those are the greatest tools.
Does anyone ever read or hear the words “tool” and “technology” in the same sentences ever? I never do. Perhaps we ought to use them concurrently to better position and discuss what the technology is there for.
We also have to acknowledge Kevin pin pointing our brains as a form of technology. We’re also supercomputers. The thing in our head is technology. The things we make with our hands is too, technology.
Yet, if technology and the apps and all the things we use with and in technology are just tools, then what are we doing by giving all of our time to one kind of technology with one kind of feedback loop through a screen? What happens if we become a servant to the tool versus the tool serving us?
“The Gods we worship write their names on our faces; be sure of that. And a man will worship something ... That which dominates will determine his life and character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
In summation
In that light, I ask if we acknowledge we too are technology then we acknowledge we too ought to be as valued as the technology in of itself then what conversations should we be having?
Can we get honest about negative feedback we’re hearing on 24/7 screen usage from human beings and steal time back in spirit of health & productivity?
Is something is off about “jobs” but is it that the way we orient around the work off? How much of a role does tech play in taking the peer-to-peer community sensibility out of the job?
The next dispatch will look at research that can tell us more about the possibilities of our brains. Specifically the idea of FLOW, humans, and happiness. This and other antidotal brain chemistry studies that point to the importance of community and peer-to-peer human exchanges. In finding challenges while sourcing a community, humans can find super powers that go beyond the screens.