What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one’s own self, which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed in its identity only by the trusting and trustworthy company of my equals.
| Hannah Arendt
…
One of the lasting legacies of the pandemic, at least for me, is the ongoing attenuation of conferences. In the before times, I generally attended at six or more conferences a year: some topical, like the Reboot conferences (I attended for ten years or so in Copenhagen), and many company and tech conferences (SxSW, TechCrunch, Web 2.0, and tech vendor shows, like IBM, Google, Dropbox, Microsoft, etc.), Lift, Shift, and many more. One of the abiding themes in even the most tech-oriented events was the impact of technology on both work and non-work. That was the basis of my consulting for decades, with those same tech vendors.
The allure of those events was not really tied to the talks, panels, demos, and workshops, although I enjoy gaining new insights. But mostly for me, it was the people: the schmoozing, catching up with old friends, the informal Q&A in the hallways and lobbies of innumerable hotels and conference centers. The casual frisson of hearing of new things, new doings, new directions.
In the five years since the pandemic started, Arendt’s solitude has played a growing role in my sense of ‘loss of self’. While I have charming and solicitous friends where I live, the great majority are not obsessed with my fields of inquiry. I need the company of my equals. And by equals, I mean those whose intellectual pursuits overlap with mine.
I’ve found a next-best solution in the communities of Bluesky and Substack, but I still yearn for the face-to-face (although I fear Substack might be sinking into enshittification). And thousands follow me here and there. But the interaction isn’t as deep, and doesn’t quite reach the level of ‘trusting and trustworthy company’. No offense intended.
I want to find conferences where those interactions are prevalent, and the themes integral and adjacent to work’s future trends and threads are explored. Recommendations welcomed.
I may have to invent that conference.
Weekend Harvest
Working and homeless in America.
In a sane world, based on science and humanism, the minimum wage would be pegged to the cost of living. But, no.
Today there isn’t a single state, city or county in the United States where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a median-priced two-bedroom apartment. An astounding 12.1 million low-income renter households are “severely cost burdened,” spending at least half of their earnings on rent and utilities. Since 1985, rent prices have exceeded income gains by 325 percent.
According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the average “housing wage” required to afford a modest two-bedroom rental home across the country is $32.11, while nearly 52 million American workers earn less than $15 an hour.
Brian Goldstone, America Is Pushing Its Workers Into Homelessness
And the Democrat bigwigs wonder why Mamdani is rallying the working class and young people around affordability? We might see a whole lot of Democratic Socialists moving into city halls across the country. You don’t see the heads of companies like McDonald's, Walmart, and Amazon raising salaries to match the cost of living on their own; our elected officials and unions will have to take the lead.
…
Is climate change the cause of our epistemic crisis?
The consensus among those who believe the climate is changing due to human activities is that those who oppose taking action to moderate or reverse climate change have been misled. The conflict between the two sides has led to a stalemate and inaction, the narrative goes. But Andrew Dana Hudson argues something more foundational:
I’d like to propose, however, that perhaps the reverse is actually true. That perhaps climate change is the reason reality is broken.
Climate Denial → Reality Denial
The basic argument is this:
Everyone knows that climate change is real, that it’s our fault, and that it’s a huge problem for the whole world.
Everyone also knows that not much is being done to address this problem, and that what is being done is mostly too little, too late.
And yet everyone has to get up and go about their days, carrying on despite knowing the planetary bus is headed off a cliff.
This multi-decade acquiescence to inaction in the face of a terrible reality has culturally prepared us to collectively acquiesce to, for instance,
politicians who constantly lie to our faces;
social media dynamics where lying is a source not of shame but of clout;
AI tools that generate answers which merely look correct, but aren’t actually grounded in fact.
Thus, climate change is behind our epistemic crisis, rather than the other way around.
I think Hudson is onto something. The cultural denial of climate change has warped our sense of reality: broken it.
…
…
What the swifts do, so do we.
Henry Oliver writes a beautiful essay, drawing a wonderful comparison between the emergent coordination of chimney swifts descending into a smokestack as night falls, and the many forms of cooperation that animate human society:
As they fall into the chimney, a little trickle at the bottom of the large funnel, it looks like a film being run backwards, of smoke escaping in reverse. The coordination required for a dozen birds to descend so closely to each other into the chimney without getting hurt is extraordinary. It almost feels like a visual trick.
The feat takes two or three minutes. And we are left with the remains of the evening. It was worth their prolonged efforts and communications. It can be 70° warmer inside the chimney than outside.
“I wonder if they have a leader,” said my neighbour who lamented the lack of human co-operation. Research suggests not. The birds fly by physical distance rules, maintaining a particular range from each other. These rules enable different sized groups. The higher the density, the larger the group can be.
Of course, the birds do not decide any of this. Swifts have no politics. They convene no forum, make no rules. They fly by instinct and coordinate locally. Order emerges spontaneously.
He quotes Adam Smith, who shared a similar view of human affairs:
When I go to restaurants, I think of all the human co-ordination it takes to make it possible for me to take a short bus ride and eat delicious Chinese food. I see this organic order at the library, on the metro, in the museums. Humans are indeed co-operative, often without planning it, without any leader. As Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations,
This division of labour, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, though very slow and gradual, consequence of a certain propensity in human nature, which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.
The spontaneous order of humans provides us with so much more than the swifts’ flight into the chimney. We are co-operating all day, every day, even when we are not aware of it. Even when we think the opposite is happening.
…
Welcome to collapse.
In Everyone I know is worried about work, Rosie Spinks alternates between the microeconomics of her family and the macroeconomics of the world of work, and in both spheres things are getting worse:
None of this is a sob story, of course. But it helps explain why I've been feeling a particular kind of grief for a prior version of me who still believed if I was hard-working, creative, and resourceful, I would find a way to be financially successful and “stable” in the traditional sense, doing the thing I love. I thought I could still outrun it.
But I am starting to accept that maybe I can’t, and that maybe a different source of security has to emerge in its place.
What I hear in so many people’s anguished LinkedIn posts is a disconnect between the world they thought they were in versus the one they actually are. They sound aghast that the jobs, companies, and industries that were supposed to provide both meaning and security haven’t kept up their end of the bargain.
They thought they were working in companies with values, morals, and ethics. Turns out, the logic of the market prevails every single time. And as we reach the upper limits of this system, it’s all becoming more brazen, the bottom line less obscured. Welcome to collapse.
[…]
We put all our stock in the idea that specializing in one field, industry, or competency — one that almost always occurs within the confines of a screen — in exchange for a steadily-increasing paycheck was the smart move to make. We accepted that we better get really, really good at it if we wanted to command the kinds of salaries that keep us afloat in this system, so we worked until the point of burnout to deliver to companies we thought would love us back. Or at the very least, not fire us the very moment there was a marginally cheaper way of doing things.
Her message: all bets are off. As she puts it, ‘I’ve accepted that no job is coming to save me’. We’ll have to look to community — our ‘rhizomatic network’ of collegial and local connections — because the old social compact has been put through the shredder, and what remains are the ashes of the world that was.
And she mentions no swifts spiraling to serve as a palliative.
Factoids
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to workfutures.io to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.