Good Work Lights Us up

This one surfaced 14 months after I captured it:

A Working Library: Mutual Aid:

One of the things that happens during moments of crisis is that people look to existing institutions—whether governments, nonprofits, churches, or the like—for guidance on what to do. Some of these institutions do good work, at least some of the time; but often the expectation that for every challenge there exists some group ready to step in and make things right only serves to disempower people from acting to make change themselves. That is, we see the work to attend to the crisis as an add-on, an extracurricular, something that doesn’t seep into the day to day but often competes with it. It is necessary to counter that narrative, to weave instead a story that shows how everything we do in every part of our lives is an act of tearing down the old world and building a new one among the ruins.

…This is among the reasons why I try to use the word “work” expansively, referring not only to waged work but also to creative work, care work, work in our homes and in our neighborhoods and in our hearts. Not because everything should be work (it should not), but because work in all its many forms is the means by which we weave and cultivate and nurture a different world. It is liberating, in that respect, even when—perhaps especially when—it’s difficult.

In Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, the leader of the anarchist movement writes:

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.

It is useless work that darkens the heart. But good work? Work that serves the living, that brings us into alignment with ourselves and with each other and with the earth? Good work lights us right up.

It pairs well with the more recent The empire always falls:

The posting classes…

That phrase was just so good I highlighted it by itself…moving on…

Companies destroy themselves and empires rot from within, and the people living inside these systems almost never see the collapse coming, because the system itself is the lens through which they view the world…

Straight-line projections are the most reliably wrong predictions in the history of forecasting, tech or otherwise…

Clayton Christensen documented the corporate version of this in The Innovator’s Dilemma…Dominant systems produce the very conditions that destroy them, because the success of the system makes it impossible for the people inside it to perceive its weaknesses…

The hubris that makes a company or an empire dominant in one era is frequently the quality that blinds it to the next one. If you could ask Lazaridis¹ in 2006, or a British colonial administrator in 1900, whether their model of the world was permanent, each would’ve given you a very convincing explanation for why it in fact was…

But roads crumble and legions go home, the epicycles collapse into a simpler truth, and something else, something nobody predicted, grows in the spaces left behind. It always has and it always will.