A New American Dream

December 23, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I took this photo on the Fourth of July in Glenside, a town just outside of Philadelphia. Its citizens had set out chairs, waiting for a parade to honor a struggle that began in revolution but seems to have lost its momentum today.

Looking back at past newsletters and from them, even farther back in my life and my parents’ lives, I was surprised by how much I’ve been thinking about the future this year. It wasn’t my original intention.

I guess I’ve become convinced that the deep-down quality of the present isn’t the same as it seems on the surface—that the core I remember has been hollowed out—and that what’s coming next may shatter the illusion that the party we’ve been enjoying in spite of it will go on forever. Still, there is no denying that the party has been pretty grand while it’s lasted, a place to enjoy ourselves amidst all the comforts of home.

In our lifetimes and our parents’ lifetimes, America sold the Dream of sunny, middle-class home ownership, consumerism, material comfort, and upward social mobility that it thought it needed to reward its WWII veterans and win the ideological battles of the Cold War. (Our kitchens are nicer here than they are in Moscow.) Madison Avenue’s advertising machine helped with the sales pitch, and today we’ve not only won these wars but continue to live the Dream we were supposedly fighting for. And let’s face it, that American Dream has been delivered to many, if not most of us despite our rising income inequality, our concern that our kids may end up with “less” than we have today, and our shabby public infrastructure.

Of course, Edmund Phelps’ “mass flourishing” has been tapering off since the 1970’s (my 11-25-18 post) and our safety nets are fraying, but even the poorest neighborhoods have wide-screen TVs, smart phones, and more than their pets could ever want or need. So why, amidst all of this plenty, are we wondering: “Is that all there is?” Is that comfortable surface all that we’re working for? Living for?

Maybe some of the uneasiness is recalling—on some level—that we once had more ambitious dreams than getting the latest gadget from Amazon delivered in an hour, binge-watching another series on Netflix, or pleasuring ourselves with the latest meme on Facebook. We’ve either heard about or actually remember a time when the American Dream was much bolder than the warm bath we’re sitting in today—and that those more vital days weren’t so long ago.

In his 1999 book For Common Things, Jed Purdy recalls the transformative political climate of The Great Society of the 1960s where America debated ways “to eliminate” inequalities based on race and “to wage a war” on poverty. A half-century later, that debate has been reduced to “managing” the poor with welfare programs and racial inequality with good intentions. Looking at the diminishment of our public aspirations, Purdy argues that:

Americans who came of age after 1974 have never seen the government undertake a large-scale project other than highway maintenance and small wars, and relatively few are inspired by the idea that it should.

Of course, state-engineered income and racial equality would likely interfere with the mass flourishing of Phelps’ more individualistic and entrepreneurial economy. But what may be most noteworthy about where we find ourselves is the absence of any serious debate—really any tension at all—between the basic problems we face and the different ways we could solve them. This acceptance of “the way things are,” along with our sedating comfort, are the principal reasons that the American Dream has become “fossilized” and needs to be reimagined. Very little of it still resonates with any of us at its core.

Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream by Sarah Churchwell ends with that argument. But before getting to its conclusion, most of her new book is about returning to the newspapers, speeches and other original sources over the past 150 years to identify “the gaps” between “what we tell each other that history shows and what it actually says” about the quality of the American Dream.

While Churchwell finds plenty of evidence of darkness in our nativism, racism, and materialism, the forces of light have nearly always shined brightly in our history as well. In the five years between 1915 and the end of the Great War, America rocked between an isolationist, America-First agenda to making the world safe for democracy on the battlefields of Europe and trying to create a new League of Nations. Before and after the Civil War, during the Gilded Age of business monopolies and mass immigration, and during the Great Depression some of our most selfish tendencies as a nation were in pitched battles with champions of social justice and “principled appeals for a more generous way of life.”

Through much of our history, there has always been a push and pull that defined the American Dream for the generations that were trying “to make it” here—at least until fairly recently. It’s the long stretch since the Great Society of the 1960s to the present that Churchwell is most worried about.

According to the historical record she has unearthed, the America that is reflected in its Dream has “diminished,” and the fact that we once “dreamed more expansively” has been “obscured.” As she eloquently argues, “if even your dreams are ungenerous, then surely you have lost your way.” In its 300+ pages, Behold America demonstrates how a “rich, complex, difficult dream” has been forgotten in a race that focuses on wealth, material comfort and disengagement from a broader struggle for America’s soul. For Churchwell, the time to re-energize a Promise that once motivated us as workers, as citizens and as a nation is now.

So why aren’t we doing so? Churchwell doesn’t say, but I’ve tried to offer some explanations here over the past several months—at least for our personal reluctance. Beyond disengaging from any notion that sounds like rally-around-the-flag or that asks us “to believe in something” instead of remaining at a cynical distance, preoccupation with our comforts and “the rush of the future” leave little space for the kinds of activism that challenged America’s worst tendencies in the past.

Almost a year ago (in my 1-7-18 newsletter), I quoted from a Roxane Gay essay about “the tiny house movement” that quickly turned from playful to serious regarding the promises that we make to one another.

When we talk about the American dream, we never talk about what that dream costs. We never talk about how so many Americans are one financial crisis away from losing their savings or their homes. And we don’t talk about how the American dream should not be grounded in material things like large homes or fancy cars rather than, say, single-payer health care, subsidized childcare, or a robust Social Security system.

We don’t talk enough about what should and shouldn’t be included in the American Dream and spend even less time acting on our convictions. Perhaps there’s not enough hope that anything we do will matter. But believing in our priorities enough to act on them always matters. As John Berger says in my post last month about the rescuers after the Paradise California fire, hope is the fuel, the “detonator of energy,” that drives us to act on our convictions. A dream, the American Dream, is just a good story that embodies those hopes.

I mentioned several reasons why the fuel line between hope and action gets clogged in another post last August.

The Future Is Coming At Me Too Fast to Do Anything Other Than Meet It

Whole industries can change in a heartbeat. Think local travel (Uber, Lyft). Remote travel (Airbnb). Outside shopping (Amazon). Personal transport (self-driving cars). Our phones change, the apps on them change, how we use them and protect them changes. We’re so busy keeping up with the furious pace of change, we can’t think about any future other than the leading edge of it that we’re experiencing right now.”

I’m Too Absorbed By My Immediate Gratifications To Think Long-Term

The addictiveness of social media. The proliferation of entertainment to listen to, watch, and get lost in. The online availability of every kind of diverting information. A consumer economy that meets every real and imagined need for those who can afford it. We move between jobs that fail to engage us to leisure time that gratifies us into a kind of torpor. We’re too sedated by the warm bath we’re in now to worry about a future that hasn’t arrived yet.

My General Laziness and Inertia

And not just during the dog days of August….

The only way to overcome these obstacles is by finding enough hope to want to demonstrate our capabilities and act on our generosity once again.

In the Shadow of the Washington Monument

In his poem the Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot described the moral emptiness that seemed to him to envelope everything in the wake of World War I. What he wrote then is not so different from where we find ourselves today.

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

The July 4th parade in Glenside aimed to celebrate what we’ve “created” and how we’ve “responded” to our challenges as a nation but it has fallen into Shadow. In our jobs, as members of a community and as citizens, the only way out of the Shadow is to “respond” once again to priorities that are bigger than our comfort or cynicism and to “create” an American Dream that is worth living in again: one capable and generous step at a time.

This post is adapted from my December 23, 2018 newsletter.

Men At Work

December 2, 2018 By David Griesing 1 Comment

What makes your work worthwhile?

Last week economist Edmund Phelps got me thinking about some of the possibilities. Is you mindset at work to expand your capabilities, to become your “better” self by confronting risks on the job for the possibility of even greater rewards—the fuel of entrepreneurs and everyone else who works to advance their own accounts—OR is it to pursue greater security in your life, accumulate more savings, and earn more time away from work? OR maybe instead of working for yourself, you are striving to build solidarity with others through the services you provide: to strengthen the social fabric instead of just your strand of it.

Phelps also argued that competitive, entrepreneurial work produced tremendous success in the economy overall, while efforts to divert that energy into engineering a more secure, equal and just society has not only caused people to derive less satisfaction from their work over the past 50 years but also for the economy in general to stall. Phelps chose the values of rugged individualism over more collective social values when making his argument about pursing a good life through work.

Over the past week while I was mulling over some of your reactions to Phelps’ thesis, I discovered Harry’s Masculinity Report for 2018 on Twitter. In an era where gender roles in the American workplace are clearly in flux, what could “a masculinity report” possibly contribute? Was it a company’s marketing ploy or something more than that? Would it champion the rugged individual at work or somebody else entirely?

Harry’s is an on-line company that has carved out a highly successful niche for itself by selling men high quality razor blades and other shaving products more cheaply than market leaders Schick and Gillette. The write-up I caught said that its Report had:

surveyed 5,000 men ages 18-95 across the US, weighted for race, income, education, sexual orientation, military service, and more. The respondents were asked about their happiness, confidence, emotional stability, motivation, optimism, and sense of being in control. They were then asked how satisfied they are with their careers, relationships, money, work-life balance, physicality, and mental health, and also about the values that matter most to them.

The results showed a clear trend: The strongest predictor of men’s happiness and well-being is their job satisfaction, by a large margin—and the strongest predictor of job satisfaction is whether men feel they are making an impact on their companies’ success.

This measure, the study finds, is influenced by whether men feel they are using their own unique talents at work, whether they are surrounded by a diverse set of perspectives, how easily and often they can chat with co-workers, whether they feel their opinions are valued, and whether they’re inspired by the people they work with.

The Report itself seemed a bit thin after all that build up, but there were still some nuggets in it. The first was their data-supported effort to re-brand their customer base at a time when “how men act” and “what men want” has been broadly criticized. Another take-away came from seeing how Harry’s portrayed “the American man” it discovered in an ad campaign the company launched around the same time that the Report came out. And finally, the Report used some interesting words and phrases to describe the most significant component of male satisfaction.

According to Harry’s polling, American men are happiest when they are working.

Men at work are men at peace: everything else flows down from satisfying employment. Men who have high job satisfaction are more likely to feel optimistic, happy, motivated, emotionally stable, in control and confident. Job Satisfaction is by far the strongest predictor of positivity, being around three times higher than the next strongest predictor in every region and across the US overall…This is not primarily about wealth, but a sense of making a difference, being part of something bigger and more meaningful… Job satisfaction and the dignity of labor fulfills men’s desire to provide and protect.

Polling found that “Health” was the second driver of male positivity, while “Income” was the third.

I was initially dubious when the Report said Income was only important because of men’s desire “to provide [for] and protect” their loved ones. In my experience, many men (as well as women) want to make as much as possible so that they can consume as much as possible–or at least more than their neighbors. But the observation gained some legitimacy from how men described the central role that work plays in their lives. Martin Daubney, one of the Report’s authors, found that self-determination was far more important than making money for the majority of men who identified work as their primary source of self-esteem. He noted how frequently “autonomy – such as being a consultant or self-employed – was associated with increased job satisfaction.” On this point, Harry’s Report is both consistent with and different from Edmund Phelps’ assessment. It acknowledges the self-defining satisfaction of entrepreneurial labor but seems to reject the lure of financial reward beyond its ability “to provide and protect.”

In addition to re-branding its customers with this Report, Harry’s also wants to influence American policy makers. After all, this is an era when automation is eliminating many middle class jobs, robotics and artificial intelligence will replace even more of them, and post-industrial parts of America (like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and West Virginia) are struggling with high unemployment rates among mid-career men as well as the epidemics of addiction that seem to be associated with feelings of uselessness. In this regard, Harry’s Report wants to change the policy-making focus from a negative to a positive one.

When service providers seek to engage men, whether in health, education, community, voluntary activities or any other front of social policy, there is often a temptation to address either the problems men have, at best, or the problems men cause, at worst. Our findings strongly suggest that the values which men aspire to most are traditional, moral frameworks. Men want to think of themselves as honest, reliable, dependable and fair-minded and it is perhaps those traits which agencies should emphasize when they wish to earn the trust and co-operation of male service users. Much previous research into masculinity has negatively focused on the problems men cause, often through the nefarious concept of “toxic masculinity”. This has never been more so than in this post-#MeToo landscape and after every mass shooting or domestic terrorist incident.

Lately, the dialogue has expanded to include the problems men have: such as the male suicide epidemic, depression, anxiety and addiction, while offering scant few solutions.

But Harry’s wanted to progress this dialogue forward, by flipping the telescope and focusing on what gives men a positive outlook. We wanted to find out which American men were the most positive and content, then look at the core values and behavioral attributes that nurture these men’s mental wellbeing. (the emphasis above is mine)

Consistent with Phelps’ predilections in Mass Flourishing, Harry’s Report seems to dictate a jobs-focused approach to addressing our economic problems. Creating new jobs and re-investing in old ones can often tap into a man’s natural motivations to make a positive contribution for himself and for those who are depending on him. This Report makes a powerful argument that every man in America who wants a job should have a job–because a man is a terrible thing to waste.

Consistent with its “accentuate the positive” view of masculinity, Harry’s launched a provocative new advertising campaign earlier this year. A female reviewer writing in GQ had this to say about it:

Selling men razors and shaving accessories often relies on the fact that it’s a rite of passage for men and a symbol of masculinity. That usually means beautiful women, severe cheekbones, and model-grade abdominal muscles [Schick and Gillette again]. Harry’s newly released “A Man Like You” ad doesn’t entirely stray from that tradition, but its statement about manhood feels refreshingly modern. The video follows a boy as he teaches a space alien what it means to be a man: how to walk, dress, and of course, shave. In the process, the kid—who’s got a mysteriously absent maybe-astronaut father—comes to the realization that, actually, “there’s no one way to be a man.” The fact that—spoiler alert for a commercial here—the boy appears to be imagining the alien out of grief or longing for dad adds up to a serious tear-jerker of an ending. Razor advertising has maybe never been softer or sweeter than this.

Harry’s ad is well worth a look because it presents an earnest if unexpected view of what men are growing up to be today.

Philosophers and social scientists talk about human nature, but easily as influential (and maybe even more so) are advertisers, playing with our emotions to make their points about who we are and what we’re like.

We already know about the dangerous side of marketers who are using the data collected from our social media exchanges (Facebook), shopping sprees (Amazon), and information searches (Google) to target us in increasingly precise ways. Harry’s ad is an instance where influencers are using our data to show us our best, or at least our better selves in the course of selling us their products.

Portraying a positive masculinity, their ad feels timely as well as necessary. It simply says: this story about men is real too and overdue for some attention.

This post is adapted from my December 2, 2018 newsletter.

Flourishing in Every Job

November 25, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Taking greater satisfaction from your work may be your goal, but it seems that it’s hardly the government’s or the economy’s goal. Not so long ago it felt differently, that those goals were all more aligned—and maybe they could be again–but only if we gain a better understanding of how that alignment came about in the first place and the choices we can make in the workplace and at the ballot box to support it again.

Economist Edmund Phelps provides a powerful argument for how the American worker’s wellbeing and capitalism’s productivity became intertwined in his 2013 book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change. His aim in writing it (I think) was to remind us that there used to be more of an alliance between how good we felt about ourselves when we were working and the benefits that our good work produced in the economy at large.

Phelps makes several proposals to restore that sense of equilibrium. But in a wide-ranging argument that relies on history, philosophy and quantitative analysis, his primary objective seems to be an ethical one: to get us thinking about what is important about our work and how to advance those priorities in the choices we make about the quality of life we want to be working for.

When his book came out, Phelps (who teaches economics at Columbia) gave a lecture with the related title: “Mass Flourishing: How It Was Won, Then Largely Lost.” It summarized several of his book’s arguments in a highly accessible format. Most of the quotations below come from that lecture. It is only a few pages long and well worth your time to read it in full.

Phelps’ thesis is that modern American capitalism created a culture of innovation, which refers to each worker’s entrepreneurial mindset as well as to the broader economic and social benefits that mindset produced. For the individual worker, this culture fostered:

a spirit that views the prospect of unanticipated consequences that may come with voyaging into the unknown as a valued part of experience and not a drawback.

In other words, at the same time that an innovation culture produces economic growth, it also gives rise to the experience of human flourishing as workers become more powerful and capable both as explorers and creators of the new world where they’ll be living.

According to Phelps, it was the Industrial Revolution (around 1800) that ushered in a period of individual and countrywide thriving that continued in America through at least the 1960’s. It was an explosion of individual and economic energy that would not have been possible without the Enlightenment values that took root, particularly in America, during an overlapping historical period.

The impetus for high dynamism, my book argues, was the modern values arising in Jacques Barzun’s Modern Era – roughly from 1490 to 1940 – particularly the values we associate with individualism and vitalism. They include thinking for oneself, working for oneself, competing with others, overcoming obstacles, experimenting and making a mark. The courage to express one’s self by creating or exploring the unknown and the gumption to stand apart from community, family and friends are also modern values. The thesis is that these values stirred a desire to flourish; they shaped a modern conception of the life to aim for – the good life. A prevalence of these values in a nation tends to generate an economy that offers work gratifying those desires – an economy that delivers flourishing.

How these values changed individual workers and the economy around them may be Phelps’ central insight. The standard argument has been that capitalism or “free enterprise” merely took advantage of discoveries and innovations that had been produced by science. Phelps argues that competition between workers in order to prosper contributed at least as much to individual and economic advancement—that capitalism creates innovation instead of merely feeding upon it. For him, it is the Enlightenment values that we brought to work for more than a century and a half that made “the good life” possible.

As quoted in a Thanksgiving article from a few days ago, this is the vitality and ambition that Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed when he traveled across America in the 1830’s, with its grassroots “religious, moral, commercial and industrial associations” standing in for the nobility and bureaucracy that limited European progress. It is what Lincoln was talking about when he observed that in America, “every man can make himself,” as illustrated in a speech he gave in 1859:

The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This… is free labor — the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.

But then says Phelps, starting around 1970 and extending into the present day, the values of “free labor” have been constrained or overtaken by other values. In the wake of the New Deal of the 1930’s and even more so of the Great Society of the 1960’s, “traditional” social values have increasingly challenged what used to be our “vigorously individualistic” ones, including the current preference for “solidarity, social protection and security.” Among other things, these society changing priorities gave rise to “a vast canvas of entitlements… [and] to thickets of regulation” that impeded and sometimes overwhelmed the culture of innovation.

Instead of driving an economy that championed a good life from the ground up for individual workers, American policymakers began to manage the economy from the top down so that it would be what they conceived of as good for everyone. For Phelps, the satisfaction that came from realizing yourself through your talents at work along with the explosion of productivity that accompanied it in the economy—a century and a half of “mass flourishing”—was increasingly constrained by the parallel pursuit of other, well-meaning priorities. We tried to do two things at once, with a number of unintended consequences.

For one thing, the personal pride and psychic reward that were yours when you seized the opportunity “to make yourself” through your work were replaced by the promise of material wellbeing. Realizing your potential and learning new things about yourself while you overcame challenges in the rough and tumble working world were increasingly exchanged for the security of income and savings and for your leisure time away from work. According to Phelps, this trade-off no longer serves the individual worker’s “non-material experience” at all, draining work of everything that had once made it so satisfying.

These [recent] formulations overlook the world of creation, exploration and personal growth. Gone is the conception of the good life as a wild ride through an economy with an open future, an economy offering challenges with unimagined rewards. In this climate, young people are not likely to grow up conceiving the good life as a life of Kierkegaardian mystery, Nietzschean challenge and Bergsonian becoming.

(I know, pretty philosophical for an economist.)

Unfortunately as a result, work today has not only become the 8 hours you have to “get through” on your way to a paycheck and a week of vacation, but it also accounts for the startling pull-back of national productivity over the past 50 years. If we accept his thesis, “mass flourishing” has been replaced by widespread worker dissatisfaction, a decline in economic opportunity with few “haves” and many “have nots,” and an overall economy that seems to have run out of gas.

According to Phelps, the creative competition inherent in grassroots capitalism and the Enlightenment values that allowed it to thrive are essential to an innovation culture that brings prosperity at the same time that it makes work engaging. For him, Washington and the decision makers in other Western governments may believe that they can create more orderly and just societies by regulating, taxing and reducing economic growth, but by doing so they have nearly killed the golden goose.

When the values of the corporate state overtake the values of an innovation culture, the result is slower wage growth, reduced productivity in the economy, greater inequality among the nation’s stakeholders, less inclusiveness in promises like “the American Dream,” a sharp reduction in individual job satisfaction, and workers who have lots of stuff at the end of the day but little sense of personal meaning in their lives. One of the great virtues of Mass Flourishing is that it backs its arguments with the kinds of statistics that you’d expect from a Nobel Prize-winning economist like Phelps.

Artist Saul Steinberg imagines today’s workers, out to recover what they’ve lost

What Phelps does not provide are any statistics that quantify the loss of individual, work-related “meaning” over the past 50 years. But to me at least, his conclusion seems bolstered by the findings of a Gallop Poll that was taken around the same time that Phelps’ book came out. Its data proved the sorry state of worker engagement both here and elsewhere, as measured by an employee’s “psychological commitment” to his or her job as well as worker disengagement due to a “lack of motivation” and the disinclination “to invest discretionary effort in organizational goals or outcomes.”

Among North American workers, the Poll determined that 71% of the workforce was disengaged, while globally the level was an even more alarming 87%. Moreover, a substantial subset of checked-out workers was found to be “actively” disengaged. These individuals were not only “unhappy and unproductive,” but also “liable to spread [their] negativity to coworkers.” That all four corners of Phelps’ argument are evidence-based makes it particularly compelling food for thought.

As a result, his thesis challenges my sometimes belief (or is it arrogance?) that greater justice, equality, etc. can be achieved by enlightened government policies, even though experience tells me that there never seems to be a large or robust enough majority to produce real change. Does a tried-and-true system like Phelps “grassroots innovation,” with its mix of individual and system-wide incentives, have a better chance than well-meaning political agendas of producing “a good outcome” for both workers and the country’s economy?

Unfortunately, many of Phelps’ proposals for recovering what’s been lost seem impossible in today’s America. One of them still appeals to me however. It would mandate that members of Congress be people who have done more with their lives than practice law or connive in politics. Phelps’ proposes that all of our legislators be workers who have experienced competition first hand and, therefore, have been forced to innovate on the job. They would bring what they know about flourishing at work to Washington before returning, after term limits, to their highly productive lives.

Today, at the end of 2018, there is still grassroots innovation in America, and not just in the garages of Silicon Valley. When your work goals are in line with Enlightenment values like thinking for yourself, enjoying competition and overcoming obstacles, while experimenting, creating and exploring the unknown, you’ll find the opportunities for innovation at work. But these days, you may need to make a more deliberate effort to find them.

This post is adapted from my November 25, 2018 newsletter. Subscribe today.

Facing Risks, Finding Control

November 12, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Introducing some risk into your life and work can remind you what it’s like to feel alive. Not that we’re sleepwalking exactly, but if “personal comfort” trumps most other considerations, you have probably insulated yourself from anything more serious than inconvenience—and there’s a price for that.

What we do everyday can easily fall into grooves of predictability where there are few occasions to be confronted with anything surprising, let alone alarming. But if we deprive ourselves of occasions where we need to find some courage and “fall back on” ourselves to overcome our fears, what used to be called “one’s constitution” begins to slip away.

Ask yourself: “What would I do if all I had to rely upon were my wits, if I suddenly had to decide between two uncertain outcomes, if none of my insulations were there to protect me—and my only choices were either to crumble or persevere?” I’d argue that it’s good to put ourselves “on the line” from time to time and find out. It gives us a chance to get in touch with “our elemental selves,” to store up some fortitude for the next time, and to recall our bravery and resourcefulness when we could use some inspiration.

Taking some risks, facing your fears and learning something new about yourself and others have been newsletter themes before. As you know, I’m an off-the-beaten track traveler who encountered some sketchy characters in Rome (“What’s Best Is Never Free”) and a genuinely menacing one in New Orleans (“Risk Taking, Opportunity Seeking”). The reward each time was to discover something about these cities and their people that I could not have found out any other way. On the spot, I felt more alive. And where I could have responded better, I thought about how I‘d do things differently the next time I leave my comfort zone.

The upside of taking risks also drove the migration from Asia that settled the Western Hemisphere 15,000 years ago. These new Americans didn’t stop in the first fertile valley they discovered. Instead, they pushed to the edges of nearly every corner of North, Latin and South America with astonishing speed. It was insatiable curiosity and the thrill of conquest that drove them on, despite their having to confront megafauna (really big animals with razor-sharp claws and teeth), the challenges of wilderness travel with children and elders, and a total absence of convenience stores. In his book about it, Craig Childs cited the research for the proposition that an appetite for risk is hardwired into our DNA, giving rise to human progress and the rush of adventure that quickly follow.

Two new stories this week provide additional food-for-thought about our psychological risk profiles and a literally “ground-breaking” documentary delves into the motivations behind Alex Honnold’s “ free solo” climb up the rock face of El Capitan. I hope they’ll contribute to your thinking about staying confident, willful and alive.

Two recent pieces in the Wall Street Journal consider fear-inducing situations from opposite directions. One, called “Using Fear to Break Out of a Funk” argues that you can raise your spirits by confronting something that scares you and building a record for bravery. The other, “Travel Mistakes That Hurt,” is about foolishly throwing caution to the wind when you’re in a vacation state of mind. Taken together, they provide something of a template for healthy risk taking.

It’s amazing what fools we can sometimes be when we’re traveling. Incapacity from drinking too much alcohol or not enough water, injuries from mopeds and other unfamiliar vehicles, assuming wild animals are “cute,” hiking or climbing beyond your physical limits, and falling off cliffs or into traffic while taking pictures of yourself. The “Travel Mistakes” article features an interview with Tim Daniel with International SOS, an organization whose travel coverage includes rescuing people from every kind of harm. Daniel says travel is disorienting for almost everyone and that when we’re inundated with all that new information we can end up focusing on the wrong things and making poor choices.

Some of us go with the first thing we’re told instead of testing its reliability. Other times we’re susceptible to “the bandwagon effect”: if others are jumping off a cliff and into the water then it must be safe for us to jump in too. We may cling to our preconceptions (this neighborhood was safe 20 years ago) whatever evidence there is to the contrary today. Daniel argues that our blind spots always become more pronounced when we travel.

They are one reason it’s helpful to travel with companions who know you well enough to warn you about yours before it’s too late. Or if you’re traveling alone, it helps to think about your worst inclinations in advance and to keep them in mind before they get you in trouble. Navigating the unfamiliar (including its risks) makes travel exhilarating, but to maximize the potential gains and minimize the possible losses, it helps to know the baggage that you’ve brought along with you.

On a more positive note, it turns out that “amping up the adrenaline to get out of an emotional rut” is also a prescription with some science behind it. This is the kind of “funk” we’re often trying to leave behind when we seek a break from our daily routines. Sociologist Margee Kerr has written about what happens when we face our fears about loss of control in challenging situations.

When we’re terrified, our sympathetic nervous system, which is in charge of that flight or flight response, floods the body with adrenaline and the brain with neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine. Our blood vessels constrict, to preserve blood for muscles and organs that might need it if we decide to run. And our mind focuses on the present. The physical response lasts a few hours, but the memory is what we draw strength from.

The woman who wrote “Using Fear to Break Out of a Funk” is also a scuba diver. She explored the theory’s immediate and long-term benefits by choosing a particularly demanding dive in Iceland, between the continental plates that separate North America from Eurasia. During the dive, she confronted her fears multiple times “but pushed through by refusing to acknowledge that quitting was an option.” As soon as she did so, she felt “strong, brave and happy.” Moreover, the memory of that experience was even stronger. Whenever she’s struggling to get through a bad day she says: “I go back to that place where I can do anything.”

Finding your control when risks give rise to fear is exhilarating at the time and empowering for as long as you can relive your resourcefulness.

This photo, along with the shot that tops this post, are of Alex Honnold climbing the sheer, rock face of El Capitain in Yosemite National Park without ropes or safety gear. 3000 feet of sheer granite, thousands of hand and foot holds, it took him 3 hours and 56 minutes. What’s known as “Free Solo,” his climb was a first in the annals of rock climbing, and is the subject of a documentary that’s in theaters today.

I’m not good with heights and so far have been afraid to see it. But somebody named John Baylies was brave enough, and he described his experience this way in an on-line forum:

I judge this the scariest movie I’ve ever seen. Impossible not to get personally involved. Two big questions loom. What disease does this man suffer, that he has no fear and what the hell were the guys in animal costumes doing 1000 feet into the climb? If this were fiction it was a perfect comic relief for was the tensest 20 minutes on film.

However curious I am about the animal costumes I may just have to read about it, but the buzz around his climb got me interested in Honnold so I tracked down a TED talk he gave along with an extended interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast since the documentary came out. I think you’ll enjoy them too.

The highly informal Honnold-Rogan exchange provides several glimpses into the type of person who would train for 20 years with the goal of finding control while facing a succession of nearly overwhelming risks to his personal safety. Watching and listening to Honnold talk was fascinating. Humble. Direct. Thoughtful. Articulate. The farthest thing from a daredevil, much of what drives him was revealed by Rogan’s question about all those people he must have inspired to follow in his footsteps. Honnold says simply that he guesses he would be pleased to inspire people if it were “to live an intentional life” like he has: knowing what he wants and working to achieve it.

Honnold’s TED talk elaborates on what living that way means for him. In it, he contrasts a free solo climb he completed at Half Dome (also in Yosemite) which proved unsatisfying with his encore at El Capitan, which he describes as “quite simply the best day of my life.”

At Half Dome in 2012, he never practiced beforehand and had the cocky over-confidence that he would somehow “rise to the occasion” and make it to the summit. Then he reached a point in his climb, almost 2000 feet up, where he could not find his next hand or toe-hold. Honnold knew what he had to do (a tricky maneuver) but was overcome with fear that he’d execute the move incorrectly and would likely die. After much deliberation, he did manage the move successfully and reached the top safely—but vowed that he’d never be that reckless again.

Five years later at El Capitan, Honnold worked for months on its rock face finding and memorizing every hand and foothold so there would be no surprises on the day of his climb. He removed loose rocks along his path, carrying them down in a backpack. He anticipated everything that was likely to happen and how he would respond to it in what became a highly choreographed dance.

The way that Honnold managed his fear was to leave “no room for doubt to creep in.” Always knowing his next move, his mental and physical preparation made the actual climb feel “as comfortable and natural as taking a walk in the park.” Why did he succeed at El Capitan when he felt so much less successful at Half Dome? “I didn’t want to be a lucky climber, I wanted to be a great climber,” he said.

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Finding the calm and mastery of control in the face of risks—as big as Honnold’s or as small as any of ours might be—is always a function of preparation. To extend yourself and overcome a new challenge takes planning and visualizing what you’re likely to encounter along with understanding yourself, the mistakes you are prone to make, and the strategies you’ll employ to avoid them. In Honnold’s words, “it takes intentionality” beforehand. You have to want to do it in the right way.

The upside in taking risks and pushing your envelope isn’t found in the speculation that you’ll be able to handle whatever comes your way. You may end up being lucky, but just as likely, a group like International SOS may be coming to your rescue. On the other hand, when you’re ready to assume the risks, the rewards are becoming fully and completely alive in the moment that you face them and the recollection of your bravery and resourcefulness whenever your confidence flags.

This post is adapted from my November 11, 2018 newsletter.

Why Craft Masters Love Their Jobs

August 13, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Every job is about two things: what it brings to you and what it brings to others.

Today, new iterations of old-time, blue-collar jobs are providing a new breed of craft masters with the personal validation that comes from using their specialized knowledge to serve grateful customers. These butchers, haircutters, distillers, bartenders and a host of others celebrate proud skills / that enable them to produce something tangible / for people they know.

Each part of their work definition speaks to the quality (or lack of quality) in our work too.

For example, many of our jobs seem inconclusive. I spent all these hours, was aggravated along the way, tried to stay motivated, but at the end of the day, week, month or year, what have I accomplished?

Having something (anything) beyond a paycheck to show for your effort is what’s missing in many, if not most, service economy jobs today. As those in manufacturing, farming and fishing—big jobs a century ago—have left to take on “office work,” what the modern workforce actually produces has gotten harder to either describe or personalize.

Customer satisfaction – Quality control – Teamwork – Greater efficiencies – More sales.

What is your contribution to any of them? Whatever you’re adding may earn you a raise, but probably does little to improve your work engagement because there was almost nothing tangible that you either produced or could “own.” When the fruits of your labor feel this remote from your effort, the level of job satisfaction always tends to be low.

On the other hand, think of the difference if you were giving someone a great haircut, mixing an unforgettable cocktail, or aging a steak to perfection. There is nothing remote about these benefits because someone “thanks you” for your expertise right away. You can take their gratitude home with you that night and recall, with pride, your accomplishments before returning to work tomorrow. It’s sustaining, makes you feel that you’re doing something worthwhile, even when the financial rewards are less than an office job might bring.

What is the calculus that motivates today’s craft masters, and how could their trade-offs change your thinking about the jobs you have or the jobs you want?

Among many other things, Instagram is a forum for craft masters, and I’m following several, including haircutter @crimsonjenny, woodworker @gingerwoodturner, and meat maestro @butcherfarrell. Everyday they show me their work, celebrate their tools, and introduce me to their clients. Talk about job satisfaction—it doesn’t get any more tangible than it seems to be for them:

What exactly do jobs like these bring to the person doing them? For one thing, they provide something that is clear and measureable to them.

In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton describes the experience like this:

“How different everything is for the craftsman who transforms a part of the world with his own hands, who can see his work as emanating from his being and can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object—whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug—and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see.”

Concreteness can also come from “living the experience.” It’s akin to what many professionals are looking for when they pursue endurance sports, effectively making their exploits in extreme situations into second jobs. As noted last week in Outside magazine, what these men and women may want the most is to be able to explain to themselves and to others at least one thing that they’re accomplishing with their skills:

“Ask a white-collar professional what it means to do a good job at the office, and odds are they’ll need at least a few minutes to explain their answer, accounting for [office] politics, the opinion of their boss, the mood of their client, the role of their team, and a variety of other external factors. Ask someone what it means to do a good job at their next race, however, and the answer becomes much simpler [for the one who’s giving the answer as well as for the one who’s hearing it].”

In the same article, Michael Crawford says that using your skills this way relieves you of the need to offer “chattering interpretations” to explain your worth. You can simply point to the race you ran, the mountain that you climbed, or the house that you built. Results like these provide demonstrations of your value that are readily apparent to everyone.

By contrast, how much “knowing appreciation” did you receive for your work last week? How proud are you of your output, how convinced of your worth given what you accomplished with your skills and experience?

Craft masters know about the pride and sense of empowerment that come from demonstrating their skills. But they also know something about work that no commitment to endurance sports can provide: the gratitude of serving someone beside yourself.

Craft masters are connected to their customers in at least 3 ways. For one thing, those receiving their services are often their peers. As such, their work is a way for both servers and served to recover some of the place-based kinship that was disrupted when national manufacturers, big box stores, on-line merchants and assembly-line service providers drove their predecessors out of business.

Both craft master and customer also respect the specialized knowledge and skill that is being demonstrated. Both may even see themselves as connoisseurs. Customers like to have their steaks, cocktails or haircuts lavished with attention, and the masters revel in their customers’ knowing appreciation of what they do.

Finally, there is transparency about what craft masters add and deliver. Customers generally know where their raw materials come from and how they transform them. It’s the opposite of products appearing on most store shelves whose point of origin, manufacture and supply chain are cloaked in mystery. Transparency establishes loyalty to the work itself and tends to deepen the bonds of trust between master and customer.

Pride and confidence in your skill and experience.

Mutual bonds of gratitude with the beneficiaries of your work.

These rewards don’t belong to craft masters alone. Instead they represent choices (and sometimes trade-offs) at the heart of every job. When these rewards are important enough, you either find them in your current jobs or demand them in future ones. They are essential benefits in every work bargain, and far too often, we’ve forgotten to expect them.

(If you are interested in reading more, a sociologist’s take on jobs in the new urban economy is provided in Richard Ocejo’s recent book and Michael Crawford’s classic essay, “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” can be found here.)