After a hectic (well, not really; rather relaxing, now that I think about it) Christmas holiday, the New Year is here. And with it, my new job as a Product Manager at PGP Corporation in sunny California! I’ll be starting in mid-January, which means Ashley and I are on a hectic schedule to move down to California in the next two weeks - cue the craziness. Yes, I know, how ironic that I become yet another casualty of the brain drain, neglecting to pay the toll along the way.
It’s with some sadness that we’ll say goodbye. It’s been over three years since we returned to Vancouver, glad to escape Ireland. No sooner than we returned to Vancouver than one of its native authors, returned to Vancouver, glad to escape Ireland. No sooner than we returned to Vancouver than one of its native authors, Douglas Coupland, published “City of Glass” and reminded us of all the things we love about Vancouver. With that in mind, we spent the day around Stanley Park snapping pictures of the mountains.
I knew that once I completed my MBA, it would probably be time to go walkabout again. Though we love Vancouver, the opportunities are pretty limited in the city at this time - so it only makes sense to see how things are in other parts of the world. Especially while we have the freedom afforded by no mortgage and no children. We will return, of course. The mountains surrounding Vancouver will always be waiting to welcome us home.
I re-read Cory Doctorow’s first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, recently as a nice way to ease into the lazy days of Christmas. The book is set in the not-too-distant future, where the end of scarcity and death has transformed society into an esteem-based economy. Your basics are free, but your perks require you to build credibility capital.
It’s a neat concept, especially Doctorow’s main character’s contention that it more accurately reflects the nature of money - for example, in the present, a “rich” man that people don’t respect will not be able to buy anything with his riches, while a “poor” man that has much respect in the community will be able to make out all right with the help of his friends. The whole idea dovetailed nicely with a conversation I had later with my father-in-law on a familiar topic: “meaningful” work.
My father-in-law’s opinion of the nature of “meaningful” work is pretty straightforward, and parallels my earlier thoughts on Adam Smith: if people buy it, it must be useful. He pointed out that without this principle, forty percent of the population would be unemployed - could I imagine what forty percent unemployment would look like? Certainly not. But it begged the question: have we already reached the point where not everybody needs to work?
Considering only a miniscule percentage of the workforce is responsible for agriculture, arguably the main requirement for life, what are the other ninety-seven percent of us doing with our time? Are we only engaging in busywork because we haven’t been clever enough to reform our system of economics to free people to pursue work that they really consider meaningful, rather than scraping out a living working on things other people consider meaningful?