Ill-Begotten-Booty

Dignity and meaning through work

Rest in Peace Freddy. A dignified and happy life, full of meaning.

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“Common sense is genius in it’s working clothes.” - Emerson

I’ve found this to be entirely true of people who work on fundamental, solid enterprises. I call them The Remembers and they wield a curiously uncommon-common-sense. They help us see reality as it actually is, not how we wish it was.

Their arch-rivals, we’ll call them The Tellers have glamor and flash -but among their ranks are the charlatans. The Twitter thread-bois and the 10-step morning routine zealots. All bang, no impact. All fluff, no pillow. At this point, the beta is unbearable.

Exhibit A: One of the most productive Americans likes to…putter in the morning.

Another American mensch is a big fan of…slack.

The Rememberers remind us that what we’re really searching for is first principles, starting with the laws of physics and working backwards to the present. The world hasn’t changed all that much. We haven’t changed all that much. The social and economic context has but we are still at the mercy of 200,000 years of evolution in our current form, and many millions more when we were something else. Meet the highest profile CEO in the most powerful nation on earth, and all he really wants is to be loved by his mother, to have a sense of purpose in the morning, and 3 close friends who he can share a hot cup of coffee with on the weekend. For all of our striving, trying, and stressing it’s turtles all the way down.

I think about first principles often and I try to live my life by them as best I can. I’m a human on planet earth so I often fail, and I’m a learner and so the more I learn the more I realize how little I actually know about anything at all. The more I peel onions, the more I cry - so to speak. But as I sit writing this essay, bathed in the warm glow of this Costa Rican espresso, the point is this - those who claim to be able to tell you how things are going to go at any meaningful scale are either lying or delightfully delusional. I almost admire them. Macro-economics is voodoo.

But how things work in the real world - micro-economics, let’s say - is not only visible, but we can see it, touch it, and taste it. Micro-economics is simply an exercise in working on the world and in the world. If you want to know if there’s inflation, ask a farmer. If you want to understand unit economics and sales, ask a hustler. If you want to learn true Life Math, talk to a young person who has had a refugee experience, or an old man who has tended a garden for 80 years.

The constant calculus of life itself - making decisions, accepting the consequences, and adjusting accordingly. The Humble Stumble.

We’re naturally tempted by the natural world and the free exchange of goods with one another, across space and time. Collaboration! Making things, trading things, buying things, and selling things.

Micro-economics is simply life in a day on earth.

And so it is with this cup of espresso.

Let’s get to work. 🤝

“A good question is not concerned with a correct answer. A good question cannot be answered immediately. A good question challenges existing answers. A good question is one you badly want answered once you hear it, but had no inkling you cared before it was asked.” - Kevin Kelly

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Mocha-Java

When we left off last week, at the time and place we were in, Arab coffee traders… “had an absolute monopoly on coffee beans…” (our Arab brothers and sisters seem to be rather good at selling black liquid) and they wisely protected that monopoly. They would roast the coffee beans before they were exported so that the importee couldn’t germinate the plant in home soil. There is a modern analogy to China here that blew my hair back on a recent pod-walk.

That monopoly broke in the early 1600s when an enterprising Dutchman (great farmers the Dutch!) smuggled a live plant out of the Yemeni port of Mocha. The ill-begotten-booty was planted and propagated in the botanical gardens of Amsterdam and clones were transported to the island of Java - then under Dutch control. The Dutch East India company used the clones… “to establish a plantation there.” And so goes the story of the coffee known as ‘Mocha Java’.

More than 7,000km as the crow flies.

By the early 1700s there were coffee colonies in places like French-Martinique. The European colonists went to extreme lengths to ensure the coffee plants survived.

“By 1730, France’s Caribbean colonies were shipping coffee back to what by then was a Europe hopelessly addicted to caffeine…Now the West had taken control of coffee - and coffee took control of the West.” - Pollan

This epiphany-laden story - and those like them - is and are the stories of human history. Working on the world simply meant the economy itself. Almost all of the mechanics of daily life were analog. That was all that was on offer so there was a base level reality that we simply don’t experience in our daily lives today.

The economy may still be dependent on foundational things like sustainable energy, capable means of transportation, and communication channels that work, but the culture has changed to such a degree that those that physically work on the world get far less attention than they are due.

We gravitate towards content creators, talkers, conveners, and thinkers, and so often forget about the makers. There’s an indispensability mismatch here - Instagram and TikTok could go down tomorrow and the world wouldn’t change one bit. Hell, it might change for the better. And all the while planes would still fly, the mail would still be delivered, the food would still be grown, the things that need shipping would get shipped and the things that need maintaining would be maintained.

I know what you’re thinking - a rather ironic sermon coming from you, no? Indeed! But - as my grandfather and namesake once said - we need to be in the business of using our gifts. This is mine. And so I use it everyday, in hopes of doing something useful and shining a light on people and places that I find remarkable. I didn’t choose it, it chose me. I’m simply paying attention.

However I can hardly imagine (for the time being) doing this without also putting in a hard day’s work in the field. Yes, I write in the morning with my hot espresso (Ethiopian preferably) but then I trot off to work like everybody else, and I work a good hard day in my chosen discipline. If I simply talked or typed full-time I may have a crisis of personality that would render me useless.

And then there’s the other observation to be made about working on the world - how so few of us actually do it. We like to complain about the gaggle of municipal employees standing around observing one of their comrades digging some kind of hole or laying some kind of pipe, but then ourselves go off to go bee-boo-bee-boop on an excel spreadsheet or to check our LinkedIn feed yet again. I would argue the latter does just as much sitting around as the former.

The reality is, in our times, both sides are missing something - dignity through work and the meaning that is still to be found there.

When I think about dignity through work I think of my father-in-law. He’s the kind of guy whose skin is perpetually sun tanned, whose forearms make an audible thunk when placed on the dinner table and who once told his working-man friend when he thought I was out of ear-shot that his son-in-law’s profession is “…doing stuff on the internet.” Fair play Jim. Fair play.

It’s hard to fault him for it. He comes from a time and place where value creation means making something with your hands. He was until recently, a linemen for the local power company. More than thirty years of service - rarely a day missed for any reason whatsoever. You might think this is an exaggerated commitment to work and that there are other things in life that matter more (work is rather out of favour at the minute) but what it really is is an ethic. It’s dignified, in a not-easily-explainable way, and it’s work as a vehicle for meaning.

Before you get too bristly - work now comes in many forms, and I’m not suggesting it has to look any one way. For example, there was once a mainstream movement to make care work salaried - including for stay at home parents. I’m not sure that has the physics to fly, but it’s an interesting concept to be sure.

Jim and his guys keep the power on. That’s what they do. Essential energy - powering every single thing you and I do in modern life. When the snow storm comes and we have visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads, they go out. When a once-in-a-generation storm rolls through North Carolina, the first and second in are Search & Rescue, and the power company. It’s that important.

Ironically, the local power companies can’t get young people to come do the job. You’d be shocked how few are charged with keeping the power on for a municipality. Those coming out of high-school would seemingly rather go $50,000 dollars into debt for a 4 year degree, only to secure a junior IT role for $45,000 a year, instead of a paid course that finds you starting at $90,000 with as much overtime as your brittle bones can handle, or to do jobs on the waterfront that will net you even more. Perhaps this is because of a culture that made young folks believe the path laid out was the only path. It is undoubtedly one component (perhaps a rather important component) in our modern crisis of meaning.

The former may have been laid out as the only viable path, but the latter is still on offer. It’s available. It’s available right now. The problem is, one side can’t seem to find the other.

The Blue Forge Alliance & Jobs on the Waterfront

Mike Rowe is trying to solve this problem with his media work and foundation - in an attempt to bridge the disconnection to meaningful work that he sees in the young people of modern America.

The essence of the question seems to be - how do we help young people find meaningful work - to build a dignified and happy life through taking their natural abilities and turning them into value for the community at large. To maximize our lot in life by using our gifts. To discover the contentedness of a good days work and community. The peace of mind that comes from doing something so natural, and the distress that comes from not doing it.

On a recent podcast with Theo Von, Mike talks about how we can bring back meaning and dignity to the work we go out and do in the world.

One practical place to start is addressing the misalignment between what we tell our kids to go out and do, and what’s actually on offer in the world.

“We told a whole generation of kids they were…screwed if they didn’t get a four-year degree…we free up endless money to loan them. So now you got $1.7 trillion in student debt on the books. You’ve got 7.6 million open jobs right now, most of which don’t require a four-year degree.” - Rowe

At the very same time that America tries to fill 7.6 million open jobs, there is an almost equally large cohort of men that are out of the workforce, and not looking - something that has never happened outside of a World War. Whatever way you spin it, that’s a crisis - of meaning, of dignity, of the human spirit, of society itself.

Crossing the chasm and solving this crisis will take a herculean collective effort, but it’s possible and doing the hard work to solve it is good work. That work could include the creation of a campaign that helps people understand that working with your physical body does not have to mean working for a pittance in a soulless factory - far from it.

One example that really blew my hair back was the example Mike gave about Blue Forge Alliance - the organization of 15,000 companies responsible for the delivery of 3 nuclear powered submarines each year, for the next 10 years, to the American Navy.

“These things are longer than the Washington Monument is tall.”

Blue Forge called Mike (naturally) to try and wrap their heads around where they’re going to find the skilled tradespeople needed to make good on their manufacturing commitment.

“I said…how many do you need? The guy says… ‘140,000’…They are hiring over the next 9 years 140,000 welders, steam fitters, pipe fitters, electricians, all of the construction trades…very few of those positions require a four-year degree.” - Rowe

The punchline is that economic development of the kind that Blue Forge is attempting, is simply not possible without the population necessary to do the work. Fellow Substacker, and friend, David Campbell made this clear when I interviewed him recently for the podcast.

I was arguing that without reliable access to energy, economic development of any kind isn’t possible - and he countered with sure, but even then you need people doing the work that needs doing! We’re back to our podcast about China and Apple - about how making iPhones in the United States simply isn’t possible because the workforce is too small to service a company that has essentially become a nation-state.

Simultaneously, we dramatically exaggerated how quickly automation would come for physical labour, and dramatically underrated the impact on ‘white collar’ professions like junior software developers or legal assistants. In fact, I will hazard a guess that most of us have never once seen a machine making anything, of any kind. Advanced manufacturing is real and robots are helping to build Tesla’s, but that’s largely out of sight and out of mind for most people. That new multi-unit apartment complex to meet the housing crisis? Humans. Repairing the roads and basic infrastructure? Humans. Railroad maintenance, tug boats, cranes, power work, building maintenance - all people.

An example I’ve come to love is jobs on the waterfront - like in my hometown of Saint John, New Brunswick.

If you come from a Port City, there are certain things that you become accustomed to, and slowly grow to love. The sound of seagulls in the morning, a fog-horn, the local church bells on the hour, and the site of tugboats and harbour captains, ensuring that ships come in with their freight, offload safely, and leave with more freight. Stuff bound for the four corners, like the almost impossible amount of stuff on the Maderia, in the video above, flying the flag of Portugal, and bound for who knows where.

We teamed up with our local Port to communicate about jobs on the waterfront. How there is work to be done, how we need good people to do it, and how you can build a wonderfully productive life right here at home - in our Port city. Please do check it out, and thank you for reading.

All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.

See you on the road.

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“…energy is the only truly universal currency, and nothing (from galactic rotations to ephemeral insect lives) can take place without its transformations..” - Vaclav Smil

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