One of the hardest things in life is not reducing people to numbers and tasks. We all practice this reductionism, and we all are subject to this reductionism. How does this manifest, and how can we make it stop?
At work, I am a unit of labor. I am paid to dedicate time to creating intellectual output. The value of what I deliver is translated into a salary. If the value goes down, my pay goes down. If it goes down far enough, my employer moves on, and I am redundant (definition: “no longer useful or needed” - ouch). By this chain of logic, I am reduced to my output, and my paycheck. As a manager, I hate delivering bad bonus news - not because it is unpleasant, which it is - but because of the disconnect between valuing a person’s work and valuing their worth. Recently, I have gotten better at disassociating my sense of worth from the value of my production - and it has made taking bad bonus news much easier.
At home, I take the paycheck and use it to pay for things such as food, shelter, and college tuition. I perform tasks such as driving, washing dishes and fixing the WiFi. We all love our families, but we all know the feeling - the “exhausted at the end of the day and then one more thing had to happen” feeling - that reduces us to providers of material comfort and performers of tasks.
In my community, I sometimes feel I am just am one more tax to collect, one more vote in an election, one more donor to a cause, or one more pair of customer eyeballs on a website. Perhaps here more than anywhere, I am reduced to a number - do I really matter other than in the most transactional sense of what I can give to the taxman, political candidate, charity, or business?
Friends, I am not channeling my inner Kafka! I am simply pointing out that human beings like to organize complexity. And this is not a bad thing: we would not have things like elections, universities, healthcare, highways, mail, supermarkets, and countless other useful things if people did not have the ability to conceive of and design systems. But systems and process necessarily convert individuals into cohorts of attributes. Well-paid consultants call this achieving scale, though more well-grounded people recognize it as anonymization. In systems, individuals remain faceless, and nameless, as we assess, monitor and improve these systems over time.
Are persons without personhood still persons?
With the advent of more process and more systems - and we are about to experience a tidal wave of this in the coming years thanks to the AI revolution - the question I am increasingly asking myself is “what is the vanguard against reductionism”? The curious thing is, the government can’t solve this problem, and corporations can’t solve this problem - because relying on them to do so only involves more systems. Only **we** can solve this problem.
Am I thinking about this the right way?
And if so, how should this impact how I show up in the world?
- j
Favor
I have a favor to ask: if you enjoy my writing, please do consider subscribing to Deeply Boring, as well as following me on LinkedIn. I periodically post exclusive content here, and have organized my writing thematically to make it easier for you to search and find relevant content.