Systems - 040

 

Systems Fall Apart

A few weeks ago I was catching up with a friend I hadn't talked to in almost a year. In talking about what we were looking forward to this year, she said something like "seems like you need to be a gardener for yourself."

I loved that idea. I stopped her and opened up my meeting files and created a new note. "I need to be better about creating conditions for myself to grow and not have expectations about what or where the growth will come from. I am a gardener."

I felt like I was getting so much from this conversation, going deeper. But she stopped me. She called me out for using note-taking to remove myself from the conversation.

And I do this a lot. For so long it was how I identified myself: all of these systems– note taking during meetings or book marginalia, lists, documentation. But I've used them to organize my thinking and life for years (decades!) and haven't really stopped to ask... are they actually serving me? 

Pretty much everything we care about as humans can be viewed as a system: our health, our families, our careers, our countries. We have more abstract constructs and subsystems like race, class, gender, ethnicity. Ways to organize our thinking and our lives.

The interconnected systems we have in place in our world... are they actually serving us? The larger "us"?

Recently, there is added pressure to our systems. And while some pressure in the systems can be good, too much pressure makes them explode. These last two years especially, we're seeing more than one system start to explode. The pandemic has put pressure on so much of our culture and society. And once they fully explode, then what?

Rebuild, I guess.

Let's dive in.

 
 

The War Over There

As you read this, there's an active war across the world. Rockets are targeting hospitals, schools, homes. Thousands of civilians have already died. Beyond Ukraine, Wikipedia shows that there are actually over 40 wars and armed conflicts going on at this very moment. 

And yet, here we are, checking our emails and having a weekend.

Mari Andrew writes in her book, My Inner Sky about how silly it is to wash her face when there are wildfires going on. "But it's also silly not to." This is what we do. We continue our lives. Because celebration and grief can happen, and exist, in the same day.

Paradoxes are all around.

Something like war or hate or destruction exists and is true, and its opposite exist at the same time. Often in the same place. We are seeing an increase in volunteering, more public acts of generosity for Ukrainian refugees, and messages of support.

We are all affected by this war. And in some ways, all the other wars going on right now. We are part of a complex, interconnected, global system.

And being raised here, we've been taught, for better or worse, that when action is taken to dismantle the system and create fear and violence, that we're inspired to take action and restore it.

When imperialist leader exercises his greed and power by starting a war, there is a global systemic backlash. And, when a movement tries to define and dismantle an outdated and dangerous system like patriarchy and racism, there are those that fight to keep those in place, too.

It works both ways, unfortunately.

We all want to be the keepers of the systems we believe in.

We all want to be the ones restoring hope.

 
 

Cheating the System or Making a New One?

Back in 2014, I read an article about "passive income" where you could make money in your sleep and fell down the rabbit hole.

I was joining communities like Smart Passive Income and subscribing to podcasts and newsletters. Chasing dreams I'd hit it rich if I just put up a store on my website. T-shirts! Posters! Workshops! I could cheat the capitalist system of having a 9-5 job and going to an office and "working." This seemed like magic.

After a year of having literally zero experience, zero products up on zero websites totalling exactly zero dollars in sales, the obsession faded.

The magic just felt like a scam.

So I forgot about passive income for a long time.

Then one day this week, I woke up to see that overnight, Caveday had 8 new member signups.

Woah!

Wait a second,

THAT is passive income, right?

Passive income is marketed as this secret shortcut to making lots of money and not doing any work. But the hard truth is that it’s tons of work.

Caveday has taken 5 years of full-time work. Behind the scenes, I'm working with 2 other partners, a chief of staff, and over 40 part-time staff between 10-40 hours a week. We've had hard conversations and mistakes.

We've slowly (painfully slowly at times) built a newsletter following, spent thousands of dollars on ads and sponsorships to build a community of members. We're constantly designing and paying for systems that automate payroll, build email drip sequences, and marketing funnels (oh, and spending the time to learn how to do all of those things in the first place).

Passive income is not about cheating the system so we can get rich without work. Passive income is about doing hard, often invisible boring and thankless work, to create systems that function without us. 

Passive income divorces money from time. 

It’s not necessarily for getting rich, it’s for taking control of your time and building a business that can scale on its own without taking more time.

We're not cheating the system, we're just spending our time creating our own systems. Still, a passive income business is just a business. There has to be a product that solves a problem for a group of customers willing to buy it.

So for anyone interested in building a passive income business (which I don't 100% recommend), maybe the best place to start is by choosing a problem to solve.

 
 

The Old System Is the New Problem

Ecosystems and solar systems and all the other systems of the natural world are hundreds of millions of years old.

The newer systems are all created. I mean, they're human-made. Which has one basic flaw: anyone who creates a system designs it so they can bypass it.

(Did you know the US Congress exempts itself from The Freedom of Information Act and The Civil Rights Act and about a dozen others?)

Which brings me to Stamped From The Beginning, A history book I read this month (I was serious last June when I wrote about my ongoing commitment to antiracism). I learned that systems of white supremacy have been in place not just for a couple centuries but millennia. Before Ancient Greece.

Systems of patriarchy have been in place for even longer.

They run well. Unfortunately.

They work the way they were designed to.

They keeps cis straight white men in power in a time where we generally value equality and strive for inclusion.

Even our system of capitalism is built on an ideal of a different time. It's not working. Not for everyone, anyway. Or maybe it worked too well. The rich get richer. Find loopholes, support their own run for office or line the pockets of candidates who can change the rules and add their own loopholes.

And there are hundreds more.

These systems we rely on are outdated. They're slower to update than our cultural values and priorities.

So the old system becomes the new problem.

But when we know that systems are designed to exempt or prioritize the designer, how can we rebuild and fix a system?

 
 

I Don't Have The Answers

Simple systems break down in predictable and fixable ways. A can opener, for example, has a blade that gets duller or gears that get stuck. But complex systems, like our communities and economy, break down in much more complex and unpredictable ways.

I thought I might write about how to fix our broken systems. How one person can make splashes and ripples and impact.

But I'm stuck. I don't have the answers. I don't know how to fix this.

I just know when we see that we've become a part of a system that favors one side of the equation over others it’s our job to call it out and try and correct it.

And with every Email Refrigerator, I'm trying.

Try with me.

***

I'm so thankful for you. Thank you for reading this and taking the time to think about these topics. Or even write back. I don't take that lightly, it's the reason I keep writing.

With gratitude,

Jake

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Jake Kahana