Our "Endless, Flat-Out Hustle" and a New Year's Resolution

Well, here we go again friends. Another trip around the sun has come back to its starting point and we refuel for the next one. I am glad to still be a passenger on this spaceship, and I am excited, and just a little terrified, to see what new adventures await us on the next go-round.

I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. We make them, we break them, and they never seem to get us to a better place. Maybe the resolutions we make are too difficult, or too abstract, or we are not really all that serious about them in the first place. Old habits die hard, and new ones are just as hard to birth. But I don’t mean to throw cold water on the aspirations of people who really are able to make and keep New Year’s resolutions, and I have one resolution I’d like to suggest for some of us as well. First, though, this background.

Bewilderment

I was determined to finish reading one more book in 2022, so yesterday I sailed my way through the final 20 pages of the beautifully rendered 2021 novel Bewilderment by Richard Powers. Powers weaves a story of an astrobiologist (Theo) and his struggle to secure federal funding for the most significant space telescope ever developed, designed to detect life on far distant planets, while he also is the sole parent raising an emotionally challenged but very sweet 9-year-old son. The son, named Robin a/k/a “Robbie,” loves to hear his father’s stories of imaginary worlds. Like the boy’s late mother (who, even though she is dead, presents with a sort of afterlife that plays a significant role in the story), Robbie cares deeply about an apparently dying Earth and the dying species that inhabit it.

There is a short passage in Bewilderment that caught my attention because it touched on a theme I was already contemplating. It occurs when the deceased mother’s former colleague (and perhaps more than just a colleague) asks Theo for permission to publicize the experimental treatment he (the colleague) has successfully been providing to Robbie to address the boy’s emotional outbursts. Ever the protective parent, Theo is reluctant to risk making a public spectacle of his son, but also recognizes that the publicity could help inspire the financial support the treatment needs for it to become available to others. As he considers the request, he briefly muses about how marketing and social media have assumed a dominant role in our society:

This late in the world’s story, everything was marketing. Universities had to build their brands. Every act of charity was forced to beat the drum. Friendships were measured out now in shares and likes and links. Poets and priests, philosophers and fathers of small children: we were all on an endless, flat-out hustle. Of course science had to advertise. Call it my belated graduation from naivete.

In Powers’ story, the unavoidable pressure to market one’s accomplishments provides a necessary link in the plot development, but also provides Powers an opportunity to take a shot at the American zeitgeist, not so much a “Me Too” era as a “Look at Me” one. Like young children who constantly interrupt their parents, many have become conditioned to cry “look at me!” with social media -- so much so that the platforms designed to facilitate our self-promotion may also be reshaping our norms for acceptable behavior.

Bartleby

A clear example of these new mores appeared in the “Bartleby” column in the December 20th issue of the British journal, The Economist. The title suggests an innocent-enough intent: “How to make the most of LinkedIn: A guide to surviving and thriving on the business world’s favourite social network.” Sure enough, the opening paragraphs provide instructions for how to set up an effective LinkedIn profile and connect with other users. Even then, though, the author begins to describe a philosophy about social networking that raised at least this reader’s eyebrows.

The first hint comes in the instructions for building a profile. “[N]othing is too trivial,” the author says, when describing your educational and professional history. “Went to a selective kindergarten? Say so; it illustrates that you were a winner from a tender age.” Really? People want to know about your kindergarten education? And going to a selective one shows that you’re a winner?

At this point, I began to wonder whether I was reading The Economist or The Onion. The column was published too late in the year to be the April Fools’ issue, but was it parody anyway, intended to demonstrate the absurdity of the narcissism self-promotion tends to breed? So, I looked at a few other Bartleby columns, re-read this one, and still could not discern whether the author was being serious. I think not (and I certainly hope not), but let’s read on.

In the next paragraph we find such gems as “[y]ou need to have 500 or more connections in your profile to be taken seriously,” and to achieve that you need to “accost complete strangers.” And remember, “[o]n LinkedIn, cringeworthy is not part of the lexicon.”

The advice continues. “[F]launt your every success.” “[P]resent the most envy-provoking version of yourself.” Don’t “humble-brag.” And then there’s this little nugget: “While you are feeding the app your achievements, do not pay too much attention to those of others—that will allow you to appear poised and unflappable, not envious.” And “[i]gnore automatically generated prompts like ‘Congratulate Dimitris on starting a new position as co-head of European Private Equity at KKR’. These are designed, as if by your mother, to rub it in your face and motivate you to be more ambitious . . . .”

Okay, okay, this has to be tongue-in-cheek, right? Either way, it illustrates a warped attitude towards one’s role in society that finds fruition in the way we handle LinkedIn and similar platforms.

In my December 11th post on this site, I quoted the Dalai Lama’s observation that the cause of much of our personal suffering is our self-absorption, our focus on “me, me, me,” instead of on the needs of others. Our addiction to LinkedIn and other platforms feeds that monster, inviting us 24/7 to beg for attention to our own achievements. Bartleby’s advice (parody or not) seeks to make us feel okay with that narcissistic ethic.

A Proposal

As we end the old year and begin the new, I’d like to suggest an alternative. What if we spent some of our time on social media doing the opposite of what Bartleby advises? What if we flaunt our own activities and achievements less and praise the achievements of others more? What if we really do congratulate Dimitris on his new position? Wouldn’t that make Dimitris feel good? Wouldn’t it be worth doing for that reason alone?

But let’s go up another level. What if instead of heaping praise on the new co-head of European Private Equity (sorry Dimitris), we heap praise on people doing good things that would otherwise go unnoticed? And what if the things we praise them for are their good works? Maybe instead of only posting about my own accomplishments, I could also post about the friend who volunteers at a soup kitchen, or the colleague who just won that pro bono case for a low-income person denied healthcare services, or the retired carpenter who donates his time building houses for Habitat for Humanity. A little less “me,” a lot more “they,” and especially more “they” where the “they” are selflessly working for the common good. I’d love to see a movement of like-minded people transform sites like LinkedIn from places where members primarily toot their own horns, to places where they also collectively shine lights on the benevolent works of the angels of mercy among us, and to do so not because it makes them or their organizations look good, but because it might inspire others to take on similar worthy causes.

There is a firmly-entrenched place for marketing in our professions. Self-promotion, once perhaps a luxury, today is a necessity, especially for those still early in their careers and organizations in highly competitive industries. But social networks also can be powerful tools for drawing attention to the good works, the charitable works, the works of service to humanity, by others who without it would fly entirely below the radar.

So today I propose a New Year’s resolution, one that is so simple and so modest that it should not be difficult to keep. I resolve that in 2023 I will use social media not only to tout my own accomplishments, but also to publicize the good works of other people and their organizations, and that I will do so for no other reason than to inspire my followers. I invite you all to join me. After all, if we’re going to “flat-out hustle,” as Richard Powers’ character Theo puts it, let’s make sure we direct a good portion of our efforts to things worth hustling for.

Happy New Year to one and all.