There's so much to do

Over the past couple of years it’s been difficult to ignore the world stagnate around us. Products have gotten smaller and quality has been reduced, roads have more potholes than ever, and food seems more bland and less nutritious than ever. Our software and services cost more than ever, but seem to constantly suffer from issues they never had before. Years of neglect seem to be catching up to us.

Zoom out more and it’s very clear. All the infrastructure that made our society wealthy is falling apart from neglect. The great hydroelectric projects of a hundred years ago are ready to collapse, the railways are overgrown, and the heavy industry has fled to far away tax havens.

Simultaneously we’re reaching new heights of the market indices on a weekly basis. If you go by retirement and investment portfolios alone it would seem that our wealth is increasing steadily, but that doesn’t really seem to be the case, does it? Despite our GDP growth, median household incomes, property tax assessments, and consumer spending metrics being positive, things don’t exactly feel rosy.

When I look around it seems like more and more people my age are struggling. Some are out of work, others working below their education and experience, and everybody left seems to have a problem with their boss not treating them right. The days of the “lifer” who earns their 25th anniversary golden watch working for the same Ma Bell for decades, has come to an end.

How can we reconcile this? There are so many broken things to fix, so many problems to solve, and so much work to do. If I could feed my family by picking up trash in the street I’d probably do it, but that doesn’t seem to be something we value. We all have to follow the money, and that has us fixing problems that aren’t real in products that nobody needs for customers that were imagined for sales projections.

We can do great things together, which is what makes this so frustrating. Any time a storm knocks down a couple trees, people immediately come together with chainsaws and hand tools to get things sorted, without the need for a single investor or manager. When the power goes out, people have a way of finding the one family on the block without any candles or flashlights, all without any need for an email blast or social media campaign. We’re capable of these things; they’re easy and they just happen!

Our system actively fights this kind of real progress. If you try to fix up a long abandoned building to live in yourself, incidentally improving surrounding property values, you’d be jailed for trespassing. It has a large net positive for society but is prohibited. Try and bake enough bread to feed your neighbours, and expect a visit from the health inspector and municipal bylaw enforcement. Most of these rules had a good purpose at one time, usually to protect our health and safety, but haven’t been used that way for generations.

Politics, law, and civil society aren’t about getting things done, they’re just about stopping things from happening, protecting a fragile status quo that keeps trash in the gutter and people out of work as long as a few specific metrics are met.

I don’t know how to fix this increasingly evident rift in our reality. There’s so much to do, so many people willing to work, but no way to compensate them. Instead we remain locked in this downward spiral as long as everybody stays afraid of taking the first steps out of this. Our world has always been bifurcated, but it feels more clear than ever these days.