To call myself “young” at this point would be to strain credulity, but I am technically an “elder Millennial” and everything Scott talks about here resonates with me and everyone I know in the generations below me. We’re going to be left holding the bag with fewer meaningful ways to improve our lives than our parents (or their parents) ever had—and those are the folks still in control of our futures.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we build meaning in our lives and this speech by John W. Gardner nails it:
“You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something.”
“If the purpose of a system is what it does, and we don’t like what it does, then we have to change the system. And we change the system by making everyone involved, especially those in authority, feel urgency about changing the real-world impacts that a system has.”
Yes, yes! 🤌🏼
And this follow-on:
“In my own life, I’ve found the greatest reluctance to embrace this idea, and strongest rejection of its obvious truth, comes from the politically moderate, centrist-leaning suburban folks that I grew up around and spent the first decades of my life amongst.”
To be an unwitting systems observer (how I feel, not Anil’s term) is to be virtually incapable of seeing the way the systems around us define our lives and experience. It’s at the core of a recent article, and his experience of indifferent moderatism in the suburban core resonates significantly with my own experience growing up in the suburbs. When the systems are built for you, you tend to think of them as natural and immutable in the way a religious person might just assume their perfect deity deigned them to be so.