Jargogled Impressions.

I often meet people with ‘commerce’ written all over their views of the world. The notion that commerce drives the system that in turn propels human ingenuity and innovation forward is baked into their ways of thinking and approaching problems. The application of this thinking may or may not have to do just with their professional worlds, but it also informs them of their decisions around lifestyle, ways to live, their social life, the tradeoffs they make when it comes to designing their life. Money is central to their frame of reference yet is peripheral to their life goals around wealth and community. Their opinions on complex social topics like immigration, NIMBYism, race, localism, etc. are arguably more transactional than moral. This makes me wonder if there is such a thing as a commercial mindset that distinguishes them from the other half of the world.

I will need to define the other half first before I dive into this breed of people. This other half I speak of, they approach all of these different facets of decision-making slightly differently. They exhibit an ethical and righteous (more like self-righteous) lens to their opinions and perspectives and secretly abhor money, while still believing in the capitalistic structures of society. Their relationship with money is complicated owing to a variety of contextual factors but money occupies a far more prominent place in their decision-making matrix than is likely warranted.

Note that this is not as straitjacketed as a capitalist versus socialist divide here which is more macro in its framing and level versus the personal/individual ideological level I am concerned with here. In any case, I am guessing with what history has taught us, we are well beyond debating this specific dichotomy of organizing our society and while examples (successful or otherwise) still exist of the various factions of thinking, capitalism has won the smackdown quite clearly.

No – what I am interested in is more personal and inward looking than the classical economic classification of society.  It is the behaviors we adopt as individuals when we face choices in life, and the heuristics we bake in our minds to simplify the complexity of the world around us, and it’s the actions we take and believe to be the right one when faced with conflicting paths.

Do you view your conversations with other people as transactions where you gain their viewpoint and you, theirs? Do you approach social problems as the behaviors of free market or as fault lines in how we have designed our society? Do you believe in spending in a freewheeling fashion because you intrinsically believe it’s what drives the wheel of human civilization forward? Do you peruse art as investment vehicles / intellectual pursuits or as a sublime medium that mirrors our understanding of ourselves? Do you distrust philanthropy and consider it inferior to the markets for solving our most pressing civilizational problems? Do you secretly believe art has driven more progress than science in this tiny world of ours? Do you hold the opinion that the collateral damage from bad art is smaller than what can be wrecked by technology?

If your answer is, it depends, then you lie somewhere in the spectrum that defines this dichotomy. I would hasten to add that there’s nothing wrong or right about where you lie in the spectrum and if there’s a bias you detect in my framing, that is unintentional. I am divided on where my ideologies land too and that’s okay. I guess we are all somewhere in the middle depending on the context and on the question at hand.  

But I do want to probe this dichotomy and see if a heuristic emerges. We are all familiar with the various personality tests (MBTI, Caliper, SHL, Hexaco, NEO, Eysenck, etc.) that the smart HR folks throw down at us whenever we want to understand leadership, motivation, employee satisfaction, and God forbid, compensation. These tests aim to leverage our understanding from the field of psychology and apply them at the workplace for us to have a “better understanding of ourselves” in conjunction with how we work (or do not work) with others. I wonder if there needs to be another dimension of these tests that measures how “commercial” we are versus not because I strongly believe we would find a strong correlation between this peculiar and ill-defined mindset and motivation/relentlessness at work. To put it bluntly, the more commercial you are, I suspect the more motivated you are to work that 10% extra to succeed at the workplace. Doesn’t mean you succeed at it, but you do demonstrate an aspirational sentiment to your colleagues; much like the wannabe social media influencers who, when they are just starting on their path, appear too aspirational in their content and messaging – sometimes bucketed as cringey in their takes. Some stay there for a myriad of reasons, others are able to hone their craft and find a sub-culture willing to accommodate them in their milieu.

But I digress. While commercial mindset surfaces quickly and easily in the professional realm, it bleeds over to our social and personal realms too. Further, both physical (COVID, hybrid workplace) and societal (finding meaning at work/through work) shifts have accelerated this bleeding. I sense an impersonal and abstract set of interactions that guide our view of the world and the commerce we engage in today – one that in likeliest of scenarios going to continue apace in the future too. And that is where my gripe begins.

What are we leaving behind as our approach becomes more commercial in this new world where the dynamism of markets and the centricity of our professions in our sense of self becomes more pronounced? At the risk of being labeled a romantic or Hobbesian or Wendel Berry acolyte, I wonder how we should live in this liminal period when we are still figuring out our evolutionary mechanism to what capitalism and technology has brought upon us. Be it our short attention spans, perennial anxiety, imposter syndrome, persistent FOMO – we can all see the symptoms and are already dealing with the fallout. I suspect our society will take its own course to equilibrium, as it always does.