Jake LaCaze

Economic growth is a hell of a drug. But what do you do when the well's run dry?

The American economic system is built around the assumption of growth. Our unofficial motto regarding the economy is If it ain't growin', it must be dyin'! Policy makers will jump through any hoops necessary to protect and ensure growth. Focusing on economic growth has been the American way since its founding, especially so in the decades after World War II. It's served (at least some of) us well. But there's one big problem with this model: the era of assumed economic growth is coming to an end.

At the end of World War II, America made the best deal in the history of deals. We told the rest of the world we'd protect the seas and enable trade routes on one condition: the rest of the world had to participate in our economic system. This proposal created the ultimate win-win scenario. The rest of the world got protected access to otherwise unavailable markets, and America got more of that international cold, hard cash. And, for 80 years or so, the world order was relatively stable, at least in comparison to the majority of world history.

But all good things must come to an end, and so here we find ourselves in a post-COVID world, as America is withdrawing from the world and isolating. Why are we doing this? Put simply, the world has gotten old. Baby Boomers are retiring and we don't have enough young people to replace them. Old people don't produce and they don't consume at the same levels of young people. Old people instead sit in their retirement homes and clip coupons until it's time for Senior Hour at the local Country Kitchen Buffet and then they scoot back home for bingo.

Building an economy around old people is a recipe for disaster. So, America is saying 'Bye Felicia' from the rest of the world and working to GTFO. Maybe I wouldn't worry if I saw an alternate path. But growth is all we know. And we're like that guy in the VIP section of the nightclub rising his head from the table, his nostrils and upper lip crusted with white dust, as we cry What do you mean there's no more coke!?

We don't appear to have a Plan B because we still talk about the economy in terms of growth. If we had another model of economic success, we'd have started using it by now—ya know, for the vibes.

A post-growth world means less opportunity to go around. What does this mean for those already struggling? And what happens when people unfamiliar with struggling now have no other choice? If you want to keep societies from rebelling and calling for heads to roll, your best bet is to give them everything they need to prosper economically. But what do you do when that's no longer possible?

Every generation following the Baby Boomers has had to live in the shadow of Boomer expectations: get your diploma, get a job, bust your ass, prosper. The Boomer formula for success may have served a person well in 1965, but not so much in the 21st century. The game has changed and the goal posts are constantly moving with each financial crisis or recession, which brings me back to my main point: we must stop measuring success in terms of the old economy. The days of effectively 0% interest rates and assumed economic growth are over. Also, we failed to invest in critical infrastructure in the best of times because we were too busy chasing down that metaphorical economic cocaine; I doubt we'll start investing in infrastructure now when capital is more costly with less return.

So what follows? What do we replace the old economic model with? How do we define and measure success going forward?

I won't pretend to have the answer. I wish only we knew the powers that be were asking the same questions rather than focusing on chasing outdated metrics, which doesn't feel like a SMART goal to me.

Jake LaCaze tries to play it cool, but these are the kinds of thoughts that keep him up at night.

#business #economics

Discuss...

Email me | Mastodon

---

21st-century living is complicated. But must it be?

When you look around you, it's easy to feel as if complexity is a requirement of the modern world. Most workplaces run via series after series of overcomplicated processes. To 'exist' today requires an ever-growing number of online profiles. Life seems impressive only so long as it's being continually pumped with more, more, MORE.

How did things get this way?

One problem seems to be who benefits from increased complexity. And most often, it's the corporate overlords trying to satisfy the need for constant growth. How can you expect corporations to benefit from simplicity? The adage 'Less is more' may be true in regard to your quality of life, but when is less ever more in terms of corporate bottom lines? For the corporation to get more, you need more. And what better way to get more than from an entity that must grow, grow, GROW?

To hell with simplifying processes by reducing unneeded steps. The real answer is MORE: More software, more automation, more problems to one day be fixed.

The people who want to sell you more are quick to peddle their tech du jour: generative AI. Regardless of what the prophets of AI will tell you, generative AI doesn't save time; it instead shifts where you spend your time, if you care about accurate work. Large language models (LLMs) often hallucinate, so you must double-check all their work, which negates any efficiency gains you're hoping for. Sure, humans are fallible and capable of bullshit just like LLMs, but humans are not fallible and capable of bullshit at the same scale as LLMs and generative AI.

So many of the people pushing generative AI just want to get paid to play with tech for a living. And for them to do that, you need to complicate your life with this half-baked technology that doesn't fix real problems.

Why unplug and focus on relationships that matter and provide value? Instead, choose MORE 'friends', MORE 'connections'. The more complexity you can handle, the more capable a human being you are. The more PRODUCTIVE you are. But how capable, how productive, do you need to be? When is enough enough?

Simplicity makes life more manageable. Simplicity is sustainable. But simplicity is hard. It's hard to see how you can simplify when complexity is all you know. And it's hard when complexity is all your peers know. Are you sure you can do that? they might ask. What makes you think you know better?

But we all know this complexity is distracting and exhausting. And, it's bullshit.

We feel it in our aching bones, in our tired eyes, in our foggy brains. We're caught in a hamster wheel we can't find the courage to jump off.

This complexity isn't serving us. There's so much pressure to add more to our lives, but we often get nothing out of it, other than more problems, more headaches, more distractions.

Jake LaCaze is getting old and has less time for bullshit these days.

#tech #business

Discuss...

Email me | Mastodon

---

Writing by hand is the best. There's nothing like finding that perfect combination of pen and ink and paper.

That tactile feedback as your pen scratches across the page. The shimmer of the ink making your words shine. The joy of distraction-free creation. These are just a few reasons people fall in love with writing by hand.

But for some people, there's one big problem with writing by hand: the practice requires the use of certain natural resources, like trees that are cut down to make paper. This use of resources may push people to seek alternatives, such as writing exclusively on a computer or on an e-ink writing tablet.

Some people use these devices in the name of saving the trees and also Mother Earth. They clearly have their hearts in the right place. But I'd like to challenge these writers to kill more trees.

Let's be honest: you're not saving the planet by foregoing pen and paper.

Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

Decades ago, the petrochemical companies told us we could make a difference via recycling. If we'd just put our plastics and our paper in a green bin and take it to the curb every Friday, we could make the world a better place, one that reuses materials to cut down on single-use products.

Recycling was great for a while, until we realized it's a sham.

The truth is that recycling is highly inefficient. It's not cost effective. Most people (like the author of this post) suck at putting only recyclable materials into the recycling bin. We now know the call to recycle was merely a campaign of misdirection to pressure everyday people into taking responsibility to save the earth while the petrochemicals companies got the green light to keep pumping out more plastic.

---

NOTE: To be clear, this post is not intended to be read as criticism of plastics. It is instead criticism of sacrificing due to misguided blame.

---

Either way you cut it, recycling is impotent activism.

Going paperless may make you feel good about the reduction of your own carbon footprint, but how do you think the paper usage of individuals compares to the paper usage of corporations? Over the years, I've worked at multiple companies with leaders who think the company should never need to print anything ever again. Spoiler alert: Officepeople still be printin'. Maybe they'll get their dream when Gen Z or Gen Alpha (two generations who don't remember a time before screens) rules the office, but for old Millennials like me (and Gen X and those Boomers still lingering around), some things are better suited for reading on paper than on screens. So, if I'm working at your company, you gotta be prepared to kill a few trees in the name of productivity.

The point I'm making about the paper usage of individuals versus corporations is related to an oft-overlooked point in the push to electric vehicles (EVs): the majority of highway emissions don't come from the individuals driving alone in their sedans or pickups or SUVs; they majority of highway emissions come from moving freight. Please keep in mind that the vast majority of that freight is moved for businesses, not for individuals like you and me.

Also, when you account for the precious minerals needed to build them, EVs aren't a clear-cut homerun over gas-powered vehicles. I've also heard the argument that EVs don't become more environmentally friendly than gas-powered vehicles until you've driven the EV for 60,000 miles. If you plan on driving your EV until the wheels fall off, then this mileage threshold isn't a concern.

But how much must you write on your computer or other device before it's better for the environment than pen and paper? Especially if you're saving your work on the cloud and justifying yet another datacenter in the world.

What about when you publish? Is that ebook really better for the environment than paper? Maybe it is. But then there's the issue of never actually owning your ebooks so long as they come with DRM baked in. That paper book may not make you feel like Captain Planet, but at least it's yours to loan out or resell or use to stabilize that off-balance coffee table that always clanks when you put your drink on it.

Writing by hand is a gateway to mindful writing. Pen and paper offer less distraction than most electronic devices. Yes, the physical act of writing by hand takes more work than typing on a keyboard, but the extra effort is a great reason to focus on word efficiency, unless you're trying to be the next Nabokov.

There's nothing wrong with preferring writing on an electronic device to writing by hand. By all means, keep on keeping on if that's your jam. But don't neglect writing by hand out of some misguided belief that these electronic options are somehow better for the environment.

At this point, the climate's gonna do what it's gonna do. Climate change is pretty much undeniable at this point, though some will still try. Some will say we're doomed, and to them I say: k. Then why try, if the ending of humanity is inevitable? Shut the hell up and let me enjoy my pen and paper. (Am I returning to my roots and flirting with nihilism?)

I don't know what the future holds as far as the climate is concerned. Are we doomed? Can we adapt? (I hope.) Can we reverse the trend? (I doubt it.) But what I do know is that the efforts of individuals to curb their own consumption is useless as long as corporations keep conducting in corporation-y ways.

Instead of spending so much effort thinking of ways to save the planet via individual practices, perhaps people would be better off putting that effort into activism to reform corporate practices in a way that moves the needle—in a way that's effective. (Effectiveness is a far better metric than effort, after all.)

If you choose to go this route, I have one request: when you write your manifesto, consider writing your first draft on pen and paper. Killing that extra tree just might be worth it.

#writing

Jake LaCaze sees no point in making sacrifices that don't move the needle.

Discuss...

Email me | Mastodon

---

Why is business so hard?

I mean, why do so many businesses struggle with basic tasks? Why do companies of smart and accomplished people seem to get bogged down on the way to success?

Here's the simplest answer I can come up with: Employees have to wade through oceans of BS. (I don't claim to be an edgelord on this blog, so I try to keep things PG-rated here. But to be clear, yes, in this case, BS stands for bullshit.)

To me, it's clear as day. I've worked at quite a few companies over the years, ranging from publicly-traded companies to family offices and a few other stops in between. When I look back at my career as a whole, I'm amazed at how often the same themes pop up again and again. Terrible leadership, unclear communication, poorly-defined processes that no amount of new and shiny technology can fix.

Among the masses of Yes Men, often parroting 'That's the way it's always been', it's hard not to feel alone. Or like you don't see reality clearly. You feel like Will Ferrell's character in Zoolander: 'I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!' In the end, maybe you start taking crazy pills just to cope.

Misery loves company, or so they say. And that's why I'm glad to have recently discovered the blog of Nikhil Suresh. Nikhil pulls no punches. Gives no fucks, as the kids say. (I've already broken the PG rating once on this post. And I'll do it again later, because quotations, so I might as well go big, right?)

To get an idea of Nikhil's subject matter, look no further than the blog posts below, which must surely be part of his greatest hits:

• I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again
• Most Tech Jobs Are A Joke And I'm Not Laughing
• PowerBI Is A Human Rights Violation
• Strategy Doesn't Matter If You Blunder Every Move
• I Will Fucking Haymaker You If You Mention Agile Again
• Your Organization Probably Doesn't Want To Improve Things

Nikhil takes something I know in my soul to be true and gives example after example of confirmation. So much of what we deal with on a daily basis is useless. The struggle leads to little productivity. You rush to meet your boss's crazy deadlines, but no one does anything with your hard work. Your report sits there unread. Your boss is an idiot who has no idea of the daily struggles required by your job, but he has an MBA and he looks great in a suit. Or, he's the owner's son. (Nepotism is a horrible business strategy that fails most of the company, yet it's far more common than you'd expect.)

Once, in a phone interview, someone asked me where I'd like to work: at a large company or a small company. I can't remember what I responded, but here's my honest opinion: Pick your poison. Each situation has its good and its bad, its pluses and its minuses. At a large company, you likely have to navigate waves of bureaucracy to get anything done. At a small company, the owner might fire you because he often gets a bit frisky on Tuesdays.

To piggyback off Nikhil's writing, I think so much of so many jobs are bullshit because so much of so many companies' operations are bullshit. Even the most successful people don't have all the answers. They're trying to figure it out as they go. But too many 'leaders' don't have the ability to figure it out, because they lack humility and curiosity and the ability to research anything they don't already have the answer for.

I find business is at its best when it's as simple as it can be. For so many companies and industries, the temptation seems to be to lean into complexity. The more complex it is, the more valid it is, right?

I urge you instead to start on the other end of the pendulum. Start from the viewpoint of simplicity. Make processes as straight-forward as you can and add complexity only when absolutely necessary. (To make sure only the absolutely necessary complexity is added, I recommend defaulting to the mindset that no complexity can be added; then you can begrudgingly allow it when the case has been made again and again, at which point you realize that maybe the extra steps truly are needed.)

I'm going to share with you a secret for making sense of complex situations: Ask questions. The asinine answers will show that no one has thought this out. No one capable of critical thought was included on the mapping of this proess.

Why is it this way? I blame the industrialist mindset.

Under the industrialist mindset, your boss seeks the best way you can make the most widgets possible. Often, the answer is for you to work harder. Or for longer hours. Or more consistently.

'Why are you talking to your co-worker when you could making me another widget!?'

That mentality might work for industrialist industries. But many of us aren't widget makers. I'm not. Neither is Nikhil or his peers.

In my own career, much of my hardest work has come from interpreting and enacting legal agreements. What does this document actually say? What was its intent? Did it cover this situation?

Sometimes you find yourself in a situation no one else in your company has ever seen before. Congratulations, you're in what they call 'uncharted territory'! This is a golden opportunity. You just don't know if it's an opportunity to make a name for yourself, or an opportunity to find a new way for things to blow up in your company's face!

In these situations, simply working harder won't fix much of anything. I can bang my head against my desk and try to make sense of it all again and again. But somtimes I need to step away and let the words bounce around my head before they start to make sense.

For most of us knowledge workers, these are the kinds of issues we regularly deal with. These are the issues that use most of our energy and take up most of our time. So it'd be nice if we could focus more time on these issues; or it'd be nice if other, lesser important tasks didn't get in the way.

So why are these lesser important issues so complicated? Well, dear reader, how else are your bosses going to know you're working hard?

When you're making widgets, I can count how many times you pull that lever. And I can see that more pulls of the lever mean more widgets.

What's the equivalent in knowledge work? The Company pays you eight hours a day. How else can the Company ensure it's getting its eight hours worth out of you? Or, look at it another way: By keeping things complex, I know you're giving me at least eight hours a day.

By now this is all sounding familiar to fans of Cal Newport.

You'd think that someone in charge of such operation would be focused on higher-level metrics: Revenue, profit, etc. But it's easier to focus on whether you're in the office, obviously doing something for a certain amount of time every day.

We also can't discount the herd mentality. Everyone's doing AI? What's our AI strategy!? No one's on it!? Well, transfer the crypto team over. They don't have much going on these days.

As you get older and experience more of life, you realize common sense ain't so common.

With every new antitrust lawsuit against Google, it looks more and more like we're falling out of love with tech. I hope that also means that we're falling out of the habit of thinking something new is great just on the basis of its age and novelty.

On a personal level, I feel as if most of us could benefit from a classical liberal education. On a business level, I think we could benefit from leaders who focus on simplifying business and who have great bullshit detectors. The perfect mix might be finding such a person who's also a great bullshit artist so that maybe he or she will have a chance of actually changing some minds and making a difference.

In other words, I don't think it's something new that's going to unlock unrealized gains and skyrocket your business. What if the answer instead lies in old school values that have been available this whole time?

Jake LaCaze thinks we make things way harder than they need to be.

#business

Discuss...

Email me | Mastodon

---

What will be your life's sweetest dessert?

I recently rewatched a video related to the prolific band The Cure being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

No, it wasn't a video of Trent Reznor's flattering induction speech. It was the one of the overly excited TV personality asking frontman Robert Smith if he was as excited as she was. Smith pretty much shrugged her off.

How could he be so chill about such a major accomplishment? I'd say inclusion in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is the cherry on top of the sundae that is an awesome musical career.

The cherry is usually the first part of the sundae you eat. Credentials like being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame might be one of the first things people mention when they talk about certain bands. Many bios of The Cure will likely mention this accomplishment early on, maybe even in the opening line.

But the cherry isn't the sweetest part of the sundae. It's not the part you get excited about. Sure, you expect the cherry. But you don't order the sundae for the cherry; you order it for the ice cream and the chocolate syrup and the whipped cream.

What do you think is sweeter: the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, or knowing you recorded Disintegration, the best album ever?

You can still have a sundae without a cherry; but a cherry does not a sundae make.

Jake LaCaze likes to imitate Seth Godin in his free time.

Discuss...

Email me | Mastodon

---

If there's one thing I've come to value after the last 16 years full-time in the workforce, it's simplicity.

'Simplicity' is not the same as 'easy'. Something simple may still be hard. (Some of the hardest truths may be the simplest.)

Simplicity means you've removed as much fluff and as many layers of complexity as possible. It's taking a ten-step process and realizing you can get rid of four of those steps without losing anything of substance. It's starting your email with the action item or key takeaway instead of burying it somewhere in the middle of Page 2. It's reducing the number of handoffs between departments, thereby reducing opportunities for someone to drop the ball and leave the rest of the team hanging.

Simplicity is the secret ingredient for businesses looking to be more efficient. So why isn't simplicity adopted more broadly?

Because simplicity is the enemy of those who would rather brag about how hard they work over how much they get done.

But, Jake, who fits that profile?

Far more people than I'd like to admit. Search your feelings; you know it to be true.

Why would anyone want to work and live that way?

The same reason we often resist change in other areas of our lives: If we remove this struggle, what will we replace it with? Chances are another struggle awaits.

Or maybe we're scared of the resulting additional responsibilities. If you're free of grunt work, then you're free to do bigger work and make more important decisions. Do you really want that?

Simplicity isn't sexy. Saying you do this one thing in one market isn't as sexy as saying you do a hundred things in a hundred markets and you're open to taking on more. It's far sexier to automate complex processes than ask how many of the processes are needed in the first place.

Writing a 700-page book seems more impressive than saying you whittled all the crucial bits into only 100 pages (or less!). The work put into 700 pages is obvious. You can see the work. You can feel it. You can hold it in your hand. You can't say the same of the 100-page book, because all the work went into what wasn't included: what you can't see, what you can't feel, what you can't hold in your hand. But that 100-page book fits more neatly in your bag and doesn't weigh you down!

Steven Pinker has made the point that the world feels like a terrible place even when crime is at all-time lows, because no one gets credit for crimes that haven't been committed. A similar point applies to simplicity: It's harder to get credit for confusion and unnecessary work you've prevented.

Simplicity requires hard work. It requires focus, vision, and consistent messaging.

Simplicity requires bravery. You'll face resistance when you have the audacity to suggest there may be a simpler way. You may hear those dreaded words 'That's the way it's always been', or their cousins 'That's just the way it is'.

Who decided this is how it must be? Who made the conscious decision this is was good as it gets? Who has chosen to thwart progress that might benefit the whole team or department or company? Raise your hand now and take credit. Funny, I don't see any hands in the air . . .

That's because the company has grown to the point that people can hide behind the entity itself. The company is now the Company with a capital C, with a mind and wisdom all its own. It's like the Market, with its invisible hands and whatnot.

Simplicity is like that shot in the butt the doctor prescribed to the toddler who's deathly afraid of needles (yours truly, once upon a time). The medicine is right here. Yeah, it's gonna sting for a bit. But in the long run, you'll be better for it. Now, bend over and show your cheeks and don't you dare fart.

Jake LaCaze works really hard to keep things really simple.

#business

Discuss...

Email me | Mastodon

---

My son is in his final year of reg-league baseball. This fall season is his next-to-last season, with his last being in the spring. It’s a bittersweet time.

The bitter part of that equation is obvious—what if he never plays baseball again? What if this is all she wrote? What if the fat lady isn't just singing, but she's absolutely belting at the top of her lungs? This is a real possibility, because, for him, baseball is more about hanging out with his friends. If he gets on base or comes home, that’s just a bonus.

The sweet part is that he lucked out and got to play with his favorite (and the best) coach he’s had yet, a man we’ll call Coach C.

Coach C is the man who led my son and his friends to a league title a few seasons ago.

On paper, Coach C doesn’t look like a championship-winning coach. As far as I know, he’s just a guy. He’s kind of puny. Maybe he played baseball in high school, but other than that, he’s just a father who volunteers his time to encouraging young boys to do their best and have fun while doing it. And he gets the best out of the kids, fulfilling every parent’s dream.

My son’s also played for a guy you’d expect to win a league championship. This other coach grew up playing baseball. He made it all the way to the minor leagues. Impressive resume, right? But his results weren’t.

This more qualified coach was hard on the boys, to the point that after one game, his assistant coach had a verbal tiff with him and told him to back off—They’re just kids.

Rec-league baseball isn’t the only time I’ve seen this contrast in candidates.

I once worked at a company that had a unique job position open up. The position was a hybrid position: The company wanted someone to perform one job while mentoring others performing a different job. This place I worked at was very cliquish, and a person who was liked by one group probably wasn’t liked by another group. But everyone I talked to agreed on who was the best internal candidate for the job. It seemed like a no-brainer that he’d get the job. He was good at the primary job and had previously excelled at the other job he'd be mentoring in. And why wouldn’t you hire someone who can unify the people working under his or her leadership?

But the job went to an external candidate, someone with some impressive employers on his resume. Only a few months later, that internal candidate quit for obvious reasons. Morale went into the crapper. The external candidate isn’t exactly inspiring others to do their best work either.

Humans are complex creatures, and so relationships are complex as well. You never know how people will mesh. Cohesion is crucial for high-functioning teams. So sometimes the best fit is the one that the team will listen to. The one they’ll gladly follow into battle.

Sometimes the proper magnetism is the best qualification a candidate can have. And anyone with such qualities is likely someone who can learn the rest of the job. But that kind of influence—that’s hard to teach.

Jake LaCaze is tired of those LinkedIn posts about hiring unqualified candidates, but he must admit when there's some truth to rehashed content.

#business

Discuss...

Email me | Mastodon

---

How many layers must you wade through in the search for your own writing’s common thread?

I once said that persuasion was my own writing’s common thread, but now I’m realizing there’s more to it.

Humanity. The human condition. What does this mean for the humans involved? These are the matters that often surface in my writings, whether blog posts or short stories or aspiring novels.

Can one argue that these questions are irrelevant? Don’t they hit at the heart of what really matters? Whether we’re talking business or tech or relationships, humans are the most important part of the equation. And not just shareholders. Or the C-suite. But top to bottom. Within and throughout and beyond.

My recent rereading of Paul Kalanithi’s beautiful memoir When Breath Becomes Air sees me returning to my roots of asking about the point of life.

Why bother if you feel it’ll all be pointless at some time? What’s the point of it all while we’re here? What do we focus on for however many days we have?

To that question, I answer: human connection. Human connection is what makes life rewarding. Interesting. Meaningful. Life is meant to be shared with other humans.

When you remove human connection, you miss something. Again, look at business and tech, two aspects of our lives that have become far less human and less human-centered over the years. I’m well aware that businesses of all types exist to make money, but I worry the pendulum has swung too far in the wrong direction. I have similar worries for tech, as humanity is the largest component missing in the AI devolution (AKA the codification of average).

In his book Survival of the Richest, Douglas Rushkoff recounts how some tech elites met with the author for advice about surviving in their doomsday bunkers during the inevitable societal collapse. When one of the bros asked Rushkoff how he should persuade his head of security to protect him in a time in which money is worthless, Rushkoff suggested he try treating the security personnel well now, before things fall apart. The tech bros laughed.

Can they not fathom any value beyond money and bits and bytes and likes and shares? Can they not see the value in relationships and can they not see why someone else may find value in simply being treated like a human being?

The bad news is that humanity seems to be missing in so many of our regular transactions. The good news is that I think this is a great opportunity for businesses. The standards are so low, it doesn’t take much to add a personal touch to an experience. I’m getting similar vibes to when Apple started promoting privacy as a feature of its products. Sure, we can poke holes into Apple’s claims all day. But the obvious answer is reminiscent of the joke about happening upon a hungry bear in the woods: I don’t have to outrun the bear; I just have to outrun you. Apple doesn’t have to have the highest privacy standards; their standards just have to better than the competition’s.

And businesses don’t have to be truly human—they just have to be better than their peers. (Grocery stores can start by replacing self-checkout lines.)

If we continue to choose paths that remove humanity from our regular experiences, then what kind of existence are we creating and endorsing? If nothing else, we’re making it easier for machines to replace us, because we’re negating our greatest advantage. We’re leveling the playing field. This is one situation in which we should not follow this strategy.

I want more humanity in business. In tech. I want the Web to be more human and messy and strange. I want stories that are about more than plot points—I want to know what those experiences mean for the humans involved.

I want more humanity in my day-to-day. Is that too much to ask?

Note: The title of this post is borrowed from the lyrics of ‘Without Any Words’ by ‘68.

Jake LaCaze thinks life advice and business advice are often interchangeable.

Discuss...

Email me | Mastodon

---

Existence, well what does it matter?
I exist on the best terms I can
— ‘Heart and Soul’ by Joy Division

. . .

Existentialists ask what it all means.

Nihilists say it all means nothing.

Absurdists say it all means nothing, yet we can’t help trying to attach something deeper to it.

My own outlook on life has followed this same path.

In my early years, I pondered the meaning of life, a silly question for one yet to experience much of anything. Then, after the deaths of my parents, I flirted with nihilism, which I eventually put aside, not because the belief structure was untrue, but because it didn’t serve me. And then, sometime during the COVID-19 pandemic, I shifted to absurdism, where I still stand at the time of writing this post.

On a long enough timeline, the events of your life don’t matter. That’s where nihilism stops. Absurdism, on the other hand, acknowledges the futility of it all, while also acknowledging the desire and need for something more.

Why would anyone acknowledge this struggle? Because, at the end of the day, that struggle is all we have. That struggle is the source of meaning.

Everything we hold dear—our families, our vocations, our friends—will be forgotten in time. In less than the blink of the cosmic eye, everything we hold dear will be gone. So why bother? Again, this is all we have. We can lament that this is as good as it gets, or we can embrace it.

What’s the alternative? To wade in the waters of waste? You can spend your days however you want. But I hope you choose to spend them in a way that might let you and those around you smile from time to time, even if the source of that joy be delusion.

Anything is pointless if you spend all your time thinking about it, something I wish the rationalists could figure out. Sure, you can laugh at all the ways we fall in love with silly shiny things. Or you can accept that, for better or for worse, humans are little more than highly-evolved apes.

If you stop and think about it, sex is one of the most ridiculous concepts of our world. (To keep this blog family-friendly, I won’t elaborate on the mechanics and will instead trust you to fill in the details on your own.) But it’s been crucial for the persistence of our species, as well as so many others.

Albert Camus concludes the essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ with this simple line:

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Sisyphus was damned by the gods to a lifetime of rolling a boulder up a hill, only for the boulder to roll down and for him to start the process over again. So, how can one imagine Sisyphus happy? Because that damn boulder is all he has. What’s the alternative?

I once heard someone criticize ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ by saying that Camus basically tacked that last point onto the end. I won’t argue with the criticism, but I will say the point of the last line resonated with me as I realized we are all pushing our own boulder up the hill, over and over and over again. No matter how we feel about it, the boulder’s here to stay. We might as well embrace whatever we can.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankenstein describes how, as a prisoner in a concentration camp, he helped others maintain morale through the Holocaust, despite his own family having already died in the camps. One might argue that Frankel’s loss shows it all means nothing, that his previous experiences and sacrifices were nullified by their deaths. Or they could say it was absurd of him to find any meaning at all after losing his family to something as senseless as genocide. There’s no question Frankel was dealt a terrible hand. But he did amazing things regardless.

Some may disregard absurdism on the very basis of its absurdity. But to ignore the existence of absurdity is the greatest form of absurdism. Anyone who’s spent time with other humans knows we don’t default to rationality. To ignore the absurdism within us is to ignore a crucial part of what it means to be human. How can one ever hope to understand or improve the human condition without first understanding the human condition? And how can one understand the human condition without first accepting the existence of absurdism without our nature? If you ignore this basic part of humans, how well can you understand them? And if you’re unable to understand these universal truths within us all, can you ever hope to find the truths buried within yourself? Can you ever know your own heart and soul?

If you discovered tomorrow that we were all living in a simulation, would that make your life and your connections meaningless? I’d argue that it changes nothing. While what you have may, in some way, be unreal, it’s in fact real by the fact it’s all you have. The absurdist notion of needing meaning means that within this fake existence is your only hope to find meaning. If anything, your situation now means more than it did before, because while there may be something else somewhere out there, your consciousness exists only within this simulation. So, your digital family and your digital friends and your digital dog—all just a series of binaries—are still as good as it will ever get for you. Because when the lights go off, that’s it.

Poof.

Absurd? Yeah.

Depressing? Only if you expect something more.

Jake LaCaze is working to embrace the absurdism of life.

#philosophy

Discuss...

Email me | Mastodon

---

Not so long ago, bloggers used social media to share their posts and build audiences. While social media is unlikely to go away any time soon, people do seem to be falling out of love with it, if for no other reason than most of the mainstream social platforms (Facebook, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, etc.) tend to throttle any posts with external links. If bloggers can’t share external links for fear of being pushed into the digital ghetto, then how the hell are they supposed to be promote their sites?

Bloggers have plenty of free and paid options for creating their own blogs: WordPress, Ghost, Blogger, Bear, Mataroa, GitHub Pages . . . But most of these options provide little more than hosting and maybe email newsletters. (For the record, this point is not an insult, because these providers don’t claim to offer more. So no harm, no foul.)

These options offer little in regard to promoting your writing outside of their platforms. Writers have countless options when it comes to owning their audiences. But what good is owning an audience if that audience is zero?

Social media is a hassle for some of us. It’s an inexhaustible firehose of noise that’s impossible to keep on top of;

But some blogging platforms, such as write.as and micro.blog, do offer other ways to share your writing without the aid of social media. write.as in particular has read.write.as, where you can read all public posts by anyone on the platform. micro.blog is in many ways a social network powered by blogs and RSS feeds.

Online life is changing. Many of us, once enamored with social media, are now turned off by it. The internet has always been about connecting people—and I think that’s still true. These days we focus on the negatives of the internet (social media and the spread of conspiracy theories and fake news, etc.). But we can’t forget or discount the good that comes with building connections with like-minded people—connections that may have never happened without the power of the World Wide Web.

While those of us with public blogs may not default to doing whatever it takes to get more clicks and eyeballs, we still want to be read. Maybe we don’t want to be read by everyone, but we want to be read by those who matter to us. How do we find these people without social media?

Is this need an opportunity for blogging platforms? Might it be a differentiator in the future? Is this why Substack has basically built a social network (Notes) into its own platform?

I myself don’t need a million readers. I’m not searching for a big audience. I’m just searching for my audience. But that audience is hard to find without social media, unless you’re going to play the SEO game. There’s nothing wrong with leaning on SEO—it’s a valid strategy. It’s just not a strategy I want to pursue.

Since I started blogging again in 2018, I’ve hosted my writing on multiple sites, including write.as, micro.blog, Mataroa, GitHub Pages, and probably one or two others I’ve forgotten. The best engagement I got in that period came when I was hosted on write.as or micro.blog, blogging platforms with built-in communities. 

I don’t know how exactly blogging platforms pull this off. And I don’t know how write.as can build upon its foundation. But I can’t help wondering if the next innovation in blogging has nothing to do with Markdown or image hosting or newsletters. Maybe the opportunity lies in simply getting writers in front of readers who matter without requiring them to whore themselves out on the social networks that often feel like far more work than they’re worth.

Jake LaCaze wants to see people connecting with people online.

#writing #blogging #marketing

Discuss...

Email me | Mastodon

---