Texts

Today I felt like writing something about sustainability. It’s something I think about on a daily basis, except I don’t always think in the term “sustainability”, but maybe in other terms or with examples of cases about the state of the world, technology, or personal life and relationships.

Even though sustainability is such a washed out word I still think that it is a very good one, hardly substitutable by any other word. The first definition on dictionary.com of the word “sustain” is: to support, hold, or bear up from below; bear the weight of, as a structure. The third definition: to undergo, experience, or suffer (injury, loss, etc.); endure without giving way or yielding. So naturally, sustainability’s definition is the ability of some certain thing to endure in the long term.

Now I said I think about sustainability on a daily basis, and I have done this for a long time. When I studied technology business and management, I wasn’t that interested in courses like finance or marketing, how to do business in the usual way. The only thing that was motivating me was learning about doing business in a new way, innovative business models and technologies that can make businesses operate with sustainability in mind. Thankfully, this has become a central part of business schools nowadays but I do feel like even more can be done. It still feels like sustainability courses are something students gloss over and don’t take seriously, and the contents often feel like a plaster.

So I’ve been interested in this for a long time, but I’ve been more or less into it mostly due to sometimes also falling into some kind of despair and hopelessness and turning a blind eye when I see what is going on in the world around me. It is easy to do that. For a long time now I’ve been thinking that I feel like the world is in some kind of state of collective mania and psychosis, chasing after illusions of results and productivity at a pace that is hardly normal or healthy, being guided by delusions. Having suffered from mania and psychosis myself, I feel that this comparison is very apt and very accurate. To be honest, I feel like the world is in a much more sick state than I myself ever was. It’s also much harder to heal a psychosis on a global scale, than one of an individual.

I work in technology, at one of the world’s biggest tech companies. It’s hard not to reflect on the role of technology in society and for sustainability. I think technology lies behind a lot of the reasons that has resulted in this unhealthy pace. We hardly have time and space for any real concentrated work anymore. I often find it’s hard to think straight with all the buzz around me. And at work, I’m expected to keep up with numerous chats, code review requests, respond within a short time, and at the same time write code that solves complicated problems that require deep thinking. I often wonder, if every organization operates like this today. It’s not just people like me, software engineers. It’s also the product managers, the leadership, politicians, people who make important decisions. If they never have time to think deeply, how are they going to make good decisions? I feel like we are never going to build anything good like this. We are just always lost chasing after delusions. I feel like the only time I feel at peace and in line with what is natural, is when I’m taking a whole weekend in my house and just reading philosophy, meditating, and doing creative work.

Not only does technology interfere with people’s deep work and thinking process, it’s caused polarization and increased mental health issues among young people. People also have an obsession with upgrading their technology to whatever is newest, resulting in e-wastes dumped in developing countries. I am not even telling anything new here, I think everyone knows this. But being employed at a tech company I feel compelled to repeat these facts and say that sometimes I have a distaste for technology and digitalization. Yes, that cabin in the woods fantasy still lives on.

Even so, I’m not going to say I’m one of those people who think everything is crap and the 1800s were better and we are all going to hell. Because that kind of thinking gets us nowhere. I’m wanting to point out what’s unhealthy but also what Einstein said, “in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity”. Because technology has a lot of benefits! Can we turn it around and use what has caused us trouble, to instead get us out of trouble? I’m not saying, technology alone will do it, it’s also the business models, the policies and what we measure, but in today’s world nothing is without tech. If general intelligence AI is really coming, what do we want it to optimize? Continue to optimize for productivity, or to optimize for well-being?

Sustainability for me has many faces, and the society is just one of them. I believe how we pursue sustainability starts with oneself. For instance, what is important for me and my life? What are my values and my priorities? Living according to what’s important for myself and not what somebody else or societal norms tells me is important, is crucial to my well-being. For instance, being constantly results focused is detrimental to well-being because it’s not natural. And I know that the things I do are more fun and fulfilling when I do them out of curiousity and interest, allowing myself to be playful and experiment, try and make mistakes, instead of beat myself down for not achieving the desired result fast enough. Like with piano, or learning to paint, or my job. It’s my belief that in order for society to be sustainable, individuals must first take the responsibility to make their own lives sustainable by calibrating their inner compass on a regular basis.

Another example of this “starting with oneself”, “starting with home” mentality: I know of companies working with helping other companies become more sustainable, but at their own company there’s a work policy where employees work their asses off, now where’s the sense in that? Maybe there’s an innate paradox, where we think the world is burning urgently and we need to stop it, but if we work at an unhealthy pace to stop this we will just contribute to more burning.

This also manifests in our power as consumers. I had a chat with my brother the other day when I told him that my company phone was experiencing some issues and that I was trying to get tech support to fix it. My brother said why don’t you just get another phone since my company phone has a refresh policy of 1 year, meaning every year I can get a new phone. I told him I don’t want a new phone, I want this phone because I don’t believe we should upgrade our phones all the time. He said that me getting a new phone will make 0% difference because Taylor Swift’s private jet causes much more environmental damage. I said it’s not just about the direct difference, it’s about principles. I think if we continuously make choices based on sustainable principles in the small choices that don’t seem to matter, only then will we be able to make sustainable choices when faced with decisions that do matter. People are creatures of habit.

Sustainability also has to do with our relationships. There are some questions worth considering. What is it that makes some relationships last and other relationships fail? What kind of relationship could be called sustainable and what kind not? If not, is it a relationship worth sustaining? If so how can one make it more sustainable? Are the relationships developed with co-workers worth more or the actual output of the work and results? Are personal relationships more important or our career? Just one fact: humans are social animals and sustainable relationships are crucial to our well-being.

It’s my belief that sustainability goes from self, to relationships, and to society. Perhaps, the most important, is self. After all that’s the only thing you truly have control over. I don’t have any solutions to the big problems we are facing, except that we regularly and sincerely ask ourselves deeply, what are my values, what’s important to me, what is it that will make my life sustainable, and then live according to those insights. Once your inner compass is calibrated, it will ripple out to everything that you do and into your relationships and society.