A sucker for punishment

I honestly wanted to start on a more positive note, but figured that it would be best getting the obvious out of the way first — something that has been bothering me for some time, and perhaps you as well, when considering how things are today instead of how they ought to be. Why so often that there has to be winners and losers in the socio-economic space that we live in, and why can’t it be more collaborative? And we talk so often about winners and losers in various contexts that you'd think that you’ve waken to a competitive race each day that you didn’t sign up for.

Examples abound: there are winners and losers in politics, the economy, the environment, relationships, and elsewhere. And they hit close to home for many, like having an affordable home, access to healthy food, opportunities to apply yourself using your best skills and abilities, to participate meaningfully in society, or just to be safe and secure.

Our current social and economic order tolerates winners and losers at a cost far greater than the typical monetary measures that we have come to accept as a universal yardstick. We lose out on nurturing people and their gifts, their present and future contributions, and opportunities to collaborate more closely. Instead we have rigid economic and social measures for success that do little to bring everyone into full participation.

Think of how society has incentivized home ownership, despite other forms of housing interests being more accessible, affordable and flexible. Our financial system has evolved to be difficult to understand and is sometimes opaque. Our legal and political system operates on confrontation instead of consultation. Our relationships, both personal and at work, often feel transactional instead of relational, despite a desire for wanting more meaningful and closer connections.

I know I’m not telling you anything new. But what I am saying is that it’s time to make the structural changes that go deeper than the incremental changes we have been making to date to fix these issues. It will take a more deep seated effort to develop a new consciousness, curiosity, and willingness to test ways of doing and thinking that go beyond the bounds of the traditional ways that we have been doing things so far. As someone close to me once mentioned, "going beyond just tweaking the software.”

Which brings me to the title of this post. Yes, we humans are suckers for punishment (masochists, even), because somehow we have allowed our most base exploitative, competitive, and self-serving instincts to guide how we work and live. But we can change this.