This week, I have been reading – or rather listening – to “Careless People” by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a personal account and reflection of her time working at Facebook.
The book paints a picture of a technology company where the drive for money, power, and status eclipses the ability to care about people and the impact of that technology.
It made me wonder again about the future we are all racing towards.
Technocrats believe that societal problems and predicaments can be resolved by technical means, through rationalistic solutions, driven by data and metrics and very much focused on what we can have or are allowed to have.
And yet, somewhere in this race our ability to care about humanity, the human spirit and our human needs risks getting lost.
It feels as though we live in a culture that celebrates the pursuit of wealth and ignores the poverty of the spirit. Creating a world that can feel increasingly lonely to those that retain the capacity to care.
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher whose work was central to the development of phenomenology, the understanding of ‘lived experience’ and what it is like to feel, see or think about something rather than explaining it through biological or physical causes and in today’s world, data.
For Martin Heidegger the core of being human was not that of being a rational animal, an ‘animal rationale’ as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and so many others had believed. What for him was much more fundamental in making us who we are as a species was our having the capacity to care.
So, thinking about who and what we care about and dedicating our time and focus more to that than the drive for greater efficiency and more wealth can help us create a life with purpose that is truly worth living and experiencing rather than an existence that enriches a few at the expense of the many.
Sometimes what we are really looking for is something more than the trivial and something that cannot be bought, sold, or measured by a balance sheet.
Whoever wants music instead of noise,
joy instead of pleasure,
soul instead of gold,
creative work instead of business…
finds no home in this trivial world of ours.
– Hermann Hesse –