psychology

Only Dreams Of Wealth Are Permitted

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I saw this reddit post making the round, and I felt it. Kindly allow me less of a rant about leadership and projects and creativity to some feelings. Ok there WILL be some Project Management.

There are many things wrong in the world, and I pretty much rant on a lot of them (then usually mention Project Management). But I FELT this post hard. There’s lots of grifts and scams in America today, but there’s not nearly enough effort into fixing things.

I grew up in a place that still had depression era public works. I currently work in medical technology which is about solving problems as otherwise people die. It’s hard to imagine not solving problems, but then again that’s kind of the problem.

I think a lot of people just can’t imagine a better world and the way to get there.

In Project Management terms, we don’t have a charter to deliver or a plan to get there because we can’t dream it up. We are surrounded by wonders of technology and architecture, of history and providence, but we are impoverished in imagination. We can’t see a way forward and maybe not even a place to go.

Sure our media sells us “good” futures in the form of endless Star Trek series and assorted other stories – but these are also marketed to us, to appeal. The media will also sell us bad futures about dystopias and apocalypses, but those are also marketed. What’s not there is a road to the good future or a road out of or to avoid the bad future. We’re sold images without much solidity because it’s all about selling.

It’s all Product.

Our politics is the same way – and caught in the same loop. I dug up some satire from the early 80s and I’m seeing the same things being mocked four decades ago. We’re still doing the same bigotries and suicidal ideas and still satirizing them. It’s just like media, but let’s be honest, politics became theater decades ago as well, and everyone’s still repeating the bullshit. Real, big dreams seem to not be there, just the same nightmares and empty promises.

So what escape do you have? Well our media soaked culture will sell you grifts and personalities, so why not try to be like them? Invest in Crypto, become an influencer, whatever some rich figure currently bragging on your monitor is doing. We can’t imagine a better future, but folks can sell you the image of a richer you.

Being richer is the one thing you’re still able to imagine. Which is hilarious considering the small likelihood we will be rich.

I think we get caught in repetitive cultural cycles due to our media-political culture. T Here’s nothing to imagine, it’s all the same, and there’s just the promise of grift. It’s just we’ve gotten to the point where it’s hard to imagine hard-nosed, hands-on work to improve the world because it’s all images. It’s Society of the Spectacle, but the Spectacle includes people online screaming about mood-altering chemicals sprayed during wildfires that occurred due to global warming.

And of course me, the Project Manager, is constantly screaming inside just like all my fellows. What are the goals? The plan? Come on people!

Even though I can imagine a better future and a way to get there, it can be frustrating. So let me close by sharing a few things that helped me.

  • I’ve been just reading more. This leads to thinking. What I do watch more and more of modern nonfiction are specialists, experienced people, and indie creators and news.
  • I’ve been reading older texts on philosophy and history, seeing the world differently. It helps you imagine – and helps you see what’s been the same for centuries or aeons.
  • Getting hands-on locally with disaster prep. Just taking a CERT course was an incredible eye-opener to how the world works. Studying disaster prep made me appreciate work in California that goes back over a century in flood prevention.
  • Actual activism of any kind. Donate. Phone call. Do the disaster prep I mentioned. Get involved in anything that gets results. It’ll help you imagine what you want and how to get there.
  • Read up on other cultures and times. There’s a wealth of knowledge of how people have lived and imagined over the years. Even if some things seem out of date or antiquated, there’s plenty of insight. Seeing how people lived differently helps you imagine living differently.
  • Select your media. I’m not saying avoid trash – just know when you select your junk food. Trust me, I can’t judge, a friend has got me watching TWO Isekai deconstruction comedies.
  • Work with people. Talking to others can get you out of your imagination bubble.
  • WORK to imagine better. Write it down. Do a story. Let yourself practice dreaming.

No one is going to sell us a better future or a way forward. We have to make it together.

Steven Savage

Madness From The Measure

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’m posting this before the 2024 election and everyone is talking about polls. Movements of a tenth of a point garner news stories. Questionable polls flood the zone. Everyone is looking at a few numbers and asking “what does it mean?”

So we know what that means here, I get to talk about the Unaccountability Machine again! If you’re new here, it’s a book on why organizations go stark raving bonkers, which seems pretty relevant now.

One of the many bits of wisdom in the Unaccountability Machine is focus on a limited metric makes an organization go insane. The author is usually talking about shareholder value, which is easily maximized by doing things that don’t actually involve doing useful things. A business can completely undermine itself, especially if it has enough money, and end up propped up by investors while not doing anything. At least until things fall apart.

Going mad from focusing on one number? Sounds a lot like polls doesn’t it?

We’re obsessed with polls, wanting to see the future, to know. Of course these are snapshots in time, and snapshots weighed and changed and tweaked to try to make them accurate. In the end someone asks a few people and then tries to model what their responses mean for the population as a whole. If that sounds vaguely crazy, congratulations, you’re starting to get it.

Trying to get the number right will make you mad, as we’ve seen quite a few times. And you know who I mean.

But also we follow the polls. We want to know what it means, and when you have a margin of error of 2% or more that often becomes meaningless. But boy as we look at those numbers, we all start to go a little crazy one way or another. We’re trying to see the future made by people either lying or trying, but not by those who know.

Watching the number will make you insane as will knowing it may be completely made up.

Finally, yes, there are manipulated polls. It’s been fairly obvious that happens for awhile, but any idiot can call themselves a pollster, and some pollsters are already a few bricks shy of a moral or mental load. So there may also be lots of B.S., making everyone else further crazy.

And then how many of the liars or propagandists are already slamming the kool-aid, believing what they lie about – or knowing they’re lying but not being sure of anything.

I’m really getting all the “nose to the grindstone, get out the vote people” this year. You just ignore the polls unless there are useful extremes and work hard. And boy in 2024, it seems like there’s a lot of weird things where margins of error tell us how much we can do or don’t know so we might as well get to work.

But the magic number tells us nothing, though it will make us and a lot of other people crazy.

What is finally crazy-making is maybe we could actually try to do stuff that works for people in politics. That maybe we need to discuss our poll obsession, or what works. But horseraces make for exciting news and endless amounts of fundraising letters. The news media makes bank on all this, but we keep talking numbers not people.

Which makes it all more crazy.

Steven Savage

Marketing Is An Infection

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Being a creative person who hangs out with creatives, we often discuss marketing – and it’s a popular subject among us as of late. Our reactions have not been, shall we say, civil towards marketing creative work in 2024. Or probably the past decade. Or three. Or our lifetimes.

Something disturbing that has come to mind from these discussions is how marketing isn’t how we sell writing, but how we THINK of writing. If you at all try to market your work, thoughts of marketing will doubtlessly infect your work as you create it. There’s always that voice in your head that takes the books, seminars, and suggestions you’ve experienced and whispers on how to do your writing or art or whatever.

You’re not writing you’re marketing

That voice is actually a constant drumbeat in our culture and we miss how widespread it is. Personal Branding seminars, amazon marketing lessons, endless books on how to write what sells, etc. are everywhere. There’s also blatant how-to-write-for-market books like “Save The Cat” and so on. I’ve even seen it well argued that the Joseph Campbell’s contrived “momonmyth” has so intertwined in culture that it affects our media and in turn our way of promoting it.

As I’ve changed my writing to be more personal columns (like this), art (under a pen name) and small press (under a pen name, look I have many) I’ve been doing more work for myself. To not think about marketing (as much) is not only liberating, but made me see how it infected way too much of my work (and that’s a wide body of work).

It’s a subtle thing, of course. Write an extra career book to help people in the thoughts it’ll help sell my others. Way With Worlds went through many experiments, including one that made me wonder if it was easier as a promotional – when it became my flagship. I vacillated on the plots of my novels to fit various desires, patterns, etc. (honestly, probably why they weren’t quite what I wanted).

How much of my writing has been me and how much has been marketing thoughts? Marketing is an infection that we’re all suffering from.

The ads you’re sick of in your browser are just the blatant, resource-consuming, questionably-targeted, most visible manifestation of marketing Over Everything. Do so many things seem empty? Well part of that is because they’re meant to be sold not experienced. Does your own work feel like checking boxes to it sells?

Now that I’ve stepped into some more for-me creative works it’s fairly obvious how widespread the Marketing Infection is. It also makes me mourn all the things that could have been and may not be but for someone trying to write/paint by the numbers of a marketing guide.

I don’t cast aspersions on people that want to make money at creative work. In fact, trying to “figure out the system” can be its own fun challenge! But we do have to ask if it’s become too much of a driver that shapes our lives and work. We also have to ask how it shapes our choices of what we consume and do.

Because the infection is widespread.

Steven Savage