Gross Ecosystem Product

Every moment, every day, even when you are dozing, or half-asleep making your breakfast thinking about how you’re going to be productive, nature is working, and producing. We don’t think much about it, we don’t realise how much work gets done by nature itself – yet when we harness the work, the energy from nature, we credit it to ourselves. Worst still, we frequently undermine nature’s self-corrective work that keeps things in balance.

Gretchen Daily’s work thus fascinates me to no end. It combines 2 of my deep intellectual passions: sustainability, and economics. We need to stop thinking of creating ‘safe havens’ for nature the way we think about gardens by our home. We need to learn to live in the forest, to integrate so many more elements of nature into our economy and integrate them. I thought the philosophy of permaculture is interesting and a potentially important component to a vision of such an economy.

Like I mentioned before, it is not a single material like plastics, or crude oil, or cotton tote bags for that matter that is damaging the earth. It is the mass production and consumption of it beyond what we actually really need for our purposes. It is the wastefulness, supported by a market economy and capitalistic society that places value on things that goes through the cycle of the economy rather than the cycle of the ecosystem. Our ecosystems are circular by nature; but our economy are unidirectional at least until we put more effort into making them circular.

Turn off notifications

Do you want to know a secret? Notifications are designed to get our attention: the drop-down banner, or the red badge, or the alert on your lock screen, the little 2 syllable sound that tells you that you need to check your phone. Or that vibration in your pocket. The problem is that it keeps coming.

“Okay”

“Where are you”

“Hi Kevin”

We underestimate the stress and anxiety it create in others when we have messaging etiquette that just spills out messages like in a conversation as if the person should respond to you. Yes the messages are sent instantly. But no, you’re not supposed to expect instant replies.

Want to reduce your daily stress? Turn off notification. Don’t bother checking for stray messages except in time you allocated and scheduled to check. And make sure you schedule them during periods where you have the headspace to actually deal with them. If it’s urgent, let them call you.

Cotton Tote Bags

I’ve been carrying around my cotton tote bags – these ‘reusable’ bags are actually worst off for the planet than our disposable plastic bags. Other than the small plastic bags used for foodstuff, I pretty much never ever use plastic bags only once; minimisation of single-use plastic is very important first step to our habits as consumers to reduce the environmental impact of plastics. The trouble with substituting them with cotton tote bags and many other reusable materials is that those products have worse environmental footprint than plastics.

To ensure you justify the environmental impact of these nasty stuff, you need to use the tote bag daily for 54 years. Or something like 20,000 times; which they probably would be able to withstand. The irony is that one of the reason we started using plastics and other sort of polymer material is that cotton is water-intensive to produce and really doesn’t decompose that easily. We basically forgot the original intentions or benefits of plastics in a zeal to just try and eliminate them.

So yes we should ban plastics and perhaps it is really our mismanagement of plastic waste and prolific use of it that is the problem. Just as cotton tote in and of itself is probably not such a big problem until you realise you have about 20 different designs, patterns and colours at home (which probably is a number close to what I found in my home). It is just the mass production, the senseless exploitation of scale economies to the detriment of the planet that is at fault.

Tensions at work

Do you hate your work? Do you feel challenged in the way you don’t like to be at work? What sort of tension are you feeling? Why do you have a sense you want to leave your job? What are the moments that makes you uncomfortable?

These challenges are probably good times to take stock and examine life priorities. As I mentioned before about appraisals, life do not always progress in the manner that our career or organisations desires for us to move. And that alignment between our lives and our current role or job may not always be good. The fit doesn’t have to be perfect but if there’s sufficient strain and tension, it is important to take the opportunity to understand why and use that insight to find your next role.

Is it about the values of the organisation? Or the kind of people the organisation is selecting to work with you? Is it the sense of impact your work has for you? We too often try to make value judgment on these things when it is often really just about how these things fit with one’s priorities at a certain stage of life. Perhaps you joined at a point of life where you were more willing to trade your personal time for learning opportunities but now you no longer so you need to shift to a role that demands less time and yet leverages on what you have already built up? Ponder over these – generate greater self awareness.

Minimum Wages & Negative Taxes

It is significant that Singapore has pushed through some of the more targeted policies to help with low wage labour and effectively try to set floors on wages for labour. The tricky thing about productivity is that it has always been computed as a residue and tend to ignore the relative bargaining power differences between wage and labour.

Research by Thomas Piketty has long shown that return on capital can be persistently greater than economic growth which is to say that what manifests itself as poor labour productivity can just be an overall phenomena of capital gaining upper hand in bargaining power in the market economy. History have shown that the best ways to deal with the resulting inequality is greater public investments, especially in the area of public infrastructure and education.

The state will be an important player in this and the overall systems of redistribution can take place at different levels in many different ways. But ultimately, these policies will have to be anchored on the question of what we are growing for, and whom we want our growth to serve. I think Singapore continues to be open as a city state to draw the right kind of capital and labour but we are now fine-tuning the balance across the relative bargaining power of capital and labour a bit more. Especially the domestic labour force.

Ups and downs

One of the stories we inherit from the boomers is the story of linear growth and unidirectional progress. And I’ve mentioned this oversimplified story having a very adverse effect on our generation. While we are not naive, this story stays with us so strongly we can’t seem to get ourselves out of the psychological rut that our trajectories will always be the same and our future state is a mere extrapolation of our current path.

There are going to be ups and downs; and cycles in life. Growth is not linear and often not unidirectional. Nassim Taleb introduced the idea of anti-fragile which describes something that strengthens with volatility in due course.

Consistency is important but it should be pre-supposed. And so we can be so brilliant at times and then make a stupid decision in the next moment. These individual moments don’t define us and at each point it is the response that determines who we are. And who we are becoming.

So let us learn to shake of that linear, unidirectional story and embrace our up-and-down lives.

Who do you want to be

I think we should ask our children this question more. It helps us take the pulse of the kind of influence that the external environment, ourselves and the activities we allow them to engage in, have on them. Kids internalise the notions of good and bad mostly from the social environment around them and they learn what is acceptable or not. They are feeling the contours of our social interactions and the consequences of it.

To ask them who they want to be is to help them consolidate their learnings and have them recognise consistencies or inconsistencies without being explicit about it. I recall asking my young little 5-year old cousin, ‘why are you jumping around?’ and she replied ‘I’m a frog’. Then when she starting walking instead of jumping, I asked ‘why are you walking now?’ and she responded promptly, ‘I’m a penguin’. There is clearly this sense of our actions and behaviours explained in terms of our identity even from that early age.

Being careful in moulding and helping children understand where and how they find their identity is so important because that’s going to affect the way they think about work and play. For children who responds saying they want to be ‘a doctor’ or a ‘firefighter’, then parents or adults around them should recognise perhaps they already equate identity to professions or jobs. If they respond based on character values (eg. A kind person) or socio-economic status (eg. Rich person), you’d also realise how much those sort of values you’re inculcating in them.

And for now, it’s probably a good thing we should be reflecting upon as an adult. Who did we want to be and did we become him/her? Why?

What makes money

On one hand the government should not really bother about what makes money because that is how innovation happens and introducing constraints on the way people can make money is stifling innovation. But on the other hand we already have tonnes of laws limiting ways people make money. For example through fraud, counterfeiting, extortion, etc.

Now the question is whether clickbaits that generate advertising revenue is fraud. Or bot accounts providing services to increase follower counts. Are they not fraud? Don’t they “counterfeit” the real followers? Can plant based proteins be sold as meats?

How about when you pay for a subcription but you didn’t use the service – can the payment demanded and collected be considered an extortion? After all, that sounds like the scammers along the streets of London handing out flowers and then harrassing you for a “donation” sure seem like extortion to us.

I think we should care about what makes money as a whole society and we should learn to scrutinise them. Because what makes money will happen and will become gradually industrialised if it can be. And it will concentrate wealth and resources in those who are doing it.

Rising expectations

If we take stock of the advancement in living standards over the course of the last 3 generations, the improvements have undoubtedly been phenomenal. Yet the average experience of life as perceived subjectively seemed to have barely become more joyful.

If anything, our generation seem more disappointed, emotionally worn and exhausted than the previous. I’m afraid it is entirely because out expectations, our hopes and dreams have continually outpaced the improvements we experienced.

Every time something genuinely gets better, our expectation rises by so much more. And it seems, we have come to associate expectations with having standards that it is a bit toxic on our mental health. We have to learn to clean up our thinking about standards we uphold for ourselves and the kind of expectations we put upon others. Making others responsible for our happiness is pretty much a sure route to unhappiness.

Purpose on a platter

The fresh grads entering the job market and other young adults still finding their bearings in the market often want to be paid well and also have a sense of purpose in their career. They sometimes fantasize about the sense of purpose in fields they did not enter: medicine, teaching, psychology, etc.

On the other hand I’ve known cynical doctors, wearied teachers and exhausted psychologists who knows their purpose but are so worn out by work they wonder how things square. Then there are banker friends who made tonnes of money and think they need to do their part for the world and hence, get involved in sustainable finance (which honestly have mixed track record and credentials).

Purpose does not come with a job; at least not served on a platter. The story that runs in our mind about our work gives us the sense of purpose. Of course the story must compel us positively and move us forward in the direction the career tend towards. This alignment is not to be taken for granted. One can be promoted into misalignment because the career progress doesn’t fit the story of greater purpose – it can become diminished purpose.

That is why I care so much about stories. Especially the stories we tell ourselves; and this is why I enjoy coaching others especially on careers – the alignment (purpose), the planning (strategy) and the tactics involved. I’m writing an eBook which I hope to share with my readers. Watch this space for more details to follow.