I have a friend who once told me that everyone, everyone, should have a therapist. If nothing else, he said, it's someone to unload all of your shit on so you don't unload it on your family.
I've written ad nauseam about the death of the community and what this means for how people interact with the market. But the problem keeps staring me in the face.
Case in point, I'm in a webinar about Gen Z and I'm told that they want a job that is meaningful. For my generation and older, this sounds like "I want a job where it feels like I'm having some positive impact on the world." But for Gen Z, it means they want the values of the employer to reflect their values.
This is new.
People used to belong to churches or civic organizations or other moral communities that reflected their values, but Gen Z does not. As such, they unload all their shit on their employer.
This will massively change how our country looks. It will result in ideological sorting in the market. In the state, it will either swing back and forth with each election or lead to divorce.
Vampire Perks
I wish I believed there was a path for the community to arise as a place for people to unload their need for meaning. The common thing for people in my situation is to bemoan the morally bankrupt values of this younger generation and fight against it. But I am reminded of the Vampire Problem.
Most people--given the option to have an undead creature bite their neck, suck their blood, and transform them into a creature of the night that can only subsist on hunting and killing the living--would say "No, thanks." Even though every single vampire, who used to be human, loves being a vampire. They prefer it to their old life as a mortal human. So who's to say I wouldn't like being a vampire even if it's not my choice?
This is the Vampire Problem. Just because I don't like living in a world in which moral communities shift from the community to the employer, doesn't mean my children's generation won't prefer it that way. If this shift happens in my lifetime, I might even find myself liking it better.
Full Circle
I'm also encouraged by The Third Pillar. Reading it made me realize the long, surviving legacy of the community. As a bayesian who is partial to base rates, I have to ask myself, what is more likely: a change in society completely destroys the community as we know it, never to return? Or it finds a way to survive and push back against the state and the market, just as it always has.
What if this trend of transparently-politicized businesses continues and every employer explicitly states their political and moral values and employees self select into jobs that match their values? Reducing your pool of potential employees in half is going to make you weaker, just like any employer that only hired blonde-haired candidates would be weaker.
The first employer to defect (ie be open to job candidates of all ideologies) is going to outcompete all the other businesses that only hire social justice advocates or nationalists or whatever. The defections to becoming apolitical and to prioritizing the best employees over those who match your values will increase and the ideologically-minded companies will start to go out of business.
But the ideological businesses won't go away completely! People will have become so attached to having that tight moral community that they will continue to meet regularly. The old ideological businesses will just become the new churches and the community will return back where it belongs.
There, I galaxy-brained myself into it. I feel better now. I guess I don't need a therapist after all.
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