“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“What do you want to study in college?”
These are two questions some might remember being asked as children. In the West, there are a limited range of answers accepted by the general public that validate a young person as being “on the right track”. These acceptable answers fall into the categories that are generally taught at large institutions, and ultimately get one a job at a prestigious corporation.
If one does not follow the standard course and is interested in other pursuits, it becomes a challenging road — often laden with guilt and shame. Under the guise of free markets, where one has “unlimited opportunity to pursue whatever they wish”, the systems of today, which promote “self-sufficiency” and “good work ethic” as the only viable modality of being, are in fact quite restrictive.
Path Normalization
Each individual’s economic box is designed according to their parent’s life experiences, daily social interactions, cultural influences, and desires. Desire is the spark. When one has a desire, they wish to satisfy it. Many believe desire to be inherent, when actually desire is often learned. Take the example of ‘Keeping Up With the Jones’. How could one desire to “keep up” unless they are first marketed the object of desire by corporations that wish to sell people the material good?
In today’s world, one must essentially be a Zen Master to not be swayed by the specificity and power of advertisements. Once the mind holds a desire for the objects or services displayed in the advertisements, money is needed to satisfy the perceived lack. By seizing attention and manufacturing desires in this way, human beings are shaped into profit and loss machines, living to satisfy these learned desires. It’s quite literally psychological warfare.
So, What Do We Really Value?
In The Origins of Native: Why Community Matters, we unpacked some important points about the nature of value:
1. What human beings care about does not need external validation to matter;
2. What inherently matters to someone does have value;
3. There are many types of value that are overlooked, disregarded, or rejected in our current economic system; and
4. Blockchain is not only unveiling that value, but allowing communities to realize it without intervention and extraction by intermediaries.
If one’s unique intersection of talents and interests happen to exist outside of one of the acceptable value earning constructs, they will quickly run up against the boundary of the economic box, and often become coerced into patterns of behavior that do not reflect their inherent motivations. Trying to operate outside of the parameters of the box makes the constraints more apparent.
Those who succeed are those who are skilled at obeying the parameters and maximizing their position within the box they inherited. They might never even realize their choices have been constrained or inherited.
Define The Box
It’s one thing to think outside of the box; we want people to choose their boxes, or define new ones.
At Native, we are building a system which allows individuals, through the power of community, to gather around common interests and define what they collectively feel is valuable and worthwhile. This new form of value creation is enabled by unique community currencies and effective collective decision making tools.
In the coming weeks, we’ll examine the kinds of communities that can be deployed within the Native ecosystem and how we can invent economic structures that support both an increase in individual expression and well being as well as collective intelligence and synergy.
The Non-Existent Economic Box
To conclude, it’s important to note that the economic box is something that we create for ourselves. One can say that it is determined by culture, but culture is you and me and the things we say to each other. We create and reinforce the economic box and consensus makes it true.
Anytime one chooses to step out of the economic box to do something new, it opens new possibilities for everyone else. At Native we believe that it’s time for a change. It’s time to invent new ways of recognizing, realizing and exchanging value together.
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