A new chapter of my life, the first chapter of Infiniteconomics
Serendipitous encounters and the bright side of economics
All summer I’ve been waiting for a falling star. At the beginning of June earlier this year, I had moved from Torino to Murazzano, a little village in the Italian hills, to spend some time in the house my grandmother had left me. Three months went by. I grew a vegetable garden and drafted “L’economia dell’infinito”, a book I had dreamt of writing since December 2012. In the countryside I finally found the time and space to organize all my ideas. Almost every night I looked at the sky, expecting to see a falling star, but no luck. As I was finishing up the draft at the beginning of September, I decided that I wanted to develop it further and translate it into English. I wrote to my friends Niccolò and Antonio, asking them to join Exosphere, an international community in Chile, who I felt was aligned with the ideas I was developing.
“Yes, you can come to Exosphere to finish your book and translate it into English”, I was told on September 16th. Together with excitement, many doubts and fears emerged; I procrastinated on the decision of leaving until one night when I was lying in bed and a shiny falling star crossed the little patch of sky in my window. I can’t explain why, but that night I decided to take action. A few days later I bought the tickets and flew, for the first time in my life, to write a book in South America.
One of the first people I met upon landing in Chile was Benedicte Riis. I had just dropped off my luggage at my new apartment, taken a shower, and met Antonio. After an initial conversation on the street, Benedicte invited me and a couple of new friends into a cozy van with an Alaskan license plate. Two years earlier, she and her partner Edson had bought this vehicle in the capital city of Anchorage and driven south, all the way through the Americas. “We are actually sailors”, Benedicte told us, “and as soon as we reach the southernmost tip of South America we are going to sell the van and make our way to the Mediterranean on a sailing boat”.
Later that day, she agreed to join us at the Exosphere HQ for an hour or two and tell her vision of a meaningful life to a dozen young women participating in the ATHENA Entrepreneurship Boot Camp for Women. As she recounted the ideas and experiences that had made her the person she is today, I suddenly recognized that she was a living and breathing example of somebody playing the infinite game, both in her personal life and in economic terms.
“A finite game is played with the purpose of winning (thus ending the game), while an infinite game is played with the purpose of continuing the play.”
~ James Carse, “Finite and Infinite Games”
In her story-telling session, Benedicte started out by quoting one of her long-time friends and fellow sailor Jimmy Cornell, who likes to sum up his drive towards self-realization with the adage “I am lucky, but I train every day”. According to Benedicte, this is one of the most important pieces of wisdom she has encountered in her life to date. I can see why and would add that it expresses the quintessence of an infinite player’s way of life. While finite players work hard for the game to come to an end, infinite players play for the sake of playing. In their economic life, infinite players never settle for a job or a company, and they don’t get trapped in the game of protecting the assets they acquire; they just keep playing and exploring.
Never Settle
“I have problems to solve every day, just like everybody else, and I don’t know whether I have become any good at it. I only know that I have become better at following my heart”, she told us about her 50+ years of earthly learning. Born and raised in Denmark, Benedicte first taught in schools and later went on to create an organization that would build schools in several poor countries. Just like Benedicte, in their personal lives infinite players don’t settle for an easy answer either. “Then, one day, I saw the mast of a sailing boat swaying on the sea and I knew in my heart that it was time to go. The organization was sound and full of young people who could take care of it. So I bought a 31 foot sailing boat in South Africa and started on my journey through Saint Helena in Brazil (where I would meet Edson) and Panama, then on to Galapagos and eventually the Pacific Islands, where we sold the boat.”
Detachment, whether from material things, from physical places, or from relationships, is one of the traits that allows the infinite player to shed inhibitions to open-ended exploration. There are always going to be new boats to sail, new friends to make, and new horizons to chase.
But what about making ends meet?
“When I need money I play my songs live or I write books”, Benedicte explained. “Sometimes it’s important to move around so you can nurture your creativity, but that’s something difficult to explain to a bank.” Seen through this lense, creativity and diversified skills are sound, lasting assets. Assets of the kind you would be wise to make a priority in allocating your resources to. Creativity involves surprise and is one of those universally applicable meta-skills. It means creating something that has not been made or was even known before. It is the triumph of the future over the past. By contrast, the economic behavior of the largest institutions in society today — big companies, financial institutions, government — depends strongly on using statistics (an account of what happened) to produce forecasts (an account of what will happen, but not really), thereby projecting the past into the future. This path-dependent logic, spreading from individual minds through standard economic analysis to the whole econo-political system we live in, is actually one, if not the major underlying cause of the financial crisis of 2008.
A true solution to any crisis, whether it’s finding our own path in life or building a more robust society and economy, would recognize the future as an ocean of infinite possibilities and seek to grow into as well as expand that space.
Every problem can be solved as long as individuals are free to cooperate and let their creativity fully bloom.
~ Me
A simple life
Other sound assets are deep human relationships and practical skills, neither of which — like your unique creativity — can be destroyed by rust or stolen by thieves. “Upon our arrival to Santiago, we were invited to a Book Fair by a friend at the Embassy. There, Edson was asked to work as an electrician”, Benedicte explained. Simple (but not easy), blue-collar skills are a wonderful investment in your future earning ability and have the added benefit of being useful on their own. Being able to fix your own lights, build a makeshift table, or lay some floor tiling gives you not only a marketable skill but actually makes you less dependent on fairweather economic conditions and the magnanimity of an employer. And the satisfaction that comes with being able to assess a problem, devise a solution, and then implement it in physical reality is something that, sadly, too few modern knowledge workers ever experience.
Another good piece of advice for traveling is bringing only light luggage and keeping your commitments simple. “If we had debts our income would be eroded month by month, making it that much more difficult and stressful to survive on the road.” In a world where both private and public debt are at historic highs in virtually every country, it would do both citizens and holders of public office some good to contemplate a more prudent approach to financial matters. It is another instance where individual beliefs and economic knowledge matter deeply. In fact, and opposed to widespread academic and popular theories, our institutions are not combating the crisis by increasing money supply, encouraging consumption, and accumulating debt. They are merely pretending to solve a downturn by exacerbating the very same problems that caused it while conveniently scoring points with the voting public.
Imagine
Imagine for a moment that you owned only very few things, but were able to access everything you need, allowing you to travel light through your life and the world. Imagine that your most valuable assets were contained in yourself — your uniqueness, creativity, and variety of skills — and in the people you establish sincere relationships with. Imagine taking full responsibility for your life, choosing to become self-reliant and staying maximally free. Imagine if the best strategy you could opt for in this time of dramatic change was for you to playfully cooperate with other players so that the game could keep on going, instead of competing for points in a game that requires you to constantly defeat — and be defeated by — other people.
This is what Infiniteconomics — economic life as an infinite game — is all about: exploring the ideas that allow us to grow, our societies to flourish, and our economies to recover, one person at a time. You, me, and Benedicte.
This is a story by Emilio Rocca who is currently writing the English language edition of his book “Infiniteconomics”. You can find out more about the project on the website at http://infiniteconomics.com/.
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