The Future Of Work Is Wethos: A Purpose-Driven Economy
Purpose.
What does it mean? How does it integrate into your life? Your work? It’s what gets us out of bed in the morning. Purpose is the responsibility you feel to feed your dog when it’s hungry. It’s the love you have for your children who depend on you. It’s what you do to feel full in this life that can so often leave us running on empty.
For too long we have let purpose fall to the wayside in our work, in our communities, and in our lives. We have let a profit-driven economy dictate us, dictate what we do, and dictate how we survive. We have put our purpose in the back seat, and we’ve let it sit there waiting while we prioritize everything else in front of it. While we allow pure capitalism to devour us.
Maslow’s Heirarchy of Human Needs shows us that purpose is the tip of the iceberg. That at the bottom lies survival, in the middle rests comfort, and at the top drives purpose.
As each day ticks by and each generation grows up we see how what was important in the past loses its velocity as time goes on and our civilization pushes forward. We see generations emerge who value diversity, technology, and giving back more than any generation that came before them. Our purpose in this world and in this life is in a constant state of flux, and we used to leave our purpose at home while we went to work, waiting patiently for us to return to it when we had the time. The bake sale you put on at school, the park you clean up in your neighborhood, or the pet shelter you volunteer at on the weekends. Or perhaps your purpose comes in a different form, perhaps you use your art to create empathy, or your code to build accessibility, or your words to write important stories that reach people across the world.
Perhaps we need more ways to bring our purpose out from the moonlit weeknights and busy weekends and integrate it into everything we do.
The way we work and what we work on is what drives our economy forward. Our current economy is a profit-driven one, and every company that has existed since the first corporation puts profit at the forefront, and profit at all costs.
Alexis P. Morgan recently wrote a blog about our unrelenting pursuit of profit and the people this economy has left behind in its tireless desire for power and money. So what does that mean for the future of work? What does it mean to shift our economy toward purpose, toward creating a world that puts meaning first and lets restless emptiness take the back seat? What does it mean to do this so we create a fairer world where one can do well and do good?
A purpose-driven economy starts with the most purposeful people in it, our nonprofits. Nonprofits make up 10% of the workforce, and have created an economy made up of 74% women. I am a firm believer that the people who are underserved most, the people who get ignored, dismissed, and disregarded are the ones who in the end will push the world forward, and that’s exactly what our nonprofits are showing us. So our new purpose-driven economy must be led by a space that feels exactly that, left behind.
It starts by changing the way we think about charity, by freeing our nonprofits from the suffocating economic restrictions we’ve put on them to stunt their growth. It starts by untangling funding that is given and received with a long list of fine print, deeming any use of funds that don’t directly put a shirt on someone’s back corrupt and immoral when the for-profit sector we so vehemently defend is the one that stripped those shirts off to begin with. It starts with them and ends with purpose bleeding into profit-driven companies, creating an economy where doing well cannot exist without doing good.
In our darkest hours we turn to nonprofits to save us from drowning in a hurricane, to save our disabled and under privileged from a world that dismisses them, to solve our toughest problems and challenges, to lead us forward with the womanly torch of purpose. In so many ways, I could argue that nonprofits are actually ahead of their time, that they see something so many of us glaringly missed, or even chose to ignore in our rampant consumption and newly found economic freedom.
It’s time to flip the script on our economy. It’s time to put our teachers, our nurses, our social workers and our nonprofiteers forward to lead us all in a new life of purpose. It’s time to challenge the notion that you cannot do good and make money. It’s time to prioritize purpose over profit, knowing that when you elevate the people left behind we all thrive in a better world, a world where money and resolve are no longer entangled in a power struggle. It’s time to leave the savagery of relentless need for more, more money, more things, more power, behind. It’s time to become collaborative instead of competitive.
It’s time to lead a charge for a new world, a better world, a fairer world, where our intelligence and our energy is spent on problems that really matter, problems that have plagued us since the dawn of civilization.
Let us stop building AR to capture Pokémon, and instead use VR to capture empathy. Let us stop replacing jobs with no contingency plan to retrain our workforce. Let us use our technology and our power to build a better place, not one that sorts your email inbox better but one that leaves you feeling purposeful.
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” -Alan Kay
A new and better life and workforce awaits us, and the power to create a true purpose-driven economy lies in our hands, it’s up to us what to do with it.
