The treadmill

Last week I talked about the gamification of work. And I asked you to imagine a trader who was trading all year, and at the end of the year we realise that their terminal was not connected to the banking system, to the wider world, that they just engaged in a simulation of trading. Nothing had really happened. But their experience of their work - the ups and downs, the failures and successes, the feeling of self-worth, the excitement and the hard work and the overwork - would all have been the same. And I used it to illustrate the idea that gamification, the idea that we're engaged in a competition, that we have targets, is one of the reasons we're so engaged in our work.

I didn't realise there is a second point to this anecdote. Imagine further that, in fact, the terminal had been connected all year, as I think is the idea. But imagine through some form of cosmic luck that all the trades that they did in the calendar year, from January 1st to December 31st, average to zero. The end result is nothing: no gains, no losses, back at the starting point. Technically probably they would've had to make some profits for fees but let's just assume zero. Would all of that work have been for nought?

And that made me think of how many of our activities are actually effective. Now there's plenty of things that we do in the world that actually don't have an effect. If we run on a treadmill in the gym for example, the effect is perhaps that we get fitter, work on our cardio, but the effect is not that we're going anywhere. We know we're not going anywhere. If I go for a walk in the mountains, the point is not to actually cover some distance because I always come back at the point where I started off. So it depends on what the purpose is of what we're doing. I imagine if you put in a full year's worth of trading, then the purpose is to contribute meaningfully in some way to the financial system, but all that happened here was some rearranging of amounts in different bank accounts.

This allows us to understand the crucial difference between effort and result, between effort and output. We focus very much on the effort: we reward the effort in our society. We reward it financially, we reward it emotionally, we reward it with status, and yet it's the output that we're interested in. How much of our work is like running on a treadmill? In terms of the output, we are not going anywhere.

Apart from all the loss and all the meaningless work that we do, there is something much more important. There are important things to do in society, for humanity. There is widespread poverty and hunger, and even in advanced nations vast differences between people who have enough to live wonderful lives and those who don't. There is a lot of work to do on all fronts and so rather than doing this useless work, which is rearranging things and feeling that we're working, wouldn't it make sense to do work which actually produces results, to focus on the results of what we do, to calculate the value that we bring to our ambitions, to our visions, to how we want to shape the world?

Is this just an old fashioned plea for utility: let's not spend our time doing useless stuff, wasting it? There is one more layer. Once we have produced a society where people have the basics, where they have enough to eat, where they have shelter, where they have security, where they have education, where they have entertainment and culture and everything that they need to thrive, we can enjoy ourselves, we can do things which are useless, like running on a treadmill or taking care of our garden, or spending time with families or friends: there is so much energy left over to do the things that make life worthwhile.

The more we have outsourced our labour to machines and to software, the more we can enjoy that. At the end of the day, if we're conscious of what we're doing, if we're enjoying it, it doesn't matter that we're not going anywhere. Going back to our trader, if they did their job with the passion of somebody working in their garden and celebrating the joyous energy of human life, that would be fine. But my guess is very few if any traders live like that.

If we want to make an impact if we want to produce something, if we want to change the world, it is important we realise whether we are going somewhere or not. And if we find out that we're running on a treadmill, it's time to get off.