Oct

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Work-life wisdom from across the pond

October 3, 2007 |

Stefan Töpfer over at the Small Business Blog made a wonderful post yesterday about work-life balance and microbusinesses.

Of course, it’s easy for me to call it a wonderful post, since I completely agree with it and find that it echoes many of the same observations I’ve been making about the microbusiness movement for a long time now.

But have a gander at his list of reasons why people say they are “opting out of the corporate treadmill,” and you see one item that I personally have never heard an American say:

Deliberate choice to live with less consumerism.

It would be great if we were saying this sort of thing from sea to shining sea but, as I said, if people are thinking like this, they aren’t telling me about it.

Stop and ponder, if you will, the significance of the President of the United States telling the citizens of this nation that the best thing they could do for their country in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 was to go shopping.

(You may not remember that, but I do.)

The sad fact is that, by and large, we Americans tend to think that the most important thing we have over here is our economy. (About the only exception to that is the set of folks who appear to think that the most important thing we have over here is our armed forces.) And, in many ways, our country’s approach to domestic policy reflects a perspective that values the ability to make lots of money over pretty much anything else people do that falls under the category of society.

It’s why you may have known me to mention that what we have here is an economy grafted onto a society rather than a society that has an economy. In this country, people and their activities, wants, needs, dreams, etc. — all that stuff takes a back seat to where they fit into the economy.

That is the principle reason why our government can’t be persuaded to give a rat’s patootie about microbusinesses. They don’t care about what people are actually doing if what they are doing isn’t generating a significant percentage of GDP. And, evidently, the collective 12% of GDP for which microbusinesses are responsible doesn’t matter when, individually, a microbusiness generates such a small fraction of GDP that it would involve just too many decimal places to write it here.

That is also why the American government is and will continue to be preoccupied with job creation. They don’t really want us to be out here doing our microbusiness thing because that just doesn’t make the kind of money necessary for that never-ending, cancerous economic growth that they believe we need in order to have a healthy economy.

From the other end of the world, I’ve known far too many microbusiness owners who are simultaneously happy with the lives they have constructed for themselves and ashamed of it because their ambitions are so modest. Collectively, we Americans act like there is something wrong with those of us who don’t want to be Bill Gates when we grow up — even though that perspective is shared by the majority of Americans.

Maybe we should cut ourselves some slack.

Of course, one of the problems is that consumerism generates two-thirds of our economy. We’ve been trained to behave as if one of the most important functions of our lives is to buy things.

Like Stefan, I envision a world where we’ll pull our lives back from the endless treadmill of planned obsolescence, shop until you drop, the paternalistic employer-employee relationships in our society, and the growth oriented wastefulness that currently characterizes our economy. But it will probably happen more slowly on this side of the Atlantic.

And that’s too bad. Because I think that a part of what will keep American globally competitive will be our ability to adapt to an economic landscape with a different set of values than the last century.

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Comments

4 Comments so far

  1. Stefan Töpfer on October 3, 2007 10:10 am

    Hi Dawn,

    Thank you so much for your kind words about my post of yesterday.

    Whatever small business you run, you will be better informed and more interested about political aspects of our lives - I sometimes wonder if that fits into the current “political” thinking…. maybe thinking is the wrong word;-)

    ST.

  2. Shama Hyder on October 3, 2007 12:22 pm

    Hi Dawn,

    This is the first time I came upon your site and read this very insightful article.

    As a business consultant who works with small businesses and micro businesses, I realize how the government constantly ignores the little guy.

    Here is to changing that…one post, one article, one voice at a time.

    -Shama Hyder

  3. The Journal Blogger on October 4, 2007 7:56 pm

    Hi Stefan.

    You know, I could wish that were true but I’ve run into too many small and microbusiness owners who think they don’t have time to keep up with the issue. There are still a lot of people out there who are willing to let others do their thinking for them — although I think financial independence encourages other types.

    Long live thinking … by everybody!

    Thanks for stopping by.

    - Dawn

  4. The Journal Blogger on October 4, 2007 8:06 pm

    Welcome, Shama, and thank you for those kind words.

    Here’s to changing it, indeed!

    - Dawn

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