Where are you going? And how will you know when you get there?
When I was young I never considered these questions. My destination was hazy, but certain. Like riding in the backseat of the car while a grownup drives you to somewhere you’ve only heard about. Where I wasn’t sure, but I would know it when I saw it.
When I look around I find many things that can be improved, departures from some ideal: stupid political moves, policies that create misery, stumps of trees that could be shading this park if only they would be replanted. All of this should be better.
Seeing these deficiencies and feeling like I should do something about them are probably what makes me good at what I do. My career capital has been build upon efficiency, ownership and striving to always improve. It is not the maximizer’s ‘do better, then do better, then do better.’ I generally find the improvement-for-its-own-sake mindset distasteful or downright harmful (although in a world run by maximizers, I tend to keep that opinion to myself).
No, what I’m really trying to do is correct departures from an imagined ideal. I just want to fix it all already. For example, ‘build new feature so it solves pain X for customers’. In my heart of hearts, I think that if I do it all right enough and eliminate pain X for the customer, I will have solved my job. Then I can get off this detour and back on the road to where I’m really going.
In reality I will admit that my job cannot be ‘solved’: even if it was, I would just have to go find another one. But inspecting my motivation too deeply is a good way to lose it altogether. Nothing is more dispiriting than realizing that boulder never will in fact reach the top of that hill. That I may never reach my destination.
So what is it I am lamenting when the field at the end of my block that has been grass and wildflowers since before the invention of money gets paved and turned into a shimmering black parking lot with an empty credit union at its center? What is this ideal I am striving for? Where am I going?
After much reflection I have come to realize it is nothing more and nothing less than the Great Valley from the end of the 1988 film The Land Before Time. That’s that yardstick by which I measure where I am, where we are as a society against where we should be.
I was halfway through writing this when I realized I needed to go back and watch the scene where the young dinosaurs finally make it to the valley, to see if my memory of it held up, and make sure I wasn’t over-idealizing my ideal. After all, it’s been over 30 years since I last saw it.
Narrator: The Great Valley. It was all they dreamed it would be: a land of green, of leaves and life. There were waterfalls, grassy meadows, enough tree stars to feast on forever. And grazing upon them, their families.
And yeah. Spot on. Even in blotchy low-fi, the scene brought tears to my eyes. A place of peace, of plenty, of joy and greenery. A limited place, naturally circumscribed, whose bounty exists because its balance is respected. Where we don’t need to grow endlessly. Where we don’t carve ‘godhead or bust’ into our mountains and into our hearts.
Call me idealistic and reactionary. I can’t help it. The childhood brainwashing runs too deep.
That’s my utopia. What’s yours?
Yum…this scene of the tree star is possibly the only time my mouth watered about a leaf.