Fleeting Moments, Vulnerability, and Our Need for Meaningful Work

Embracing Fleeting Moments, Vulnerability, and Meaningful Work | M3 BearCast

Welcome to the M3 BearCast hosted by Malcolm Travers. This episode delves into three thought-provoking topics: the transient nature of reality and the role of grief in appreciating the present, the importance of vulnerability in forming meaningful relationships, and the concept of 'bullshit jobs' and finding value in our work. Travers draws insights from books like 'Meditations for Mortals' by Oliver Beckman and 'Bullshit Jobs' by David Graeber, offering a deep dive into the psychology behind these essential life aspects. Tune in for a compelling discussion on embracing life's fleeting moments, the art of vulnerability, and seeking meaning in our professional lives.

00:00 Welcome to M3 BearCast
01:10 The Fleeting Nature of Reality
08:21 Embracing Vulnerability
15:55 The Meaning of Work and Bullshit Jobs
29:39 Conclusion and SupportSUBSCRIBE NOW to M3 on YouTube and find more M3 on these social networks at https://solo.to/malemediamind 

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Transcript

  📍  Hello, and welcome to the M3 BearCast. My name is Malcolm Travers. MailMediaMind is a grassroots organization dedicated to uplifting and unifying our community through dialogue, insight, creativity, and knowledge. And each Tuesday, I take a time, I take time to break down three topics that I would normally discuss on my live streams at youtube.

com slash MailMediaMind each Wednesday and Monday. These topics are usually around things like friendship, relationships, self development, spirituality, mental health, and self development. But today, most of these topics are dealing with psychology and deeper meanings behind our actions. So the first has to do with the fleeting nature of reality and how grief can help us slow down and take advantage of What is right in front of us.

And the next topic has to deal with vulnerability and the different types of love that require vulnerability. And the final topic is dealing with bullshit jobs and Maslow's hierarchy of meaning and how we derive meaning from our work. All right, onto the topics.



 I think one of the most crippling mistakes that we make in trying to pursue a happier, more fulfilling, meaningful life, is to try to assume that everything should last forever, or that we should make things last more. I got this from the book, Meditations for Mortals, by Oliver Beckman, and he also talked about it in his previous book.

of 4, 000 weeks, time management for mortals. And in both of those, he talked about experiencing these transcendent illusory moments and somewhat ruining them by trying to sear them in his mind so that he could relive them over and over, or trying to extract as much positive enjoyment as he could. In his mind and yet, in that moment he was not spending that time in the present moment and so That brought me back to this clip, I believe this is from a moth story time and I found it on tiktok.

I'm gonna play it here

 This one truth, everything in this world that you love, you will lose. That's not meant to make you sad. It's meant to make you sober. It's meant to make you a better, more present version of yourself. It's meant to remind you that the moments in life that you enjoy are as fragile as they are precious.

Whenever you're ignoring your daughter because your nose is buried in your phone, what grief is meant to do, grief stands up and taps you on your shoulder and whispers, Everything you love you will lose. These moments are as precious as they are fragile. Instead of your nose being buried in your phone, you better nestle your nose in your daughter because you're not going to be here forever and she won't either. 

And so It really originally resonated with me because I tend to be You a rather morbid person who thinks about the way things are going to come to an end. And I think about, and I worry about all of the negative consequences of things ending almost all the time. And yet, I have to recognize that there is a certain beauty that comes with recognizing the end of something.

Because of its fleeting nature, That's where the value of that present moment comes from. The fact that as soon as it comes, it's gone. It does not exist, almost. There is the past and there is the future. The present moment is just simply the future becoming the past. There's almost no present moment.

And yet, that's all there is, right? It's everything and it's nothing. And I am forever in awe of that fact. The fact that everything is fleeting. And that's also where the value in things come. And when I was talking about the types of personalities that exist, different personality indexes about introversion, extroversion, one of them, which is probably, I think the most conducive to a happy life is openness to new experiences or openness as a personality trait.

And that means being able to try out things that are beyond your comfort zone, or even better yet saying that you have a strong sense of self and identity, strong enough to expand your comfort zone to include things that you would not normally do. and fully immersing yourself in an activity. It's been called a flow state where you're not really paying attention to how this is going to look in the future or the past, but you're fully absorbed in the moment and enjoying it for what it is, very tactile, less cerebral.

And flow moments come I think because you are pushing yourself to a limit somewhat. And that comes before you decide to engage in that activity. You do it in a very purposeful way. You recognize that it is something outside of your control. You recognize that each attempt is good on itself, and that failure is a teachable moment.

And when you engage in that activity, you just enjoy it for what it is. And I'm trying to do more of that on a daily basis. I think another point to make is that in those different personality types those people who are high in neuroticism, like myself, also tend to easily be able to think about the negative outcomes.

And I think we have to push ourselves to do it anyway, and have, allow that openness to experience, to override our neuroticism and to engage in activities that have possible negative repercussions, just to go ahead and do it anyway, fully aware that there's always the possibility of things going wrong.

And. That possibility is why there's magic in it. There's the reason why there's value in it, because there are so many times that things didn't go wrong when they really could have almost, I would say they should have, so many times that I've done things that I really should have not been able to pull that off.

And I really should have paid a higher consequence at a higher price. And the fact that it didn't happen, I don't take for granted. And it also reminds me that even all the times that I think that things are going to go wrong, I'm not wrong, but the higher probability is that it won't, and I will be okay.

And so I take that into my search for novel activities. 



So some of the things that I would consider are. What are some of the personality traits that lead to higher levels of openness of experience? What are, here's another question, what are the differences between those who are optimistic and pessimistic?

Where do optimistic people and pessimistic people fit in to the larger framework of society and of how we view ourselves and each other?

And, how can we learn from each other? What things can a pessimistic person learn from someone optimistic? And what can optimistic people learn from pessimistic people? And I would say another question is on this quandary of grief and how grief encapsulates all of our experiences, understanding that everything.

that we value will pass away at some point. What are some meditations that we can include in our daily lives to appreciate what we have even more? 

 So I am coming to you with a meditation on the arc of vulnerability and why it is important to let our guards down with the people that we love the most. And in this video I'm going to play, she just explains how vulnerability has a reciprocal relationship with the people you love. Let me insert that right here

 Therapy taught me that in my vulnerability I can see people for who they are because it is actually a superpower because the more vulnerable I am I can see how you react to my vulnerability and then I can make decisions based on how you react to me because sometimes the more guarded you are the harder it is because if you put up a wall the thing about the wall is you can't see out as well as people can't see in but if you put down the wall you can see out and people can see And in this life, unfortunately, the lessons that we have to learn, you will get hurt.

But in every type of pain, there is a lesson that you need to learn. And if you don't learn that lesson, life will keep growing until you learn. And for me, my lesson is the art of letting go.

.  When you're vulnerable with someone, they respond to you in the way that you actually behave. And that means that their actions are an honest reflection, or at least their honest reaction to your actual true being. If you can't really be yourself around someone, then that in some way reflects the idea that you cannot really truly know the intentions of someone else.

You don't know how someone is really going to respond to you until you bring down your walls and allow yourself to be yourself in front of them. And one of the things that I've come to realize about vulnerability is that most people, most good people will value, vulnerability, because it gives them permission to let down their guard as well. Putting on a show I think is the standard way we move through society. I feel that, people who have learned some level of theater or drama or acting have a leg up in life because I think On a certain level, we are all on a stage and we are performing certain aspects of ourselves, our class, our race, our nation, our, our communities, our groups, we perform in certain ways that people expect us to behave. And that's all good and normal. But then there's a point at which people in your life need to be able to truly see you for who you are, the good, the bad, the ugly, and allow them to react to that in a honest way. And if you don't allow yourself to be honestly seen then you can't really know that you see people for who they are. And I would say that, vulnerability is not something that comes without a certain amount of practice. And I don't think it's something that you give to everyone. You let down a little bit at a time. You test the waters. You feel free to be vulnerable with the people who matter to you most. And you recognize it as a gift that is to be given selectively. I was looking at this book. By a follower of Maslow, who created the hierarchy of needs and on the hierarchy, love is one of them. And in his meditations about the type of love that self actualized people have for themselves he talks about be love. being the type of love that is just existing.

And then there's D love, which he consider a deficient love, one where you require the love of someone else to fulfill you. And D love is this type of feeling that never really gets satiated. And it's the way that A lot of things in life exist on a dopamine loop. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that gets us to desire things, to pursue things. It often gets confused with the type of hit that you get for a reward for something that you receive. Rather, it is the anticipation of a reward. And the problem with that type of love, the anticipation of receiving love, is that once you get it you're on to the next hit, right? Like you're never satisfied.

It's it's the thing that keeps us motivated to strive further. And B love is considered this antidote to it, in a sense, is that it's not a striving kind of love, a yearning kind of love, it's a, an existing kind of love, it's a love that can sit in itself and, begins with a sense of self love and wants to radiate outward to the people around them. And I think that's the kind of vulnerability that I am speaking of, the kind of vulnerability that begins with loving yourself. Loving who you are doesn't mean liking who you are. There can be many aspects of yourself that you don't like, but love is a sort of accepting that all of this the good, the bad, and the ugly are all who I am and perfect the way that it is and that allows a certain amount of vulnerability with other people because you then want to share yourself with others.

You want to through your being a good, a good and honest person radiate goodness and love to the people around you. And of course that, the foundation of that is vulnerability and letting people in. And once the people in your life are vulnerable with you in return, you're more capable of transmitting that sense of self love to other people. Being able to make someone else happy, I think is one of those true senses of self actualization making someone else happy by being a model of self love and vulnerability and the two of you resonating together to be that thing, I'm doing a little bit of reading on this and I will I'm gonna update you on what I find this is a book recommendation that I got online is called All About Love, A New Vision by Bell Hooks.

I think it's a classic. I get it. It's recommended to me so many times and I've never read it mainly because it's not on audiobook, but I am getting the ebook and I'm going to get a AI reader to read it to me and, I will let you know what I make of this classic on sort of the philosophy of love and vulnerability and acceptance.

I can't wait to let you know what I find. All right. 

  Another topic dealing with meaning and transcendence that I'm exploring this week has to do with finding value in our work. Now, there's a book that I've been meaning to read that one of my favorite TikTok creators is just diving into. So I put it on my list of my library to take a look at bullshit jobs.

It is a theory and I've heard people speak on it several times before and he actually goes into several different industries within corporate America and explains how a large portion of jobs in middle management and different places feel like they exist just to say that you are meeting certain criteria for the company and that no one at the company or any of the employees can really determine what value they add to the company.

It's just like you're a cog in a wheel and we're not even sure that what you produce matters. And I'm going to play the video from the creator and then talk about it.

 I'm finally reading this book after so many people told me to. Bullshit Jobs, a Theory by David Graeber. Wow. So his theory in short, his thesis is basically that so many people are working bullshit jobs and they even know that they're bullshit. Here's his working definition. A bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.

Even though. As part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case. I. e. all of us and we just click clack on our emails all day and we answer the fire drills from our managers and we have convinced ourselves. That we are either A, doing something important, or that B, it's fine to do something that we don't care about.

Where the employers and the heads of these companies convince us that these jobs are doing something. And that this is a system that is obviously so much larger than us. He published part of this, before this book was a book, he wrote an essay about this. Huge swaths of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.

It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the sake of keeping us all working. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul, yet virtually no one talks about it. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labor when one secretly feels one's job?

Should not exist. Unless you just think this is the author's subjective opinion. People did research to be like, is there Statistical evidence of this truth that there, that so many jobs are bullshit jobs? Yes, there is. A YouGov poll which asks Britons the question, does your job quote, make a meaningful contribution to the world?

37 percent said that they believed their job does not. A similar poll in Holland said almost the exact same thing. 40 percent of Dutch workers reported that their job had no good reason to exist. Cannot wait to keep reading this. I am fired up. As someone who has been in many bullshit jobs over the years.

 So this is one of those things that I think is often considered funny. The front of the book is actually a picture of someone making toys out of office supplies, indicating the idea that they're sitting at the office doing nothing all day. And on a certain level, you would think that's nice that you don't have anything to do all day and you still get paid a salary.

The problem is that there are things in life that matter more than survival. And this is one of the things that Harlow and Maslow talk about in their hierarchy of needs is this need for meaning in our lives. The idea that we need something that we do on a daily basis that contributes to the world as a whole.

And if you don't believe that your job contributes to anything in the world, anyone's happiness, anyone's satisfaction, making life more bearable more, just, the idea that someone, even someone who works at a fast food restaurant recognizes that you gotta eat, it may not be the most glamorous job in the world.

You're actually feeding people sometimes that's the, their, the highlight of their day is, I remember someone talking about that working the ice cream cone machine at Dairy Queen, and seeing how the kids and even sometimes the on the weekends when they came to get their treat was like the highlight of their weekend, it was Getting a frosty or what is it a blizzard?

I don't even know, you know the ice cream machine like we are all mad When it's not working, and so it may be an underpaid overwork job, but there's meaning that comes from it and that can radiate throughout the rest of your life But this idea that you contribute nothing or better yet, you may be just taking up space consuming resources in a way from a company and producing nothing of value, can lead to an existential crisis.

Like why am I here? Why is any of this here? Why you can definitely do that sort of

sort of negative neurotic spiral into nihilism if you don't really have a why for what you're doing and it's pernicious because so many people in the social system of capitalism. Reside in this sort of gray area of bullshit jobs. And, when people talk about, does your job actually provide value, and you can just ask people that there's a, what, a third of people say it's bullshit.

And even if half of them are wrong, even if it's just one out of six people truly exist in a job that could stand to be replaced by AI, there's probably several jobs right now that exist just on the cutting edge of being replaced by a robot computer chat bot. But those jobs will probably exist much longer.

before they get actually replaced by a robot. Because one, we don't know if the robot is reliable. It is a risky bet. It also just doesn't give really good PR, and there's just lots of risks involved in replacing people with robots. But that is just an example. Of jobs that probably didn't need to exist that need to on paper, to satisfy, say a stock portfolio or to say that you have a quality control person and they just really just don't do anything but read emails all day and or gave an example of people who, middle management people who.

are the go between decision makers and those who implement the decisions. But truly, they just don't do anything. They just keep the blowback away from the people up at the top so they don't have to deal with any sort of consequences with their bad decisions. They just, they insulate the people at the top, but truly they could deal with that themselves and save a lot of money.

Sometimes it is, jobs that are literally there just to cover someone else's ass, right? And so if they just manned up and took responsibility for their decisions, that job would just disappear, and it's interesting. So I'm definitely going to check out the book. I do want to ask some questions of.

my robot overlords, what are some examples of bullshit jobs from this book? What are the definitions of a bullshit job? What are the consequences of bullshit jobs on individuals on societies? And what are some further readings that I could do for learning more about this subject?  

Two additional points that I wanted to make were some of the hierarchy of bullshit jobs that he noted in his book. Now, I haven't read the book, but I just looked him up because I was looking for more examples of what a bullshit job is. He broke them down into five categories, called them flunkies, goons, duck tapers, box tixers, and task masqueraders.

Flunkies, goons, duck tapers, box tickers, and task masqueraders, right? So you got your flunkies, which are those who are made to serve someone else and make them feel or look important. You can think about like receptionists who really don't have any meaningful tasks to do in a day, but having a receptionist makes that person important.

Another example would be goons. Those who are there because of competition and not because they provide any tangible benefit to their industries. Think of things like lobbyists, PR professionals, people who help companies compete with other companies. I think there was a pretty good example of that with corporate corporate consultants who, basically bullshit jobs duct tapers.

positions that are designed to fix problems that shouldn't exist in the first place. E. g. workers who could handle the inefficiencies in the system by resolving them. Instead, they decide to fix them over and over again. That is probably the most pernicious form of a bullshit job.

I remember somebody actually providing a solution for a job that would have eliminated three peoples. Jobs, like you said, I could write a code that would just fix all those problems automatically you know, I could just write a simple program that would go through fix all those problems and Everybody was looking at him like you're gonna get us all fired This is a friend of mine who loved writing scripts, you know automated Programs and I think this is where AI is coming at Now we're, a decent person who can write a good AI prompt can probably fix a bunch of problems that You know, duck or, being duct taped currently box stickers, those who are whose job is primarily to check a box through forms reports or compliance to a certain regulation, if you had to have a certain position field for, whatever it may be your company has to have this role.

Then you have taskmasters, which is one that I'm also probably most most familiar with a managers whose priority is simply to supervise employees who could easily manage their job on their own or independently, their job is to make other people do their job and they could do their job just fine, but they, want to have someone to do that.

And, the thing is, I think some people may actually. Gain some sort of Sense of need out of these jobs. So like I don't say that bullshit jobs are always going to lead to some sort of Existential dread but there is like a bigger question The second question is, what does it mean for all this productivity all this work?

that people could be doing towards, concrete goals that could be, furthering our society. And this brings into two different sort of liberal oasis sometimes pie in the sky notions. One of which is universal basic income. People think that if we were to provide everybody with a basic income that, that would just tank productivity within most companies.

But when we think about the current status quo of companies, there is a lot of waste and mismanagement already there. Maybe tanking of taking productivity and providing people with an income separate from the need to fulfill meaningless tasks would be okay. Like those people would still need to find some sort of meaning in their life.

And it could be uncoupled from, being receiving an income, right? I think this is one of those things where it's being tested in different places. All the economic theories in the world don't really tell us what the way reality would actually function in those cases. And a lot of what we know as received wisdom about economics is mostly bullshit itself, because it comes from this idea that, human beings are entirely rational beings that function, completely at the whim of incentives that, can be known and calculated.

This is just not the case. And then the other one is being social

cooperative, co owned companies where everybody has a stake in the ultimate productivity and profits of the company. Instead of being a worker, being a co owner of a said company pretty much eliminates bullshit jobs as a function of the structure of the company, right? That if you're a co, every worker is a co owner of the company, right?

No one is going to be doing shit that doesn't contribute to the overall financial stability of the company. How that can be mass produced on scale, I'm not sure. I think it would be interesting to see more cooperatives flourish throughout society. I'm assuming there would still be large scale, international corporations, the way they exist now, but on the local level, companies that are thriving because of the fact that inefficiencies are removed as a matter of their structure.

And yeah, I'm going to be taking a look at much more in the realm of bullshit jobs and how we find meaning in work. This is a topic that I find fascinating, and there's so many more readings that I will have to get involved with, including this book. I'm definitely looking forward to it.   📍 And that'll do it for this episode of the M3 BearCast.

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