Work Face
A podcast where people finally tell the truth about work. Workplace culture expert Ben Jackson hosts refreshingly honest conversations with people from all walks of life about what actually happens on the job.
Work Face
Luckpilling the Meritocracy (with Dr. Aaron Rabinowitz)
What if most of what we believe about success and failure at work is just a story we made up? What if the core ideas driving modern workplace culture might be making us less effective, less innovative, and a whole lot more anxious?
Dr. Aaron Rabinowitz, Ethics Director at the Creator Accountability Network, shares his experience in off-Broadway theater and discusses his dissertation research on “luckpilling,” a radical new way of thinking about success, failure, and who deserves help (spoiler: it’s everyone).
(00:00) Who Deserves Help?
(01:44) Theater Work and Insecurity
(06:03) Workplace Power Dynamics
(13:40) Restorative Justice at Work
(20:26) The Just World Illusion
(25:20) Performance and Psychological Safety
(32:54) Leadership and Organizational Change
(34:42) Navigating Disillusionment
(37:39) Leisure and Human Worth
Dr. Aaron Rabinowitz is the Ethics Director at the Creator Accountability Network and host of the podcasts Embrace the Void and Philosophers in Space. His research focuses on how beliefs about merit and deservingness shape culture and behavior in educational settings.
Follow Aaron on Bluesky.
See also:
Luckpilled: A New Pedagogy of Luck Introduction on Embrace the Void
Behave by Robert Sapolsky
The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits
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Work Face is produced by Hear Me Out, a culture strategy firm for leaders with the courage to listen. We help them cultivate trust by having real conversations with employees at all levels about what’s working and what’s not.
Learn more at hearmeout.co and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Stop talking about who deserves bonuses or compensation and just talk about who needs what. What are the needs of your customers? What are the needs of your employees? And when you are looking around and seeing like where you can help, as much as you can, try to avoid slipping into thinking, "this person doesn't deserve help." Everybody needs help. So help them.
Benjamin:What if I told you that most of what we believe about success and failure at work is just a story we made up? That the core ideas driving modern workplace culture might be making us less effective, less innovative, and a whole lot more anxious? I'm Ben Jackson, and this is Work Face, a podcast where people finally tell the truth about work. Today, we're talking with Dr. Aaron Rabinowitz, Ethics Director at the Creator Accountability Network. Aaron also recently defended his dissertation at Rutgers on something called "luckpilling", a radical new way of thinking about success, failure, and everything in between. I'm opening these podcast episodes with the same question that we want to ask every guest. What do you remember about the first time you felt insecure in the workplace?
Aaron Rabinowitz:I think I felt particularly insecure back when I was doing theater stuff and I first started doing lighting work in New York City. And it was a pretty big jump from work that I had been doing to doing off-Broadway stuff. The thing I hated the most was you have to go find something. Something about the task of being told, go find X in a space that you don't know well, and you just are like looking around constantly and the worst thing is going to be that you don't find it and have to go back and ask somebody about it. That to me always just felt like a particularly stressful activity for some reason.
Benjamin:What was so stressful about the idea of having to go back and ask somebody for help finding that thing?
Aaron Rabinowitz:I don't like not being able to do a thing. And so tasks that were just, a task where you sit and assemble something, build a light, whatever. That's, a set number of tasks that you're going to do, you know, all the steps as long as you have all the pieces, you can just do the thing. But like looking for something is such an open nebulous task? Like, do you, how do you know you're really looking in the right place? Maybe it's under something, maybe somebody has moved it. When you do lighting stuff, a lot of it is very logical. You figure out why the light isn't working by tracing your way back to the thing. But looking for something, yeah, very open ended and yeah, it's just, I don't know, always stressed me out.
Benjamin:What was the culture like in that workplace?
Aaron Rabinowitz:It can vary a lot depending on the crew that you're working on. But I think because of the nature of theater in that space and because of the people who I tended to gravitate towards, the groups tended to be more balanced gender wise. The number one problem you'd find in a lot of spaces was sexist behavior as a kind of a default behavior. And so you wouldn't see that nearly as much if you're on a crew, it's like half non men.
Benjamin:How did others around you seem to be handling similar pressures? Do you notice any trends?
Aaron Rabinowitz:Um, substance use? I think people cope with the pressures in a lot of, you know, like, the fairly straightforward ways that a lot of people do. They blame other people sometimes, or they check out sometimes, or they go and have a smoke or a drink or something like that.
Benjamin:What were some of the power dynamics at play in that workplace?
Aaron Rabinowitz:Because it was a gig economy kind of situation, it's always a very precarious situation, and so you're always at the whims of people who are organizing crews. And so if they're good people, then you're in good shape. And if they're not, then they can do weird, and sometimes exploitative things. I think to take advantage of whatever influence they do have.
Benjamin:Any examples come to mind
Aaron Rabinowitz:Luckily, not in the theater spaces that I was personally in. I certainly heard stories, just, the usual kind of, hitting on people who you're a direct supervisor to, especially in spaces where there is no really functional HR. So part of the reason we developed the Creator Accountability Network was that there are so many workspaces that have, essentially, no oversight that the people are often doing their own gig economy work. It's often not their primary job, even and in those spaces because of lack of oversight and human beings, just being human beings, you have higher risks of a variety of harms.
Benjamin:So when did you start seeing this as a systemic issue?
Aaron Rabinowitz:Undergrad. I went to UVA for undergrad. I was generally progressive in high school already, but when I got to UVA, like I experienced a lot of what people would call rape culture, I think. UVA is a really quality school. I loved going there. It has a reputation of working hard and playing hard. There was a lot of binge drinking and a lot of sexual behavior that was happening in conjunction with that. I remember writing an article for the school newspaper. I made an argument that if you don't know somebody, you shouldn't sleep with them drunk the first time. High risk of sexual assault. And people wrote response articles like this is bad. Like they were just disagreeing with that fundamental basic idea. So that was when. I think it became pretty clear that it was like a systemic problem. What we've found with the Creator Accountability Network is every space you go into is pretty much the same. You start explaining things and they're like, "Oh, here's our version of this. Here's our list of people who did some really bad things in our community that we're still recovering from," like it's everywhere. So that's how you can tell it's systemic . It's literally everywhere.
Benjamin:How does this connect to your research on luck and merit?
Aaron Rabinowitz:Yeah, so there is a connection via the restorative justice aspect of what we do at the Creator Accountability Network or we call it CAN. So at CAN, we use restorative practices to address both harassment and abuse as well as content violations , if people accidentally promote bigotry or something, we have a process to help them understand why that was not a good thing to promote and how to correct the issues. Restorative justice for folks who are not familiar arises as a counterpoint
to retributive justice :figure out who did harm and harm them proportionally because they deserve it. Restorative approaches are focused on needs. So what are the needs of the individuals who were harmed that need to be met in order for them to be made whole as much as possible? The needs of for the community, but also the needs of the individual who caused the harm, which is the hardest one for a lot of people. Because I think if you're progressive, you kind of have to acknowledge that when people cause harm, it's usually as the result of an unmet need. So. that kind of idea of meeting everybody's needs connects to the luckpilling stuff because the luckpilling mindset and that phrase is a shorthand for helping people internalize the, what I consider taboo truth that like everything is luck all the way down. And by luck here, I mean, something you don't have control over in the way needed to be responsible and therefore to deserve praise, blame, reward, punishment, etc.
Benjamin:And to be clear that's, sort of in in contrast to other kinds of luck.
Aaron Rabinowitz:When I talk about luck, I’m always meaning non-supernatural, unless I say otherwise. Supernatural luck is really interesting. Almost everybody believes in some version of it. Now that kind of luck is really, you believe that individuals have the ability to take an event that is chancy, probabilistic and impact the probability that that event is going to occur., they can, convince Lady Luck to make the die roll the way they want it to. Non-superstitious luck is ultimately, when we're trying to decide if somebody was lucky or not, we're asking, did they have control of a certain kind? And that's not just the kind of control where I can pick up my glass and put it back down. It's the kind of control that's needed for moral responsibility.
Benjamin:Can you share an example?
Aaron Rabinowitz:Yeah. So, because I live in America, the example I always go to is a child with a handgun. You know, if a small child gets a hold of a handgun and shoots another small child we would consider that a tragedy. We would consider it very bad. We would try to prevent such a thing from happening, but we wouldn't consider the child morally responsible. We wouldn't say that they deserve to go to jail Nobody thinks the child deserves to suffer because of what happened there. It's just horrible luck that they happened to do something that they didn't understand that caused such terrible harm. So in that situation, we can see what we call causal responsibility, that's the ability to pull that trigger, comes apart from moral responsibility, whether they deserve the consequences of that situation. If they can come apart in that context, I argue they can come apart in every context. That in every situation, there is an argument to be made that no one has the kind of moral responsibility needed to justify deservingness, which is needed to justify a bunch of terrible things that people want to inflict upon each other and themselves. So yeah that's, the core idea and then you just practice until you can convince yourself that this is true for all situations for all individuals. And I think it has a bunch of positive effects.
Benjamin:I'm curious if there are any other examples you can point to that might be less cut and dried, where reasonable people might have different opinions about the moral deservingness of an action and how you might pick that apart in a way that adds nuance to that.
Aaron Rabinowitz:So, I'll take an example that relates to the CAN stuff that we're often working on when it comes to harassment and abuse prevention. A lot of times when people talk about sexual ethics these days, there's a lot of emphasis on consent. And I think there’s sometimes given too much of an impression that consent is a fairly binary thing. It's easy to determine whether someone consents or not. But consent is actually incredibly complicated, and a lot of it is grey area. And we need to be thoughtful about how we approach that gray area. So the big example that we often see in society today is power dynamic relationships. There's one that used to break loose every six months or so on Twitter , which is the debate about whether it's okay to sleep with your grad students. As an academic, I see this one a fair bit, and I find it fairly horrifying that this is a question that is a struggle for people, but it really does appear to be a struggle for people that like, to me, it's fairly straightforward. This is a person who you have a lot of power over. Not just with the dissertation, but afterwards, assuming that you are an academic in good standing in the field that they are interested in working in, you're going to be influencing their workspace as it were for a very long time. And to me, that should just be a no go. I think things can be more complicated in workplaces, so I do think there are relationships within workplaces that are appropriate. But you have to be aware of the higher risks and you have to compensate for those things.
Benjamin:There are a number of concepts, ideas that came up in your dissertation that to me feel especially relevant as we think through the implications of luckpilling for workplace culture. I'm just going to rattle them off in no real order here.
Aaron Rabinowitz:Sure.
Benjamin:The, illusion of, is it the illusion of free will?
Aaron Rabinowitz:Uh huh.
Benjamin:There is the, just world cluster of illusions which include meritocracy and a few others. I'm curious how some of these concepts show up in workplace culture every day in ways that our listeners might find relatable or familiar, at least.
Aaron Rabinowitz:I think we can talk about the illusions and then we can talk about the solutions. So I think the solutions are the stuff I talk about in the fourth chapter, explaining how luckpilling really is a mindfulness practice and how to merge it with other mindfulness practices towards specific goals, especially compassion, empathy, gratitude, humility, intrinsic motivation and flow states. So those are going to be the things that I'm going to be like, here's what we should replace this bad stuff with. And so the bad stuff is, as you say, the Just World illusion cluster. There is this group of illusions that hold together, protect each other, and are there to give us a sense of, underlying needs for fairness. To believe that the world is just, because believing the world is just, (A) I think feels good because we're hardwired for fairness, and (B) if the world is fair, then it's also in theory controllable as long as you understand the moral rules. So if you are a good person and do good things you will get good things in return. That's your law of attraction, wish kind of stuff, which is superstitious luck. All of that is not real though, unfortunately. The reality is the world is not just. It doesn't care about anyone in this kind of way. And there's a long there's a longstanding literature about the harms of the just world illusion. That it is the source of things like a lot of victim blaming. When someone is harmed, you want to feel like they were harmed because they made a mistake. They wore the wrong clothes, walked in the wrong place, did the wrong thing, said the wrong thing. But that is just a way to console yourself that you will not experience that same harm as long as you don't do those particular things. So it's a coping mechanism in a sense. It protects our sense of fairness, our illusion of control. And then, that just world illusion is protected and reinforced by the free will illusion that you mentioned which you see pop up a lot in policy, in workspaces; the meritocracy illusion, which just absolutely dominates most workspaces these days; and then the divine justice illusion, which is kind of a cosmic backstop for when these other illusions might fail. These all hang together psychologically, it seems like they correlate, and there's a bunch of ways in which, when one of them is threatened, another one jumps in to protect it.
Benjamin:I'm dying for an example.
Aaron Rabinowitz:Yeah, so rich people and poor people. At a basic level, it feels like there shouldn't be inequality unless there's a good reason for it. And meritocracy arises to fill that void essentially, to give a better argument for why some people deserve to be rich and others deserve to be poor. This then plays out, so if anybody has read things like Meritocracy Trap by Markovits, I think that's the best book on the subject, it results in a bunch of really harmful behaviors for everybody involved. Society gets split up into these gloomy jobs and glossy jobs. Glossy jobs, which are considered the success stories of meritocracy, involve 70-hour work weeks, never seeing your family. They're still precarious, weirdly enough. They don't provide security, even though you'd think that being at the top tier would provide security but because of a variety of things with our society, you're still very very precarious and forced to constantly be competing and the belief is when someone fails to compete in that meritocratic game we blame it on free will. They chose not to work hard enough. They chose not to chase those opportunities. And we have a bunch of thought terminating cliches to back that up that luck is just when preparation meets opportunity or something like that. One of my favorite horrifying ones is Thomas Jefferson who says, "I very much believe in luck, and I find the harder that I work, the more luck I have." This is a guy who owned 600 people over the course of his life. You can see how the illusions protect people from the reality that know, there but for the grace of luck go them, they would be on the other side of all of these harmful situations, which then allows us to justify everything from exorbitant pay scales for meritocratic elites, quote unquote, to not having a universal basic income, even though it seems pretty essential at this point, if we're going to function as a society.
Benjamin:I'm curious, how do these beliefs impact leaders and employees in their day to day? For example, what does this do to psychological safety in the workplace when people believe these myths?
Aaron Rabinowitz:There's a couple of ways. One big thing in the world of business management stuff that as I understand it, and I'm working with somebody doing some research on this, who's in that world as well, is that like, y'all are very interested in humility at the moment. That there's data that suggests that narcissistic bosses are bad for companies in various ways, and that they create toxic work environments. One of the number one things you're up against when you're trying to promote humility is survivor bias. The illusion that because you survived, you somehow did something that meant you deserved to survive, right? If you've ever been to a talk where anyone has explained why they succeeded, unless they just said the word luck over and over again, they told you a survivor-biased story of some sort, probably. That kind of bias is in direct conflict with having humility and by humility here, I don't mean what people often think of as pretending that you can't do the thing, being overly demure. Humility here in the technical sense means, accurate self-assessment. So neither overconfident nor underconfident. And what you find is when people are humble as leaders, they're much more effective. They're more willing to listen to other people. They're more willing to have their minds changed. They're more willing to acknowledge when they are wrong and apologize, which is a very useful skill, a very basic skill that seems to, people seem to lose as they get more successful. I also think that when you live in a workplace that's driven by things like compassion, empathy, gratitude and humility, there's way more space to take risks. Meritocracy as a system, because it's hyper competitive, promotes what we call performance avoidance mindets. So in the world of motivational psychology, you've got three broad
motivational categories:mastery approach, performance approach, and performance avoidance. Mastery is your intrinsic motivation, that's your gold standard for motivation You want to do the thing because you value the thing in itself, and so you're naturally going to want to get better at it. You're going to not want to cheat at it. Performance approaches is, I need people to see that I'm good at this thing. So I'm going to do it as long as someone is there to watch and praise and reward. That's your world of extrinsic motivators, which is better than nothing. But actually gets in the way of intrinsic motivation a lot of the time when we rely too heavily on extrinsic motivators. And then your worst-case scenario is someone who's just afraid to be seen doing something wrong. So it's not, "I want to have people see me succeed." It's, "I'm afraid for someone to see me fail." And that kind of mindset is really habituated in meritocracy, where the gap between the person who gets the job and the person who doesn't is often so tiny, and so the elite parents, elite students, elite teachers are all in this massive, obsessive grind. And students will learn don't take a harder class if you might get a lower grade, because that could look worse on your transcripts, even if you might be more challenged and might learn more.
Benjamin:How do you think this kind of thinking might shape performance reviews and feedback?
Aaron Rabinowitz:I want to just first caveat here and say, I don't have an expertise in business. So when I give advice or suggestions, there may be unintended reasons or harms, so don't take me as gospel here. This is more like, these are what seem reasonable, intuitive changes that need to be made. So when you're talking about performance reviews, for example, there's a ton of literature that basically says grading undermines growth and understanding. So this is in education world, but I think it applies very much the same in business world. If you give a letter grade or a score, a percentage, alongside your feedback it wipes out the feedback , the person's mind, they don't look at the feedback. They don't think it's important. So if you're doing a bunch of performance reviews with a bunch of like, scoring rubrics and stuff you're probably doing the opposite of what you want to be doing, which is getting them to understand and care more about the thing itself. All of these are structures for meritocracy to quantify itself and manage itself through that quantification, but all of that quantification is just pulling you away from doing actual good work. And we all know it, right? We all feel it every time we do it, I feel like.
Benjamin:I certainly feel it I, put myself in… try to put myself in the shoes of say a Fortune 500 CEO listening to this conversation. And the question that comes to mind for me, at least is, okay, great. How do I fire somebody who's not performing?"
Aaron Rabinowitz:First of all, as I understand it, America maybe has it a little too easy on how you can fire somebody. I think, firing someone is usually not someone's primary goal. You don't want to fire people because you've likely invested resources, hiring them and training them, et cetera. So using restorative approaches, similar to what we were talking about earlier, can reduce the need to fire people, can allow you to address issues more effectively and more quickly. But when there really is a situation where someone is not a right, a good fit or something, then you can still fire them. And I think we can make clear that someone can't do the work, without ridiculous, painful performance reviews. And I'm not saying we can't ever have performance reviews. What I'm saying is a way in which we are doing them now that doesn't seem to actually be benefiting individuals. I have a friend who works in a large bank and is an executive and does performance reviews and stuff, and I think he probably does them well and in ways that are helpful to people but he often has to work against the way the system actually wants him to do the thing in order to do that. And that's, I think, a common experience. So yeah, I don't think this prevents us from firing people. This is not a a recipe for "you can never correct someone's harmful behavior." If someone's persistently harassing people in the workplace, you should fire them for that reason. That's, perfectly compatible with thinking they don't deserve to suffer, that you're not going to harm them excessively. You're not gonna be vindictive about it or something. You're just gonna address the issue.
Benjamin:So let's say I'm this leader. I have taken your luck pill. I swallowed it whole. What's the first thing that I would change my organization? Where do you start?
Aaron Rabinowitz:I would start with your compensation structure, probably, amongst other things. Some people might say, well, if we do that, then we're not going to get the best talent. I don't think it's actually the case that the, endless arms race over compensation packages, is actually producing better balancing out of talent. I don't think the market is working well in that case. I mean, radical wealth inequality is killing us, I think. I don't, we should always be skeptical to believe that we're living at the end of our society or the collapse of something, but there's tons of evidence that radical wealth inequality does destabilize societies. And I think we're seeing that on a variety of fronts, politically, socially, economically right now. So you know, what can individuals within their own organizations do? They can look at their compensation package for their executives. And if they are extreme, they can put a cap on them. They can find other ways to compensate them: reducing work, reducing workload in general, I think. And maybe that means deprioritizing the kind of radical growth model, and that's, that's why we go back to the systemic problems of you need to change sort of capitalism and societal understanding of what the goal of the company is. But there are various versions of this… stakeholder capitalism is one attempt to do the kind of things that I'm describing. Sustainable approaches to your corporate governance are versions of this. I'm always hesitant to like point to specific examples because so much of it is PR, but my understanding is places like Costco, Sam's club that like some of these organizations are run in such a way where like the compensation for people on the low end is very good and they get a bunch of support and healthcare and that sort of thing, and then the compensation on the higher end is limited.
Benjamin:Great. So, okay. I've significantly reduced, probably not eliminated any kinds of pay inequalities in my organization. But, I've done the work to make sure that people are being paid fairly in predictable and transparent compensation bands. Where do I go next?
Aaron Rabinowitz:If you're highly profitable, putting a lot more of those profits back into communities, having a higher obligation or awareness to your stakeholders in that broader sense. Reducing workload. Like the theory of automation was always supposed to be people would have to work less and get more leisure time. And I think a lot of people are afraid to take vacations. Now, there are debates about whether mandatory vacation is harmful, whether it doesn't actually do what you want it to. But I think the reality is it doesn't do what you want it to if you're still in a culture of meritocracy. And so I think, you really do have to signal to your organization over time that we really do actually value and prefer this. So that involves your executives doing it, you know, leadership has to model behavior. When we talk to content creators, we talk about how much their behavior will shape their audience. If you're a creator who is casually misogynistic, you are going to attract a casually misogynistic audience. If you're a, manager who is a workaholic, but you tell your people to take reasonable work hours, they will not believe you, right? They're not going to trust that that's actually what you think they should do. So it really is living that way yourselves. And so part of luckpilling is about, self-compassion, so that you don't burn out and, finding that balance again and recognizing that you don't need to constantly be engaged in what Markovits calls conspicuous production, which is the modern problem.
Benjamin:Are there any other changes, even small changes that I, as a freshly luckpilled CEO, would maybe want to consider in my workplace?
Aaron Rabinowitz:Stop using the word deserve, and replace it with need. This is a hard trick to do initially for people, but there's a lot of good psych data that deservingness judgments crowd out our actual moral reasoning. So, just doing things like, stop talking about who deserves bonuses or compensation and just talk about who needs what. What are the needs of your customers? What are the needs of your employees? And when you are looking around and seeing like where you can help as much as you can, try to avoid slipping into thinking, "this person doesn't deserve help." Everybody needs help. So help them. That's I think would be a small, but very large change in your language.
Benjamin:I love that. And I'm curious what are some of the other—you you use the phrase thought-terminating cliches, which I'm also a huge fan of—what what are some of the other turns of phrase that maybe reveal this kind of thinking?
Aaron Rabinowitz:"Success is 90 percent hard work and 10 percent luck," or some version of that kind of thing."You are who you choose to be," which is a kind of victim blaming with regard to what we would call your constitutive luck. A lot of those thought terminating cliches come out of positive psychology, actually. So anytime people start talking about hard work or effort or choice in those ways, "that person chose to suffer" or something, those are thought terminating cliches in my mind. And often, they are used to prevent the person from going from 97 percent everything is luck to 100 percent everything is luck. Because they'll often say, yes, I was lucky in this way, in that way, in this way, but I also worked hard and made good choices.
Benjamin:What would you say to a CEO or a founder who's wrestling with these ideas for the first time?
Aaron Rabinowitz:You have to help them recognize that your capacity to work hard and make choices is itself luck. Sapolsky's book Behave is a really great long form explanation about how your ability to choose is something that you are lucky enough to have, and that you could be easily deprived of at a moment's notice. And then helping them understand that just because it's luck all the way down, that doesn't mean that there's no morality or that nothing has meaning or value anymore, and that it is still good to help people, even if your ability to help people is the result of luck. I love the language of things like pay it forward, spending your luck the same way people talk about spending their privilege. You still have that capacity to help people. It's just, you don't deserve praise or blame. Another thing that CEOs or people in these organizations can do when they are helping people is do it with less of an eye towards getting rewarded for doing so. Do it anonymously more. Then finally, there's like accepting the unpalatable conclusions that come along with this, that the world really just fundamentally is unjust, is a hard thing, it's a hard pill to swallow. And that nobody deserves, anything, especially, nobody deserves to suffer That one is harder for people a lot of times than that nobody deserves praise. Everybody wants praise. But if they had to choose between getting to praise and getting to blame, I think most people would pick blame. So helping them let go of that is, I help people practice by saying things like "nobody deserves to suffer, not even Hitler," and Really working through that in your mind is the kind of mindfulness process. The last part is reinforcing positive effects. Helping CEOs, helping people understand that you're not gonna lose. I mean, let me put it this way. You might lose some productivity. You're not going to have a collapse of productivity, though. If you are working people extremely to death, then probably they're being more productive than they need to be a lot of the time. And so if you take away conspicuous production, yes, it will look like your productivity has gone down, but I don't think you will actually see the kind of thing people are afraid of, where like no one will work anymore or something. Because if you combine this stuff with mindfulness, social-emotional learning, social justice, pedagogy, these other progressive practices that I recommend incorporating it with people will be motivated to do the things for better reasons and will be better at doing the things because they will be more likely to do things like enter flow states because they will not be constantly anxious that they are getting something wrong.
Benjamin:What about a middle manager? Is there anything different or anything you'd add for someone who's stuck in the middle of an organization, trying to embrace these ideas and yet limited by the broader structures around them?
Aaron Rabinowitz:Yeah, to that, to me, they are very much like a teacher at a school who isn't embracing these policies. So for example, if you're really serious about ungrading because you actually want to help your students grow and learn, but you're in a society that cares so deeply about grading that if they don't learn to care about grades properly, they might have worse outcomes in that society. Do you compromise your values and teach them the skills that they will need to survive at a cost to their flourishing as a human being? There's no easy answers to these questions. And so, that's where harm reduction and harm mitigation ethics comes in heavily. When you have people who are drug addicts and you do harm mitigation, it's because you're recognizing there's no way to just get people to just immediately stop doing drugs. Similarly, in these circumstances, you want to do harm mitigation for the people around you. So the harms that come from an overly meritocratic system, you don't want to exacerbate them. And I don't, again, I want to be careful not to be prescriptive and get people fired, but I do think that like that can involve a bunch of little kinds of kindnesses, right?. But like also just conveying that stuff as a leader yourself, helping them understand that you recognize when something is not ethical, even if you're not able to necessarily address it. People need to just feel seen, I think, sometimes, and have it be admitted that what you're asking them to do is bullshit, and you both know it.
Benjamin:And what about someone just starting their career?
Aaron Rabinowitz:I would say that, it sucks out there. The world is, in many ways, going in problematic directions . I don't think that we should lie to them and tell them that things are a meritocracy, or that a meritocracy would be a good thing if we even had it. There's a person who I talk about in my dissertation who says the just world illusion is helpful for people, and we should continue to reinforce it. Same thing with the free will illusion and all the other ones. People think that because they are what they call positive illusions, we should tell people to like, lean into them. So I guess my answer to young people starting out is, I understand the pressure to lean into these illusions. I think you're better off not, and that may mean that changes your job trajectory. And when I say better off, I mean, I think it's more likely to promote flourishing in principle, but in reality, you're probably also going to have to make ethical compromises at various points to survive until we overthrow capitalism, like until we have a UBI. We don't all, we don't get to be, there's no ethical life under capitalism in a lot of places. So I don't want to be high horsed about it, but I also don't, I want people to maintain a critical eye. It's very easy when you start to succeed to get pulled away from being critical of your world. So if you can try to avoid that.
Benjamin:What are some of the questions people at any of these levels might ask themselves that will help them maintain that critical perspective?
Aaron Rabinowitz:Look at a success you had. What luck went into that? If you get better, at just recognizing that, this person helped me, or I happened to get this email at just the right time, or I happen to have a teacher who taught me how to do this weird skill that turned out to be very valuable in this particular space. Doing that promotes gratitude which in turn also promotes humility. A regress argument that I give in the paper that I think everybody can engage in themselves where they simply take any activity that they've done and ask themselves, what was the reason for doing it? And why was that reason the one that won out for them versus other reasons? And then asking where that feature of them came from. Did they choose it or did it happen before they had the ability to choose anything? And if they say they choose it, you can ask what was the reason? Either way, you end up in a place where the person has to acknowledge that they acted in that way because of things beyond their control. That's the way to get luckpilled, but it's also just a way to become more and more aware of all of the aspects of luck that are pervading all of our lives, which if you balance it hopefully with the other work that I'm recommending here, doesn't cause you to spiral into nihilism or fatalism.
Benjamin:This has been delightful. Before I let you go, is there anything that we haven't had a chance to talk about that you think is important and want to share?
Aaron Rabinowitz:So going along with the kind of gospel of leisure stuff, you don't have to earn your place in this world. You don't have to work to deserve happiness. So you don't need to work to earn the right to live, let's say. It is unfortunately true that you may need to work in order to earn the money to live, but that is not the same as earning the deservingness of that money. You should just have a UBI. You should just be able to live a good life of flourishing. You should be able to engage in leisure without feeling like you earned that leisure by working a bunch first. Be more self compassionate and compassionate towards others. And nobody deserves to suffer. Not even you. And thanks, Ben. It's been really fun. I appreciate it.
Benjamin:Work Face is produced by Hear Me Out, a culture strategy firm for leaders with the courage to listen. Our consulting producer is Lina Misitzis. Original music composed by me, Ben Jackson. Special thanks to Rob McRae and Michelle Mattar. To learn more about Hear Me Out, visit hearmeout co, follow us on Instagram at @hearmeout_co, or find us on LinkedIn by searching for Hear Me Out.
