Photo Credit: DarthNick(Original)

“Young people often spend a quarter century primarily as critics of a life they know very little about: as consumers they feel powerful and secure, but production frightens and confuses them,” says Walter Russell Mead, editor of The American Interest magazine, is an insightful social commentator who isn’t afraid to make broad assessments of culture and society.

The liberal social model is breaking down in the U.S. and elsewhere, Walter Russell Mead says, but we can’t simply return to the conservative view of society, either. Calling the liberal model “blue” and conservative model “red” as is the norm among U.S. political pundits these days, he says that we need to find a way beyond blue that doesn’t try to re-create red.

The key to doing so, he said this week, is to understand how the blue social model has transformed the nature of work in our society. In “Beyond Blue 6: The Great Divorce,” he focuses his attention on a worrisome trend in last 20 years or so:

Historically, young people defined themselves and gained status by contributing to the work of their family or community. Childhood and adulthood tended to blend together more than they do now. Young people in hunter-gatherer tribes hunted and/or gathered with greater success as they approached adulthood. Farm kids moved toward adulthood as they contributed to the family’s well being at a higher and higher level. The process of maturation – and of partner-seeking – took place in a context informed by active work and cooperation.

In the absence of any meaningful connection to the world of work and production, many young people today develop identities through consumption and leisure activities alone. You are less what you do and make than what you buy and have: what music you listen to, what clothes you wear, what games you play, where you hang out and so forth. These are stunted, disempowering identities for the most part and tend to prolong adolescence in unhelpful ways. They contribute to some very stupid decisions and self-defeating attitudes. Young people often spend a quarter century primarily as critics of a life they know very little about: as consumers they feel powerful and secure, but production frightens and confuses them.

The separation of learning and work was originally seen as a way to promote learning: by allowing young people to concentrate full time on learning without the “distraction” of work, they could do a better job in school. It is certainly true that working kids too hard can make it impossible for them to learn – but it is also true that cutting kids off from work can also reduce their ability to learn. The maturity and sense of purpose that come with responsibilities in the real world make students more serious about what they choose to learn and how hard they work to take advantage of the educational opportunities they have.

That so many American kids spend so many years in school without learning basic, elementary school-level reading and math skills — to say nothing of the other things that in theory 12 years of formal education should teach — is a devastating critique of the way we organize this part of our lives. The sheer amount of time wasted is staggering – to say nothing of the money, effort or lost potential. People often speak of the need to revive vocational and industrial education as a way of reaching students for whom the traditional academic classroom holds little appeal; more basically, education needs to be integrated with the priorities and purposes of life as these young people experience it.

Read the full post. (Hat tip: The Daily Dish.)

When I read Mead’s critique of Americans as too much consumers and not so much producers, I am reminded of a criticism voiced by a friend of Steve Jobs (I forget who) to the late CEO of Apple. The friend told Jobs that Apple was creating a big problem in the world. Its gadgets like the iPod were great at allowing people to consume entertainment, but terrible at allowing them to create.

As much as I admire the scope and complexity of Mead’s thinking, I am also struck by his failure to consider the connection between the shifting relationships between learning, work, and wealth, alongside the shifts in American spirituality.

Looking at an important survey of shifts in religiosity over the past 20 years a stracked by The Barna Group. It breaks down its findings for women and men, and finds regarding both that church attendance is down, Bible reading is down or holding steady, Sunday school involvement is down, and volunteer activity at church is down. The surveys also tracked significant decreases in people feeling that they have a personal responsibility to share their religious views with others who believe differently and decreases among those firmly believing that the Bible is totally accurate.

What’s more, only one religious behavior increased: becoming unchurched. Considering that other recent surveys have found professed spirituality among Americans at an all-time high, it is clear that religiosity and spirituality have become increasingly distinguished over the past 20 years or so.

So as learning and work are becoming more highly differentiated, a parallel movement seems to be taking place in the God-realm. People in the U.S. today are spending more time in school and in differentiating their identities through patterns of consumption, and they are spending more energy in highly differentiated forms of spirituality, consuming new age workshops and self-help books, and less time in churches which tend to require obedience to traditional beliefs and codes of morality.

Mead speaks of a need to reform education so it becomes more integrated with “the priorities and purposes of life as these young people experience it,” but without uttering a single word about spirituality or God, he tends to reinforce the disconnections that he wants remedied. How — without encouraging young people to explore and express their unique experience of God or Ultimate Reality — can education hope to speak to their deepest needs for meaning and purpose? How can it hope to build character based on love and charity grounded in something more permanent than the desires of the ego?

If people today have become too obsessed with consumption and not enough with production, the remedy is not to send people back to factory floors or sterile cubicles that were the norm in the 1950s. We need new ways of experiencing work which allow us to bring with us our more differentiated and individuated selves. Those “selves” are more spiritual today than religious, but that spirituality is too seldom allowed to be the spark that generates the creativity that fuels passionate work and generosity of spirit.

The seriousness of the problem at work can hardly be overstated. Surveys have even found that job satisfaction among U.S. workers has recently hit 20-year lows. A revolution in the self and spirituality has taken place in recent decades — broadly, a shift towards more inward, highly differentiated individuals dependent on constant stimulation arising from a globally-aware consciousness — but our structures of work choke off the life force of this new spirit.

To move “beyond blue,” pundits like Mead must be willing to address Spirit and learn how it is bursting outside of the old forms of production into new forms of creativity. And we must look at how liberal blue dogmas such as holding to a strict separation of state and spirituality are compounding the problem.

Martin Lindstrom

World Spirituality as I understand it includes a practice of right livelihood, conscious business. The overarching perspective gives us the framework in which we recognize that the ethical center at the heart of work is Love, the force of evolution itself. It is from this capacity that our own individual work lives have an ethical livelihood and from the collective ethos of an organization that it has (or fails to have) an ethical brand.

The world may be evolving better, more ethical, businesses. How, specifically? One possible future: the Internet will empower consumer to hold brands responsible to ethical standards by punishing those which do not deliver. Businesses, anticipating a shift in power in relationship to consumers, will begin to act with greater responsibility rather than be punished.

Martin Lindstrom, once named one of the “World’s 100 Most Influential People,” by Time Magazine, tells us that the world of product branding is changing. In an article in Fast Company, he says that he predicts that Wikileaks sorts of organizations will emerge in the future which are focused on keeping brands honest. Smart people in business today have to realize the importance of putting ethics first. He writes:

Last year, I began a study of 2,000 consumers in which I asked for their ethical perspectives [on branding]. Their advice proved invaluable. We would be wise to take note of it:

• Don’t do anything to kids and consumers that you would not do to your own children, friends, and family.
• Every time you launch a campaign, a new product, or a service, secure an “ethical” sign-off from your target group. Develop your own independent consumer panel (a representative target audience) and disclose the perception of the product, as well as the reality. Let the consumers make the final call.
• Align perception with reality. Your talents might very well lie in brilliantly creating convincing perceptions, but how do they stack up against the reality? If there’s a mismatch, one or the other must be adjusted in order for them to be in sync.
• Be 100% transparent. Nothing less. The consumer needs to know what you know about them. Furthermore, they must be told exactly how you intend to use the information. If they don’t like what they see, they need a fair and easy way to opt out.
• Almost any product or service has a downside, so don’t hide it. Tell it as it is. Be open and frank, and communicate the negatives in a simple and straightforward way.
• All your endorsements and testimonials must be real–don’t fake them. [Read more...]

There’s no bright line between real world identity and online persona. The Atlantic reports:

What the researchers found was a big correlation between the personalities represented on Facebook and the personalities suggested by the test. The extroverts had more Facebook friends than the introverts; those who were open to new people and experiences in the physical world replicated that tendency in the digital. ”The study determined that online social networks are not an escape from reality,” RWW’s Alicia Eler put it, “but rather a microcosm of peoples’ larger social worlds and an extension of offline behaviors.”

via Who You Are on Facebook Is Probably Pretty Much Who You Are.

An in-depth article in Fast Company describes the massive changes that have reshaped the working world, requiring new levels of dexterity across the board. Here’s a taste:

According to recent statistics, the median number of years a U.S. worker has been in his or her current job is just 4.4, down sharply since the 1970s. This decline in average job tenure is bigger than any economic cycle, bigger than any particular industry, bigger than differences in education levels, and bigger than differences in gender. (Since women are more likely to interrupt their careers for child rearing and caregiving, their average time in a job is even shorter than a man’s.) Statistically, the shortening of the job cycle has been driven by two factors. The first is a marked decline in the “long job”–that is, the traditional 20-year capstone to a career. Simultaneously, there’s been an increase in “churning”– workers well into their thirties who have been at their current job for less than a year. “For some reason I don’t understand, employers seem to value having long-term employees less than they used to,” says Henry Farber, an economist at Princeton. Farber has been documenting the decline in job tenure in papers with titles such as “Is the Company Man an Anachronism?” (Answer: yes.)

Shorter job tenure is associated with a new era of insecurity, volatility, and risk. It’s part of the same employment picture as the increase in part-time, freelance, and contract work; mass layoffs and buyouts; and “creative destruction” within industries. All these changes put more pressure on the individual–to provide our own health care, bridge gaps in income with savings, manage our own retirement planning, and invest in our own education to keep skills marketable and up to date. Financial commitments like homeownership or starting a family are a much tougher proposition when one, you can’t expect to stay in a place for long and two, you can’t expect to ever earn more in real terms than you do at age 40, as recent surveys at Payscale.com suggest.

via The Career Of The Future Doesn’t Include A 20-Year Plan. It’s More Like Four.

One thing employers are looking for is evidence of GROWTH. The ability to tell a coherent story that integrates a multi-faceted work history can make a world of difference. The hallmark of a successful career sales pitch today is very often the ability to reflect with self-awareness on a seemingly incoherent mishmash of experiences and highlight the underlying patterns which make it into a forward-looking unity.

Some recent studies have focused attention on the apparent fact that money does not buy happiness (or at least, that happiness tends to “max out” when one’s annual income reaches about $75,000 a year). On the Big Think blog, Will Wilkinson pleads for economic growth as a moral imperative:

…Kahnemann and Deaton have found that while life satisfaction, a judgment about how one’s life is going overall, does continue to rise with income, the quality of subjective experience improves until an annual income of about $75K and then plateaus. They conclude that “high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness [i.e., subjective experiential quality], and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being.”

What’s average world income? About $8K per year! The typical experience of a human being on Earth is “low life evaluation and low emotional well-being” due to too little money. How many times does global GDP need to double in order to put the average person at Kahnemann’s $75K hedonic max-out point? Three and change. But life satisfaction ain’t worth nothin’, and it keeps rising. And, of course, rising income doesn’t just correlate with rising happiness, but with better health, greater longevity, more and better education, increased freedom to choose the sort of life one wants, and so on. If it’s imperative to improve the health, welfare, and possibilities of humanity, growth is imperative.

via Why Economic Growth Totally Is Imperative.

If this is about right, then the greatest moral and existential dilemma of our time could be put succinctly: How can we triple global GDP more than three times to maximize universal happiness, health, longevity, education, freedom, and so forth…without destroying the planet for other species or future generations in the process?

If enlightenment means an end to suffering not just on an interior subjective level but in all dimensions of our existence and for all people, then evolution has got some serious work to do.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of the Integral worldview to our modern discourse is its ability to explain why the solutions offered by the left and right to address global economic inequality are inadequate.

Change must happen not only in collective structures (left) or individual values and behaviors (right), but both together. And the essence of that change is that it does not merely arise from striving and activism and determination, but by getting out of the way of Love.

One of the most important pillars of the integral worldview is its understanding that there is not simply one self, but a myriad of constructed selves operating in highly complex contexts which are themselves manifestations of an ultimate reality.

So the self is personal and transpersonal; either way, the self does not exist independently from the language used to communicate its nature. The self is always communicated; that is to say, from a perspective which emphasizes certain values, the self is always branded.

One contrarian, Olivier Blanchard, hates putting the word personal next to the word brand. On The BrandBuilder Blog, he writes:

Here’s the thing: People are people. They aren’t brands. When people become “brands,” they stop being people and become one of three things: vessels for cultural archetypes, characters in a narrative, or products. (Most of the time, becoming a brand means they become all three.) Unlike people, brands have attributes and trade dress, slogans and tag lines which can all be trademarked, because unlike people, brands exist to ultimately sell something.

That core need to build a brand to ultimately sell something is at the very crux of the problem with “personal branding.” Can you realistically remain “authentic” and real once you have surrendered yourself to a process whose ultimate aim is to drive a business agenda?

Perhaps more to the point – and this is especially relevant in the era of social communications and the scaling of social networks – is there really any value to turning yourself into a character or a product instead of just being… well, who you are? And I am not talking about iconic celebrities, here. I am talking about people like you and me.

Think about it. Those of us who truly value attributes like transparency and authenticity (and that would be the vast majority of people) don’t want to sit in a room with a guy playing a part. If I am interviewing an applicant for a job, the less layers between who he is and who he wants me to think he is, the better. Those extra layers of personal branding, they’re artifice. They’re disingenuous. They’re bullshit. I am going to sense that and the next thought that will pop up in my head is “what’s this guy really hiding?”

via R.I.P. Personal Branding.

Leaving aside whether Blanchard has accurately described any actually existing school of personal branding thought, he does have a perfectly legitimate view of the self from a perspective which sees business values (reputation, image, profit, etc.) as anathema to personal values (namely transparency and authenticity).

His view resonates with postmodernism’s obsession with transparency at the expense of all other values, and its de-coupling of authenticity with achievement (“Tell me how you really feel, not what you want to achieve.”) Blanchard can hardly imagine that achievement and its necessary components (e.g., slogans, tag lines, resumes, etc.) can actually be authentic to a self, apparently because they are foreign to his self-sense (they look like artifices to him).

Blanchard’s post earned a strong and lengthy rebuke at the Personal Branding Blog, where Oscar Del Santo replies, in part:

His tirade begins with a statement that sadly lacks philosophical or sociological sophistication and can therefore be easily dismantled: “People are people,” he tells us, “they aren’t brands. When people become brands they stop being people.” Not quite, I’m afraid. By the same token and under the same faulty premises we could fallaciously argue that people are not consumers, clients, voters, patients, citizens or biological entities. Yet people are of course all of those things and many more depending on the specific context and focus under consideration. And there is no question in my mind that in our digital 2.0 world people are (perhaps for the first time) also brands and have brand-like attributes they can use for their benefit without in any way, shape or form forsaking their humanity or their identity as people.

From the ulterior development of his argument, we learn that the animosity Mr Blanchard feels towards brands and personal branding stems from his negative associations with selling and the misconception that we can only sell by becoming “a character or a product”. “That core need to build a brand to ultimately sell something”, he states, “is at the very crux of the problem with ‘personal branding’. Can you realistically remain authentic and real once you have surrendered yourself to a process whose ultimate aim is to drive a business agenda?”. The answer to his question is obviously a resounding ‘yes’: I have not surrendered myself to any evil process or become inauthentic to create a successful personal brand and sell my services any more than I believe he has done so in order to become a social media author and sell his books. To claim otherwise without proof is intellectually arrogant and plainly misguided. And of course, both he and I – along with everyone else with a career – have “a business agenda to drive” (even if it is is just to remain in business!) and need to sell a product, service or idea: and we are none the worse for that.

I am glad to find in his post the words transparency and authenticity and once again sad that he should need to retort to expletives and offensive accusations to put forward his case (“those extra layers of personal branding are artifice… They’re bulls**t… Don’t be a fake. Drop the personal branding BS”). On at least one account I can most certainly put his mind to rest: nobody here is trying to be a fake or condone such behavior. In fact, our personal branding philosophy goes well beyond his own premises and not only has transparency and authenticity at its core, but is emphatically built on the primacy of values, can be profoundly spiritual, and is open to people from all walks of life including minorities….

Del Santo correctly realizes that Blanchard is attacking a straw man, not personal branding as it is actually described by its proponents. He and Blanchard seem unable to recognize whether “selling” can be part of the “authentic” self or not. Drawing on his personal experience (and that of others, I’m sure), he disagrees.

But is it really necessary to say that one or the other must be correct? When human development is understood as a continuum, and the self is understood as a developmental line, then actually both views can be viewed as correct from a certain point of view.

Let us loosely apply the labels modern, postmodern, and integral to describe the different philososphical points of view, each arising in a developmental sequence.

1. The modern self is seen as divided between personal and business, and the latter is often taken as a roadmap for personal development. You are what you earn. Your business is like your family. You are the CEO of your own life. Your life has a bottom line. Achievement is everything. You work with brands, but you are likely to think of those brands as external to yourself. Your work life and personal life are highly differentiated and possibly segregated, and it is common to want to “leave work at the office.”
2. The postmodern self is seen as authentic. You are more than the sum of your achievements. You are what you feel, think, and do. You are so inherently complex and nuanced that no social structure, no business, can fit you without alienating who you really are. Being real is everything. You know what’s real because it’s what you are developmentally moving away from: it’s everything that a business is not. The postmodern self sees its own stage of development as the end-point of self-actualization and does not recognize the difference between the modern self and the integral self.
3. The integral self is seen as both authentic and an achievement. You don’t just be yourself, you become yourself; thus, selfhood is finally recognized as an achievement. Excessive attention to the interior life and its dramas fades away. Excesssively anti-business views and anti-achievement attitudes fade away. What remains is an achieving, evolving self. The new self must find ways of communicating itself and connecting with others who recognize its value. The new self reaches for a (trans)personal brand, a (trans)personal image, a (trans)personal worldview, etc., which allows it to integrate the stages of its previous development and interrelate with others.

So when looking at the debate between personal branding and its critics, it’s important to ask yourself: what is the self that is being branded? There is not just one self, and people often talk past each other when they fail to recognize this philosophical point.

In “5 Ideas that will influence 2012″ career guru Penelope Trunk writes the best prediction article I’ve read in a long while. She explains new twists on such ideas as “Nature v. nurture,” “Lean startup thinking,” and “Fake is an art form,” that are cultural emergents which she says will become more visible in the year ahead.

4. The rise of career centers.

At some point, there’s going to be a huge shift in university politics, and the head of the career center is going to be the god of academia. That’s because the value of a school is no longer in the knowledge it spews—anyone can take the classes online. Anyone can access the teacher’s papers online, and anyone can email the professor with a good question.

The value in the school is the jobs kids get after they graduate. For some schools, just the name of the school will open doors. For most schools, though, this is not true. And for those schools, the career center has an opportunity to add huge value to the diploma.

At some point, university administrators will stop courting physics professors and start courting a high-profile head of the career center. Because right now the career centers are throwing the students under the bus.

You know what will make this shift go much faster? When US News and World Report gets a reality check about what people reallly want to know about higher education, and they start publishing lists of schools ranked by how well they place kids in the job market after graduation. There’s nothing like a new list criteria to force the hand of university presidents. (And in the meantime, we should complain loudly that US News and World Report uses largely irrelevant criteria for school rankings, like class size. It’s 2012. If you don’t like the size of your class, go online and have a class of one, and then meet your professor during office hours.)

5. The compounding effect. 

The guy who publishes Success magazine, Darren Hardy, wrote a book called The Compound Effect. I liked the book as soon as I heard the title. I thought to myself, “Of course! Making good career decisions every month is like putting money in a 401K every month!” The thing is that most of us are not putting money in a 401K every month. (And it probably doesn’t matter, because saving for retirement is an antiquated approach to life.) But most of us can get the compound effect by making solid decisions each month, again and again and again.

The opening of Hardy’s book is: “Ever heard the story of the tortoise and the hare? Ladies and gentlemen, I’m the tortoise. Give me enough time, and I will beat virtually anybody, anytime, in any competition? Why? Not because I’m the best or the smartest or the fastest. I’ll win because of the positive habits I’ve developed, and because of the consistency I use in applying those habits.”

I like that. I like the idea of making lots of good small decisions about my career knowing that the compound effect will create big rewards over time. Which reminds me of the idea that captured my attention in 2008: having a strong career is so much more rewarding than having a 401K.

via Penelope Trunk Blog.

From where I’m standing, (4) provokes me to wonder about how spiritual organizations might change for the better if they paid more attention to helping people get what they want out of life rather than simply being a place to celebrate the status quo and revere traditions past. What would a “career center” look like in a church if that career is a person’s vocation and spirital journey? Many priests and ministers offer counseling to troubled parishoners and congregants, but what if that counseling were elevated so that it was the central or driving force behind the religious enterprise?

Also consider how paying more attention to (5) could help to re-orient such programs as Integral Life Practice. Instead of setting goals for spiritual practices in various domains (body, mind, soul, spirit) and then rigorously tracking progress towards those goals, the approach becomes habit-centered. What are the habits that are most important to work on cultivating at any given time, and how can we reflect on the progress or setbacks in building and strengthening those habits in order to feel more whole and alive?

On Psychology Today, Kim Schneiderman, LCSW, MSW discusses the importance of recognizing that “You are the star of your own story.” In her piece on positive narcissism, she explains what gets in the way:

Sigmund Freud distinguished between healthy and unhealthy narcissism. Starring in our personal narratives is only narcissistic if the titles of our stories are “Me, Me, and Only Mine.” But what if the title of your novel is “Serving Humanity” or “Family Comes First?” Mohandas Ghandi wrote an autobiography called, “The Story of My Experiments with Truth” and Nelson Mandela called his “A Walk to Freedom.” Martin Luther King and Mother Theresa starred in numerous biographies written about them. They were the stars of their stories, but their storylines were about living for causes larger than themselves.

Research suggests that our brains are wired to process information in narrative form. Think about it – we tell stories all the time – about how we spent our day, funny things that happened, and issues that are bothering us. We often frame our stories in terms of supporting characters – spouses, parents, children, friends, colleagues, to name a few – and adversarial ones – the disapproving mother-in-law, the psychotic, power-hungry boss, or the crazy ex-boyfriend. We classify our lives as chapters, which we call “the good old days,” “hard times,” “getting married,” and “raising children.” We get frustrated by sudden plot twists, excited by climaxes like weddings and falling in love, and disheartened by tragedies.

The whole social media revolution is predicated on people’s desire to tell their stories in moment-to-moment sound-bites and more explicative narratives. In an era of blogging, Twitter, Facebook and Myspace, I can now follow the daily chronicles of my childhood friends and long lost relatives, or enjoy the chapter-by-chapter unfolding of my friend’s sojourn into single fatherhood on his “Diaper Chronicles” blog.

Despite our predilections as natural storytellers, few of us actually take time to step out of our stories and figure out what they’re about, who is writing our script, why we’ve selected our chosen roles, or how the challenges that we face can help us develop the strengths we need to move to the next chapter.

via Psychology Today.

Even more helpfully, she discusses some of the issues that keep people from stepping outside their own story and how to overcome those roadblocks.

Her view of positive narcissism appears to be consistent with World Spirituality’s emphasis on recognizing the distinctiveness of individuality while overcoming the limited ego. It is by learning to tell wider and larger stories of ourselves — as aspects of a universal Self — that we evolve spiritually.