Possibility in 2030

Seth Godin wrote a blog post today entitled “2030”.

After his usual clever, though admittedly only somewhat helpful story about smoke detectors, he says the following:

Whatever happens over the next ten years, if history is any guide at all, the year we just finished will be mostly a faded memory.

What will matter more than what just happened is what we decide to do with where we are, daily, persistently, generously, for the next 3,650 days.

Here’s to possibility, to justice, and to betting on the future.

2020 will likely be an exception to this for longer than most years. Like the 1918 pandemic that was known by relatively few until Covid showed up, 2020, too, will disappear.

But for those of us, which is most of us, lucky enough to have lived through this period of time, we have benefited from a new, humbler perspective. Covid and its effect didn’t just last the 2-week period initially proclaimed by Donald Trump… we are nearly at 10 months. Most of us believe our new practices, our new habits, our new perspective, will last well into 2021 and even into 2022.

I do love the reminder that every day counts, every day can be made up of small practices to improve our relationships, our work, our passions. In 3,650 days I’ll hopefully be 61, sending our 7-year old off to college (wow, he’s here for a lot longer!) and if I’ve done what I hope to will have made some impact in the world of income, wealth and information inequality.

Today is January 2. I didn’t do much, but I did listen to Abigail Disney on the Pitchfork Economics podcast while I rode up the chairlift 5-6 times. She fired me up, frankly. Here’s the link if you are interested.

Here’s a great one excerpt about “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”…

Abigail Disney: Could I say something about the bootstraps metaphor?

Zach Silk: Yeah, please.

Abigail Disney: Because I want to observe, if you sit down and you’ve got boots with straps on them, I want you to try and pull on them and see how far you get, right? It’s a metaphor that suggests impossibility or futility, no one pulls themselves up by their bootstraps. Do you know, when my grandfather proposed to my grandmother, they were 35 years old, which was very old for the time, it was 1925. She’d been out working as a single woman for a lot of years and had saved money, she loaned those guys $2,500 from her own personal savings to bail them out. They had went through a series of debt crises, and therefore, get them out of another hole they had dug for themselves.

Nobody does this on their own, there are communities of people, there are structures in place, nobody pulls themselves up by their bootstraps. We need to just kill that metaphor once and for all.

I often say we need to give people bootstraps to pull themselves up. The one thing I would convey to them is not to attach them to their boots or they won’t be going anywhere fast.

I hope that by 2030 those of us who can have helped hoist tens of millions out of the economic quicksand they find themselves in today allowing them, too, to bet on a brighter future for themselves and their loved ones.