Imagine something more interesting than being rich
How to get out of a growth mindset.
When did children start dreaming of being billionaires when they grow up?
Why does everyone want to get rich? What are you going to do when you do get rich? Is there a point when you will feel you have enough and can start doing those things?
Our whole society feels based around this idea of more. Everything needs to be more. Needs to be bigger. Needs to be growing. Why is this?
We are suffering from a lack of imagination. I suspect, for most people, if they were to sit down and picture what their ideal life would be it wouldn’t require nearly the amount of capital they are striving to acquire. They would find they are overly focused on the means and not the end. In their heart of hearts people know that there is not a deep happiness to be found on the deck of a yacht or in the glove compartment of a Maserati. And ironically they may be missing their chance at a fulfilling life in their relentless pursuit of overshooting what they need to achieve it.
However, this lack of imagination is systemic. It doesn’t exist solely as some kind of moral failing of the individual. It is built into American culture and pervades everything even at the institutional level. Let’s take a look.
Maximizing shareholder value
Why can’t you just be happy as a big company? Why does Meta need to keep finding ways to extract more attention from its users and turn that into more ad revenue for themselves? Couldn’t they have better served society by just being a good place to stay in touch with people you know? Why do we live in a world where it would be thought of as bad business for them to just focus on making Instagram the best possible way to share photos with your friends?
The answer is obviously in the obligation to the shareholders. It is against the law for a public company to not act in the interest of its shareholders. The shareholders interest in this case is not complicated, it’s just more money. I have not found an instance where shareholders have urged the stewards of a business to do something cool or creative or beneficial to society if it did not directly fall upon the path to higher earnings per share.
As a result you have this predictability. These companies that capture the public’s imagination (to gain a user base) and then without fail turn into some sort of ad platform.
They don’t have to do this to survive. They have to do this to forever increase their value. Because in our shareholder centric version of capitalism, the only thing a company is capable of imagining is being the biggest. It’s hard to imagine a world that is any different.
But if you really use your imagination it is possible.
Things like Wikipedia are a good example. Unreliant on investors, wikipedia is free to be the most beneficial version of itself. It is something that someone wanted to see in the world and they made it happen. It is not striving to optimize for anything that is in conflict with what makes it good. This is what is possible with imagination when it is decoupled from growth for the sake growth.
Another good example is Apple. Apple has two reputations and they come from two distinct eras of leadership.
