Doing Business in Real Time
February 3, 2020

     I don‛t mean to be glib.  This is serious business.

     * * *

     Business.  The act of being busy.  Industry, industriousness, industrial sector.  Production.  Work. Labor.

     These are concepts, values, practices, and habits that we prize in contemporary American culture – or at least to which we give a great deal of lip service.  We think of ourselves as busy people, on the whole, saving a special disdain for those we deem "lazy," those "takers" who presumably aren't pulling their weight. 

     And yet, curiously, even among the apparently industrious, there is a certain reserve of idleness and celebration of leisure, a sort of gnawing wish to escape the work of living – to be like those who, by luck or by grace or by some other means, have enough resources at their disposal to take it easy.  We fantasize about winning the lottery or discovering that childless Aunt Jane was secretly rich, and we're first in line for the inheritance.

   Whole forests have been converted to books exploring our strange, almost Jekyll-and-Hyde relationship with work, and perhaps I will have something more to add to that conversation in the future (hopefully with a modicum of artistry).  But for now, I can say this: we have already received our inheritance.

     We have already received the stored wealth of millions (billions?) of years of the sun's blessings, in the form of fossil fuels.  In the last 200 years or so (perhaps less), those highly concentrated energy reserves have powered a revolution in the way we human beings live on this blue-green planet.  And while still more forests could be razed debating on paper whether that revolution has done more good than harm (spoiler alert: I am cautiously on the side of more good), I am far more interested in what we actually do with what we have left of our inheritance, our attitude toward it, the moral hazards and opportunities in which it engages us, the wisdom that we will have to bring to bear to manage it going forward.  I am most interested in whether we will figure out how to start generating wealth (energy) for ourselves now, in real time, rather than simply living off the past – which is really nothing more than stealing from the future.

   And it's not only the technical aspects of this question that intrigue me.  While those are fascinating, I lack sufficient training in science and math to do them justice.  I gravitate, instead, to the moral aspects of the question.  What kind of people live on real-time energy?  What are their habits of body and mind?  What do they value?  To what do they aspire?  How do they interact with one another and with the environment that sustains them? 

    Jeff Bezos has said that one of the major reasons he loves his work with Amazon is because he gets to live in the future.  I'm right there with him.