Creative Sparks: The Corporation

Cycle 12 Day 8. Tuesday, April 14th. It’s 04:22 in the morning.So.Fam.Everyone listening.The few loyal followers listening to this:You are about to hear the first of my nighttime reflection episodes here that will feature, and mainly wrap around, a new creative idea that I have that I will brainstorm with myself in this recording, and you will follow my thought process.And it’s interesting, because the reason I have this idea is that I got it straight away as I woke up.That happens a lot to me.And it happens a lot in these transition periods in my current cyclical situation, where I’m going down into this underworld with the most of suffering, and then I’m crawling back up, I’m slowly rising to the surface, and then mentally you could say I’m starting to soar toward the skies already.And it reminds me of what a good friend of mine yesterday wrote to me. He said: the lower the lows, the higher the highs.And that definitely holds true from my experience, both in my awakened state, but also in terms of my dreaming and my creative life, my creative spark.This most valuable creative spark that I’ve always cherished.It’s always been there with me, but when I haven’t had these lowest of lows, it’s like the highest of highs haven’t really started to pick up speed.And you all know it, at least from consuming other people’s creative endeavors that have been triggered by other people’s creative sparks, that if you take the world of music, for example, the lowest of the lows, the most oppressive periods in people’s lives, very often concerning life and death or love and hate, they’ve generated some of the most magnificent musical creations.And those creations are timeless.They’re like a star in the starscape.To the memory of man, they’re very hard to erase.Now that we have recorded sound, and I’m certain before we were able to record music, there were thousands of these creations that were surviving throughout the generations.They were being retold.They existed through tradition.Which, at least in Swedish, means spoken word.Most probably it should mean the same in any Germanic language.That tradition, this oral tradition, the oral retelling, the oral re-singing, and the physical replaying—yeah, we’re known to have heard of the replay button, but originally it had to be the replay of a human being in order to keep the tradition alive of retelling the story that was told through sound, through rhythm, through lyrics, through singing, through melody.And they made that happen as well.And let’s say back then, one of the strongest songs might have been caused by a vengeful twist of fate where half the tribe had to suffer an annihilating death because of some natural disaster.Well, that turned into tradition to retell that in order to caution the people not to have the tribe go through that again.And that story, very often accompanied by music, must definitely have been around for years.And over time, I’m convinced, it’s what created our religions.Religion means to be bound. It’s to be bound to religio in Latin, if I remember correctly. It’s to be bound to a conviction that something holds true based on history, based on human experience.And I’m sure these original stories have, over time, formed and shaped these more world religions that have become organized and grown out of their suits, in my opinion.Where religion originally was something tied down to the small tribe and the few individuals living in it.As anything human, we’ve scaled it up.We’re talking about society here, but the original society, in an evolutionary sense, was originally just a small tribe.Your family, your neighboring family, some other neighboring families.And often you guys decided who was to be chieftain for the time being.And there was a division of labor within this extended family.But that was it.So we’re already on a side quest here, but bear with me.I’ll get to the main creative idea that I was waking up to.And it’s definitely connected, in a sense, to what I’m now free-balling on.So we were talking about the highs and the lows, and then we went into how they are enmeshed into any cultural product, any creative product that you get from human beings that sustains itself over time, that creates a narrative that people find captivating.It often has the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.Or maybe the other way around: it has the lowest of lows and then the highest of highs.Or there’s a roller coaster, somewhat like my conundrum here, where there’s steady fluctuation, where I’m just flipping like a light switch between highs and lows.High, low, high, low, high, low, high, low.Okay.Yeah, it’s getting repetitive, but there’s a lot of nuance there as well.And that’s definitely something to clarify.Just because I’m going through these cycles that from the outsider’s perspective might look homogenous and monotonous and draining and grueling and gruesome and just pitch black, it’s definitely the case that every low, every valley, every downfall, every twist and turn where I’m heading down into the abyss, has been radically different from the one before.And the same is to be said with every high.There are layers to this onion that I would never have even dreamt of experiencing in terms of my visceral experience in this.But my body is one.My body’s one integral system.So my mind is following all of these twists and turns.And similarly, it’s also peeling off layers of its onion and discovering new dimensions to itself and to its relation to the material world as a whole, as we experience it.And as it’s peeling away, it’s discovering its untapped potential.And I’m not meaning untapped in terms of what you see on the internet, that the brain is only using 1% of its capacity.It’s on a different plane.I mean, I could be saying I’m using 1% of my capacity, but I think the brain’s capacity to see through things in different ways and from different perspectives is infinite.Or it’s only limited by the laws of the universe.And those laws are malleable.Any law is malleable.I mean, we’re not legalists here, right?We don’t think what is right or what is possible is only the things that are within the framework of the law.No, we’re not those guys.Because if you were, you would be history-less.You would be someone who’s completely inept at projecting into the future.Because what’s legal, what’s allowed, what’s taboo or not taboo at this very point in time, it changes.It’s changed before. It’s going to change in the future.So what’s your measuring stick?And why do you limit the realm of possibilities to only being in the here and only being in the now?And then what’s deemed legal was deemed possible, was deemed taboo or not taboo, was deemed appropriate, was deemed moral in this place.If you move to another place, if you put your body and you wake up or you grow up from being a child to an adult in another place, well, that measuring stick will have changed.So why do you want to limit your realm of possibilities to only have an idea of what’s just and right and what’s appropriate and what’s legal or whatever moral to this here?So in combination, the time and place, it’s all flexible.The here and now is just one point in the XY plane of the infinite-dimensional plane, which doesn’t only encompass time and space.It encompasses so many more parameters that humanity can peer through and peel away at.So that was a side note, or a side route to the side route, which means it’s easier to get lost in the woods.But I need to keep my eye on the woods, despite cherishing each tree in it.Speaking of metaphors with trees, yeah, I love them, because now I’m getting closer to the region of one of the things I’m putting a lot of time into since September last year, namely arboriculture and dendrology and tree studies.But that was a side note to the side note to the side note.So now let’s go back.We’ve talked about the highs and the lows, which was already a side note.So now we’re fourth removed from the original topic, or more.But before that I said I was going to—oh yeah, it’s actually fifth removed, because the highs and the lows came from me talking about waking up, and in the same way as when you wake up you can remember what you dreamt sometimes, and you can remember it quite vividly and hopefully in some detail, at least at the point when you were waking up—what seems to happen to me a lot, especially now that I’m getting to enjoy the taste of some of these highs creatively, is that I’m waking up to the idea, the creative idea, generated in my mind.And this one time, just now when I woke up, I had one such creative idea.And what’s lovely with these creative ideas is they tend to make use of the things that I’ve done during my daytime existence.But they synthesize them in the most unique ways.I mean, you’ve probably heard of this before.People claim creativity is often when one or several minds—but I think it’s almost always generated inside just one mind, and then it can be retold by one mind, and it can get rings on the water, and you can get that idea to spread or to be revamped, remixed by someone else, which is a new creative spark coming from that person.Which is what’s driving this wonderful creative edge that humanity has.It’s not just that one individual can do this. It is that we can accumulate this over millennia, over generations, and spread it geographically.But what happens is that I get the idea, and as I said, it’s synthesized in the most unique way.Sometimes in the most unique way, it seems to have synthesized different experiences from different realms, different disciplines, into a new created product.And this happened tonight.So now the pre-word, the prologue, is over, and I’ll start to get into the actual idea.And throughout that idea, afterwards or a bit during, I will also bring in other aspects to why I think this idea came about.And hopefully we can conclude before my mouth gets too overworked here, and the muscles in your ears get overworked as well, and our calendars are clogged up because I’m sitting here just telling this reflection and it’s already time for my next treatment, and you’re sitting there listening or reading and you missed four days of work.So let’s not get there.Marching on.The CorporationSo we have the stage.I’m waking up.And in my mind’s view—let me see, how did it start?Yes.In my mind’s view, I get the stereotypical experience that I’ve been having: working in a big company.But it’s a bit warped.Or in the first frame that I’m seeing, it’s like a comic book.Maybe the comic-book feature of it comes a bit later.But what I’m seeing is: we’re in a big company, a corporation, a conglomerate.Oh, conglomerate makes me think of the labeled conglomerates inside my body.But yeah, let’s not get into that.So imagine you’re in a big company, this colossal enterprise.And inside this enterprise, you have workers.And there’s a very young, industrious, motivated, energetic, almost frenetically willing, energetic young individual, young professional, as they label it nowadays.But a young aspiring professional who’s aspiring inside this existing hierarchy of the big corporation, who’s willing to push himself in the daily grind.The daily grind.Remember the word grind here.The daily grind.And he’s grinding it out.And together with him, there are a lot of colleagues coming into the corporation.They join through a rigorous application process which is only selecting a few out of the applicants to join this big corporation.And it’s an honor for them.They feel it’s an honor to have not only applied to join the company as apprentices, but that they’re then accepted as one of the few, and that they get to apply themselves inside of the corporation.So they start their apprenticeships or their internships.And throughout the internship they need to grind it out.They need to do a lot of menial work.They need to do a lot of work that other people in the company don’t want to do.And over time, they accumulate all of these tools, all of this understanding of the company and the corporation, and they can provide so much value to the company by grinding it out and by helping the corporation as a whole.And they keep being very industrious until they’ve collected so many tools that they become these more experienced, and therefore more and more senior experts inside of the company.Subject matter experts.Process experts.Process specialists.Senior consultants, senior engineers, senior lawyers, senior administrators, etc., etc.And being these subject matter experts, they’re really keen on refining their work.And they start to care about the details of their work.They start to tutor other people in this.And they keep grinding.They keep grinding.They get home to their private life, to their life outside of work, and they don’t have much time for anything else.But they’re so dedicated to work.They’re so dedicated to the firm, to the corporation, to the conglomerate, to the institution in their lives.And suddenly there’s a stroke of luck.There’s just something happening in the world, and there’s a miracle coming down to them.They get kids.So the subject matter expert, the Nestor, the one who’s at the pinnacle of his contributions to the firm, the spider in the web, the one who makes the work of other minor workers, the younger, more energetic applicants and junior colleagues, so much more valuable by infusing it with process improvements, with increased knowledge for everyone to share, now has a new goal in life: to take care of their kids.But they’re getting a split-personality syndrome.They have put so much into the firm.But gradually, over time, family life starts to matter more.And they start to deviate from their holy path of the firm.Where they were to sacrifice themselves for the firm, now they have a new idol.The child.The holy child.And they gradually sacrifice themselves more for the family.The crux is that they’ve come to a position of power inside the corporation.And that power is only increasing by the day because they’ve reached past a certain threshold point where they’ve accumulated a lot of privileges, a lot of rewards for their past work.And some people have even gamed the system by not having been in this valuable-contributor bucket, in essence, by being the subject matter expert who’s coordinating everyone’s efforts, or being the leader, being the coach who’s helping everyone else to grow and blossom and seeding innovation.Rather, some have gamed the system so they’re able to get closer to the laurels of the company prematurely.But whether they’re in that bucket of people, in that swim lane, or whether they were in the original swim lane of the greatest contributors and the martyrs for the company, essentially—and remember that word martyr as well, because it will reflect in what’s to come—so you have the grinders, you have the martyrs, but now you get to the stage where these people that have continued this trajectory in the firm, they have a new god in town: the child, the juvenile.And they keep spending their energy and their dedication into the family, to the suffering of the firm and their contribution to the firm.And since they are at a very high position in the firm’s hierarchy, their decisions, their way of acting, will trickle down to form the culture of the company as a whole.And these people who originally were very valuable advisors to their juniors, they become less and less valuable.The idol, the family and the child, they lose sight of their original aims for the company and they’re not as flexible in their thinking.This will over time have the firm stagnate in its goals and aims and its malleability, its adaptability to the surroundings and to its own strengths and weaknesses and what’s happening in the world.And this will trickle down throughout the firm.The firm will get more and more rigid as it goes on.And this will create bitterness over time, which will accumulate because of arbitrariness inside the firm, because of people taking things for granted inside the firm to the extent that sooner or later they will just start not at all corresponding to the reality outside of the firm.Or the reality inside of the firm, for that matter.So the map is not changing at the speed that it needs to change to stay at least as close to reality as it once was.And as I woke up and started having this idea, I was looking at it from my own personal point of view, where I feel that since I haven’t formed a family yet, I’ve been in this subject matter expert bucket for a long time.And I’ve been a very good company man.I’ve contributed a lot to the company.And I’ve looked at my colleagues who have gotten kids, and I haven’t understood why they got so lax.But obviously, if I go into their perspective, they have a new idol in town.But they also have a limited energy budget.When they come home from every day of work, or nowadays when they can work from home, still they need to be connected to their laptops, and they just feel that they’re this split personality syndrome and they have to make a choice.You cannot be fully engaged in two things at once.That’s not how humanity works.You see these hustlers online saying that you can start your side business and it will become your passion, but I’m convinced it’s not how that works.What they do is they have a job, they have their day job, but they find a way to be able to do that day job without much passion and engagement.And then even though they’re spending hours on that job, it’s basically just hours where they do things on autopilot, and a big part of their brain, and even their hands and eyes, might still be focusing during their working hours on this new passion.So similarly, it’s what’s happening to the family father or the mother who used to be the company man, but now they’re less and less engaged in forming the company to the best of their abilities because there’s a new god in town.And I see that now.I fully see it more than ever, that this change has to happen, because I’ve never been able to combine two passions at once if one is draining me to that extent.And I mean, to be fair, most people don’t feel that what they do in their company is their actual passion.What tends to happen, though, is they sublimate their want for having a passion in life by identifying themselves as this company person, the company man, the company woman.And they build a cultural identity around that.And they build their self-worth around that.And that starts even earlier with our education system, and even earlier than that with parenting and how our social spheres are just burnishing us, they’re branding us.Original etymology for branding is this heated iron to mark the flesh of the cattle.And we’re being branded from birth with these expectations on ourselves to conform.And that carries on through into our definition of self-worth through being a company man, basically.Following in the patterns of our ancestors.Joining the army just like your dad did, or his dad before him.Standing up for the nation, for the people, for the kingdom, for the king, for the tribe.And there you have it.Originally it was very crucial to stand up for the tribe, but now as we’re a mass society, it no longer is, in the sense of having to act in a very specific way, following very specific customs.No, you can create your own customs.But back to the story.So I personally reflected on my own path here, and I started to empathize more and more with the family parent who gets into this crux.And as you’ve heard, it’s a common theme that over time the firm starts to stagnate.So it grows bigger and bigger, larger and larger, more and more unmanageable, more and more distancing itself in terms of its philosophy, its methods, its madness.There’s a method to the madness, and it’s growing out of shape.It’s growing to a scale that humanity cannot handle.Which brings us back to this original side topic of the tribe.Because the original scale of things was the tribe.There’s this anthropologist who came up with a number, the Dunbar number.Yeah, an anthropologist, Dunbar, I think he identified how big tribes in aboriginal societies or indigenous societies got to, and it’s in the hundreds, maybe one or two hundred people maximum.And then it starts to scale to an extent where humanity is not very good at coordinating its efforts, or at least there will be a lot of aberrations in how well it coordinates its efforts in relation to what’s best for it, what’s closest to its natural tendencies, etc.And definitely to what’s functional in terms of harmonizing with its external environment, the flora and fauna of its surroundings, and the natural resources of its surroundings.So that’s the story of humanity as well: that it’s scaled out of itself, out of its social fabric, its suit.It’s grown out of its suit socially, but it’s also grown out of its suit ecologically.And that’s the tendency you’ll see in this.But carry on the story of the firm.You see me retelling all of the stereotypical stages in the firm.And I already got quickly into education and upbringing as well, so we can have those as well.So you have the cyclical parenting and birth and parenting and birth, where you have the birth initiating this journey for one individual joining the company.And the child is then brought up.It’s being shaped by its surroundings, by its parenting, and the society at hand.And then it goes into a formative phase where it has to become an individual in the flock.And then it’s herded into the company.And then it becomes the company man that grows to be the subject matter expert company man, that then becomes the senior person with this new god, the family, the new child, and the new children in the family.And then that person keeps having to split their attention and split their lives between the company and the family, so it’s never fully satisfied with either.And the company isn’t fully satisfied.Those other people still in the company, they’re not fully satisfied either, because the company gets warped and holds less and less meaning for its members because it’s grown out of its suit.Same as humanity has grown out of its suit socially and ecologically, it’s now grown out of its suit in terms of endeavors and goals and how they line up.But the person needs to be in the company because they need the material security of staying in the company in order to provide for their family, because they’ve left the wilderness.This is the new wilderness, to be able to extract resources by being a member of not the tribe, but the corporation.That’s the new tribe in town.And what they do is they keep being a member of the corporation until the day they die.So they keep being drained of energy until the day they die.They keep being in the split-personality situation until the day they die.And what’s happening throughout all of this is they are dedicating their life energy, their currency, their flesh, their blood, sweat, and tears to the corporation.And in my mind’s view, what I saw was that the corporation—I envisioned it as like a tall factory building rising from the soil.And with every increment of sacrifice and dedication and energy and blood, sweat, and tears spent by each member of the company, there was a trickle of flesh, metaphorically speaking, being churned by the company.And you already remember I was referring to the word grind and to have it in mind.Well, what I’m seeing happening here in this comic book that I envision this is to be—it is to be a comic book, I’m to publish this comic book, I’m to generate this comic-book version of this story—the people had their daily grind, their dedication going into grinding it out here.And that makes me visualize a big grindstone, a big millstone, at the center, at the heart of the factory building, that is grinding away all of these workers.They turn more and more into drones that are just mechanically grinding away.It’s less about the output from the company.The output of a huge company, it can water down over time.You see it with social media, that now that they’ve grown so huge and added so many layers to the cake in order for that company to sustain itself just economically, and because of the stagnation inside the firm and the stagnation of the goals of the firm, it starts to gradually just turn into a drain of energy for the people inside the firm, but also for the ones who are using the product.So inside the heart of the factory you have a millstone, a grindstone.And what’s being ground is the passions, the energy, the time that these company workers, the drones of the corporation, us, are putting in day in, day out, into the corporation’s soul, from their own soul.And that’s a big grindstone.It’s grinding away, grinding away.And people are actually martyrs.But they’re martyrs for something that turns into something else.The startup, the noble idea, it has turned into something else.It’s morphed into this colossal giant that is no longer steered by the will of the individuals.And it’s no longer steered by the will of the most powerful individuals either, because they cannot steer it either, even if their will by now will have been very corrupted from the idealistic dreams that they might have had at the onset of this.And this is the corporation, but you have this in any type of human structure.You have it in the bureaucracy.You have it in the political party where people get into it being idealists and then they come out of it just being drained.They might be materially powerful or whatever, but they’re drained because they sacrifice so much of their uniqueness into this generic whole.So I’m fully convinced, and this came to me gradually during the second half of high school and stayed with me ever since, that the best interactions in life, they’re the ones that are most localized.If I want to get to know another person, it’s always the best to do it just me and that person.If we bring in a third person into the conversation, into the room, it’s never as unique.It’s never as intimate.It’s never as multifaceted.The quality of the interaction goes down.Now we’re talking about human endeavors on a scale where every individual that is included in the process, they need to dedicate so much of their lives and so much of their time and space on this planet, which is limited.It’s all limited.So viscerally experienced by me, how limited it is for each one of us.And we expect ourselves to dedicate so much of that into one single mass endeavor.The firm. The corporation. Humanity. The church. The state.No, f**k that.Those things will come out of their own.They will be created by all of our interactions.But what if we could focus on the more local-level interactions?The way I’m doing now, talking to you guys.If we could focus more on the local-level interactions and improve the quality of those and honor those and curate those, I’m convinced we would have so much less of these grindstones that we put ourselves in.And you can say, yeah, it’s impossible because we’re so many people on this planet now, and our strength is to aggregate knowledge and traditions over time, so there’s no way we can go back to that localized mentality.But I say b******t.I’m living in a very global world, but I’m still feeling this.It’s at the core of my bodily existence that I feel how much I cherish quality in direction, quality in perceived life quality in waking up and knowing that for the coming moments, before I get to bed tonight, if I get to bed tonight, if I’m lucky to get to bed tonight, I would get so much more out of genuine interactions, genuine collaboration with individuals, rather than sacrificing my blood, sweat, and tears into an abstract, monstrous, amorphous, metamorphosed monster of an aggregate entity such as a corporation or a political party or a government or a bureaucracy or a military or a sect.If I could cherish those individual interactions, those spark-of-the-moment type of synergies, when I go to bed at night my life will have felt so much more full, so much more in tune with my natural instincts.Because there is no thing else than individuals.These aggregate bodies that we’re talking about—the firm, the party, society, humanity—it’s all an illusion.It’s such an illusion.And our minds play tricks on us, and we inherit these tricks from our parents.So much of our cultural heritage is just wordplay on riffing on these themes.So there are more alleyways here in this reasoning, of course, that I could go down.But the main point was that I got this lovely creative idea of making a comic book on the topic of the corporation.But it could just as well be called The Church, or The Party, or The Bureaucracy, because any organization that human beings scale to that scale, it’s out of proportion and it’s unwieldy.It’s unwieldy in itself, for itself, but especially for the individual.And the individual, if you listen to the word individual, it’s something that is indivisible.You cannot divide it.Of course you can divide it.You can chop up an individual into all of the constituents, animal cells inside that individual, etc., etc.But we’re all just energy in the end, or whatever you would call it.We’re all just flux.But no, I really lost the thread.So I want to create this comic book.And I’m not a subscriber to the belief in the law of attraction, this popular-science idea that if you manifest something in terms of speaking it out loud to yourself or to other people, it will be created.No, I don’t think that’s the case.I don’t think fate will magnetically attract me to writing this comic.Same way that I don’t think me shouting from the top of my lungs to myself or to others that I will cure my “incurable” cancer will make that happen.What I do firmly believe, though, is that the more I can talk about my ideas, the more nuance I will bring to those ideas, but also the more top-of-mind they will be in a sense where I will keep working at them consciously, but also subconsciously within my dream states, for example.So I’m very happy that this idea came to me.And I don’t think it would have come to me if I would have been stuck in the corporation day to day, which I no longer am.And I’m grateful for that.And maybe I can retain not being stuck in such a corporate day-to-day for quite some time now.Let’s see.So there you have it, my idea.I’ve shared it with you.And obviously this is not something I’m going to realize tomorrow, but it’s a new idea in my creative library, which is endless.And so many of those ideas have not been written down, so they may be lost forever.But this one at least will be recorded, for me or for someone else to pick up the baton and run with.Yeah, that’s it.Now I need to get back to sleep.Though I’m hearing the dove cooing outside, and that’s sometimes the sign, now when it’s starting to get into the summer half of the year and it’s so light outside, that I might not be able to fall back asleep.But that would all have been worth it for recording this idea, for you guys and for myself.So to conclude:Thanks for hanging in here.Thanks for sharing this moment with me.Be mindful of your life force.Be mindful of your own creative spark and think of how that could be life-affirming for you in your context.Namaste. 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