I came up with a triangle model this morning, that could help us think about the relation between pay, meaning, and flourishing. And provide a contrast between broken-apart living, and as-a-whole living.

I got out of university in 1990, graduating from the University of California at Santa Cruz at this exact moment when we started to learn the effect that climate change that our outputs were having on the earth and struck by this realization for the first time as a lot of us probably were that we could actually upset the very balance of the planet itself, which was… hard to live with. Meanwhile, I saw a world that was suffering in a lot of ways and people doing things they didn’t want to do in order to survive. And this bothered me.

And then I was living in San Francisco with my girlfriend at the time and she was temping. So then I started to temp and then I started to work in these giant office towers. Like the phone book company. I worked in the phone. On some floor in some cubicle in the phone book company, and I would type memos. They had a thing called memos before email. It was kind of weird.

So anyway, I’d be typing these memos and then we were supposed to be there at eight, I think, and leave at five. Or five-thirty take the bus down there, take the bus home. And I was exhausted every night. Exhausted. How do people do this? I really don’t understand how people do this every day, 40 hours a week. Where are you supposed to put your art? Where are you supposed to put your heart? This seems horrible. And I still think it’s horrible. If that’s not what you love to do. It put me on a path that I’ve been on for over 30 years of now of trying to help design ways and help people to create work that they love work that’s meaningful and compensating and contributing all at the same time.

So, I got this model in my head this morning of a triangle. All systems take things in from the environment. They put things out or contribute things to the environment, and then they have the experience of living. So, the three pieces of the triangle are contribution, compensation, and enjoyment.

So we contribute to the world. And we’re compensated for that work. And in that whole process, we enjoy ourselves. That might sound a little simplistic, but that’s the ideal or that’s the model.

And at the time back in 1990, when I got out of college, I was wondering how in God’s name… if I take these 40 hour a week jobs, I won’t have any time to think my thoughts and understand what’s important and know what I really want to do. So I kept temping and that was a good solution for a while.

There were a few little pockets of places where you could talk about things like work sharing or working from home or part-time positions, things like that, but it was very rare. It was “weird”. And now all of that of course has exploded in a hundred different ways, which I think is really awesome. And I’m mostly just interested