An old friend from college is part of a family that until recently owned a very large retail operation with stores throughout the Midwest. A few years ago the family sold the business for a price that could be measured in the billions.
In the past, family members would gather for an annual meeting during which the CEO, a family member himself, spoke about the macro-economy in concert with the micro-prospects for the business itself. They were at odds. His analysis of the former was generally negative, and was a reflection of the negativity that seemingly always informs economic commentary. As the great Ken Fisher points out, albeit optimistically, we’re always in the Dark Ages.
The main thing is that after talking about all the negatives infecting the business climate and the economy more broadly, the CEO would invariably pivot very optimistically to how the myriad horrors out there weren’t hurting the family company; that it was largely immune to the challenges faced by everyone else, that its future prospects were wildly sound. The yearly message was that the economy was bad, there was potential for much worse, but those problems won’t affect us.
Stories of these family meetings came to mind early in David Bahnsen’s excellent and essential new book, Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life. I’ve long argued (including in my book The End of Work) that work is the source of happiness, that realistically people can’t be happy without living productively, and Bahnsen shows why on an economic and spiritual level that is so crucial to the discussion. Here’s hoping many people buy Bahnsen’s book as a way of understanding themselves and their love of work better, but also as a way of seeing into a future that will more and more be shaped by passion about work precisely and paradoxically because less of it will be required of us.
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