Make the Dangerous Choice to Dissent

Harvard Business Review: Make the Dangerous Choice to Dissent

Work harder, feel emptier, buy more, grow poorer…work harder. Sound familiar? That's the conventional wisdom of the omnipresent church of more, bigger, faster, cheaper, nastier, now. The problem is that the conventional wisdom isn't just wrong. If we want real human prosperity, the ability to live a live that not merely glitters, but that matters — well, then it was never right. …

… Hence, my suggestion is this: If you want to live a meaningfully better life, you're going to have to make the dangerous choice to dissent. A life lived meaningfully isn't denominated by digital friends, designer logos, or wads of paper notes. It's denominated by what you've lived, what it's worth to you, and what that's worth to humanity. That's the heart of eudaimonia, a new economic paradigm based on fulfilling human potential — not creating and marketing useless stuff. It's so different from our current conception that I had to reach back to Ancient Greece for a name I thought captured its essence. I'm developing it further in an HBR Single — a short, digital essay I'm planning to release in December. But in the meantime, here's how I see the crucial elements of a eudaimonic life: …

… The first challenge is seeing through the empty promise of opulence. But the second, tougher challenge is refuting it. To do that, we're going to have start living heretically. We're going to have not just disbelieve the conventional wisdom — we're going to have to defy it.