First: Final of Season 5(?) of Outrageous Fortune last night. Gone is the best thing on TV on a cliffhanger ending, which has forever changed Dave Dobbyn's song "Wouldn't You Rather Be? (In Love")" from conjuring a cartoon Wal Footrot swinging around a lamppost to an extended sequence of humour, reeling through chaos, unravelling in horror.
Best moment since the death of Aurora in Season 3, and makes the next Season look promising. The "long snooze" of Season Four is a distant memory.
*
Second, I read a couple of interesting tidbits in the NZ Herald while I was getting a coffee. The Careers section had an article on feeling a fraud at work (no link on its site yet). Called it "Impostor syndrome". Suffered by 70% of the workforce, they estimate. Because they don't "value themselves and their success" enough. Like labelling this epidemic makes it understood.
I already thought most people suffered from this. You can tell just by a look at the shoddy performance of our media versus their status for an example. You have to have an ego like Paul Henry's to cope with with the guilt of the vast gulf between what they produce and what they receive.
This feeling of fraud is complex and is worthy of far more attention than some self-help guru's dismissal. It points to a huge fracture between who we are and the way we work. Part of it is feeling they are given a reward they did not earn or deserve, or boots they are not big enough to fill. Most corporations love throwing young talent in the deep end. They're cheap, skilled, can be bought of with what seems (to them) huge raises and perks and prestige, and they have to really buy into the corporate message to succeed. Or sink, or get out... at which point there's always another young Candide willing to try their skills.
Two things can happen. Either you get sucked in, thrive, and this corporate identity infests you like mould. OR as most people do, they form a shell. This shell personality - role - allows them to interact with the organisation, perform disagreeable tasks, reach amoral agreements. They're disconnected from it, because they have to put their values aside, their needs and wants. Their humanity. And just do the job, whether it's building bombs, or drafting copy.
That shell is called professionalism.
And if you needed proof that having a big job doesn't mean you're grown up-
Rob Fyfe, head of Air New Zealand featured on the business pages complaining about the politics of climate change. Speaking to a "Green skies" conference in Hong Kong, he got to grandstand about how all his company wanted was to clean up his act, and it was just politicians and agencies such as those of the UN, that were paralysing the process.
The best view you could take on his speech was that he was merely a confused child holding his ears wanting parents to stop arguing. Of course we all want equitable, quick action. Problem is, some arguments need to be had. And at the moment the key argument the globalising political economy is facing is no longer whether climate change is happening, it's what to do about it. It's "Weak Sustainability" - placebo measures meant to placate the public but allow the extremist policies of BUA (Business As Usual) to continue - versus "Strong Sustainability" - rethinking the economy's relationship with the sociosphere and biosphere, and taking the greatest possible action to redress the harm in the current structures of our economies that has allowed the current crisis to develop.
More on that tomorrow.
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