What is is what was...

… and the folly contained therein.

“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” -Steve Jobs

There’s a natural tendency to accept that the state of something, in the condition in which we found it, is what it is.

When you join a company, the way that it structures its development, strategy and execution is what that company is. That is what its values are and how its business is conducted. The company might ultimately fail, or it might achieve its objectives were it structured in a different way, but nevermind, because that is the way you found it and, hey, that’s its success or failure. Startups are hard and startups fail and that’s the way it is.

When you meet a person who is unemployed it is difficult to discern what their productive capacity to contribute is. It’s not so unusual to wonder whether that capacity is meaningful. Its converse - what a person does and is paid to do - makes it clear and tangible what the person’s value is, because someone has assigned that value to them by the nature of employing them. To make these assumptions about the employed person’s capacity is both an assumption that contrains them and it can often be an unfair overestimation of that person, if we’re being frank.

When you meet a person who is recently divorced it calls into question their character and the way they are in a committed relationship, whereas when you meet a person who has been married for a decade it speaks to their commitment and value in a partnership. The person who is married may not be good to their partner and the person who is divorced may have done so at great personal sacrifice in service of themselves and of their partner. But seeing this requires deeply knowing and inquiring as to surface impressions made, a step many of us never reach in many of our encounters and the judgements they contain.

In each of these cases, the intention and the character and the essence that gets read is different according to the state in which you originally encountered the subject, regardless of the fact that they inhabit those states only temporaly. Your estimation of what is might have been dramatically different when encountered just a few months apart, as they inhabit a context which is ever changing and transition from one state to another.

One of the ways this undermines and leads us astray is that it prejudges in our mind:

(1) intentionality - what the subject aspires for

(2) potential - what the subject could be

(3) engagement - the way that we interact with the subject

I led the food efforts for my Burning Man camp over this past year. Joel, my camp’s lead, had words of advice as I stepped into the role. “Remember that Burning Man is the product of volunteers, that people have to be inspired to make their contribution, that you cannot run it like a business and you cannot make people do anything.” I thought I was hearing his words, but in fact my surface level appreciation for his advice prevented me from appreciating their second order effects, and I was not able to look ahead to the lessons and the impact this role would have on me over the following year. I understood Joel’s principle to guide the how of operating as food lead and not the what of the task I was setting ahead of me.

The previous Burn had been my first year at Burning Man and also my first year camping with the Turtles. Everything was new and so everything was the way things were. The food operation I found was a marvel. In the desert of Nevada the Future Turtles served meals that were delicious, nutritious and personal to each lead chef, and the camp pulled it off twice a day for lunch and for dinner.

I took these characteristics to be principles and I took those principles to be intentional. In taking on a lead role for the team I unconsciously followed the very human instinctual proclivity to grow. Take the thing for what it is, as you recognize it; find the things it does well and hold them sacred; find the things it does less well and make them better and bigger.

With the benefit of retrospect, I realize that I failed on the day I took up my mantle. It took another 10 months and carrying through the Burn to understand that I had failed and how and why.

Burning Man is volunteerism and people have to be inspired to contribute. But food is not volunteerism. Food is life. Food is necessity.

The proclivity to grow and improve meant that the food program was pressured to grow in its capacity and its impact year after year. This imposes growing obligation - not inspiration - on the camp to execute year after year in an environment which is intended to inspire burners to gift their own contribution, whatever that contribution might be.

This is actively bad. At this exact moment I hold a completely different conception of what the food program is and what it ought to represent. My current conception might change, and it should, because what is should not necessarily be what was.

We must question; so as to understand, so as to be, and thereby so as to achieve our potential.

I have much more reflection to do and collaboration to do with my campmates and with Joel. I don’t know where the food program will end up and frankly it really doesn’t matter. What does matter is the lesson I have learned - that what is holds an irresistible inclination to be what was and that what was can be a poisonous siren song beckoning to rocky shores.

I will end with a cautionary tale of the future.

Among many efforts last year as we prepared for the upcoming Burn was a decision to transition our camp’s collective knowledge from Notion to BookStack. It’s a much better solution than what we had before. As part of preparing the food team, and the transition to a new knowledge base, I made an effort to document as much as I could so as to set up all future food leads for success. This included kicking off the food section of the wiki, and in so doing I wrote the following when establishing the food team section:

The Food Team serves hot, delicious and nutritious meals, keeping Turtles sustained on their adventures all across Black Rock City.

This sentence was written blithely in a moment of creative penmanship. It sounded good at the time and it felt like a decent representation for what the food team was as I understood it. I also thought it might feel motivating and help volunteers step up and contribute their efforts to the venture.

There was a description field and I filled it in with what felt right to me at the time. But I lacked intentionality and consciousness in a way that was impossible for me to understand at the time.

In so doing I have unconsciously participated in the violence of presumption and I have further solidified what is as a function of what was as I saw it at the time. Should someone else be in the role of food lead in the future, and should I fail to intervene, that sentence will become what was and therefore create perverse pressure on what will be.

May future food leads have the wisdom to discard the foolishness of my mistakes.