Scalable Usefulness

Whether it’s a glass ceiling we’re looking up at or the night sky, there’s a deep desire in every human to go higher—to pursue the unspoken dream that seems impossible yet equally probable. It is that point in our minds when we decide whether to take the high road, or the heavily trampled one because the ends no longer justify the means. This dichotomy of decision making, you know, weighing the options of giving it your all knowing that there’s a good chance you’ll still fall short or the option of the monotony that will surely follow a life of settling for the easier path of least resistance, is where the waters part. It’s a place where we lose friends and gain acquaintances.

But in the mental vacillation all people experience as they attempt to determine what choice to make we, often times inadvertently, ask ourselves about this thing called scalable usefulness—a concept of actually taking the higher road one step at a time—making the tough decisions a little more achievable. But all of this nice words don’t make the decision any easier. It’s a mind game we sometimes play with ourselves. A mind game of stretching and reaching until we’ve made a little ground, finding our stride, then giving it all we’ve got, knowing in the back of our minds it would come to this eventually. That’s what seems to happen when we choose ‘usefulness.’

We bite the bullet. We dig in, face the consequences of our actions and cowboy up. Undoubtedly, we will find ourselves alone at times—on the side of the peak, hanging by a thread. We’ll question our own motives and abilities, attempting to quell our beating hearts when things get tough. We might even weigh the option to turn back—but for the ones who choose usefulness, there really is no turning back.

It’s the same internal drive that makes people stay late at work, push a little more on the track, jump in the deep end, and deal with it all…the internal dialogue we have with ourselves about the elephants in the rooms we occupy. The thing we just can’t pretend we didn’t see or hear—the problem that we were made to help solve. That’s usefulness, and in all honesty, sometimes doesn’t seem to pay off. So why do we keep at it and how can we make it more scalable, and therefore less likely to cause a burnout or ruptured disc?

The main reason I think of as to why we keep at it, being useful, is because we have to—we’re wired that way. All living species are wired to reproduce, survive, thrive even. So when we see a way of being useful, a part of us wants to fill that void, solve the problem, or step in an be the hero. But when the going gets tough, the tough sometimes shrink back… back into the shadows of this cat and mouse game with our true nature. We look at the sheer face of the problem, year after year, or time after time, and realize that our efforts pale in comparison to the shadow cast by this behemoth of a situation. So instead of being useful, we pass the buck, or worse, pretend there is no problem at all. Maybe we jump on the bandwagon of renaming the problem, giving it a PR agent and colored ribbon. Maybe we join in with the complainers who have already succeeded their God-given usefulness to cheer on helplessness.

Enter the crab mentality. If we can’t solve the problem quickly, cheaply, or easily then we all must stay in the muck of the problem itself, right? That’s becoming the wide road in America. We can’t fix it so let’s pretty it up and make it palatable even though it is killing us. Not a great outcome especially when we get honest with ourselves about the past. If we, as a nation, had chosen the collective crab-think, we’d all be speaking with a cool accent but I’d be a slave. My grandmother would have been locked up for being too independent. My aunt would have never voted and my father would have to deny my birthright existence because my parent’s marriage would never have been sanctioned. My grandfather could still practice his vocation as priest, but be relegated to nice-nice sermons about nothing much because controversy might lead to insurrection and we can’t have that now, can we? There are hundreds of other parallels that could be drawn. Or we make the decision to scale our efforts toward usefulness.