The quicker you accept that everyone is full of shit, the better off you’ll be.
That’s a miserable way to start a column. It’s an even more miserable way to go through life. But some days, listening to the people in charge, I wonder whether it’s the only way to keep from being played.
I believe in art. I believe in craftsmanship. Those things are essential to my well-being and my soul. I want people to care about what they make and how they treat the people who buy it.
Money is a means to an end. A way to eat, have shelter, take care of your family and have some fun. A few fun tickets for the ride through life.
It isn’t my god.
And I am so freaking tired of being spoken to by people who seem to think it ought to be everybody’s.
Honestly, I find myself blaming the education system. The business schools. The accreditation systems that stamp their approval on them. What the hell are we teaching? Why does capitalism have to be a blood sport? Why can’t you make money and focus on quality?
Are we educating business leaders, or ordaining priests in a financial religion where profit outranks everything else?
I’m asking that as someone outside those classrooms. I don’t know what every business school teaches, and I’m sure plenty of professors and graduates would push back. But I see enough of the finished product to wonder how people become so fluent in margins and so detached from human beings.
Take your profit margins and shove them up your ass if the only way you can improve them is to make everybody else’s life worse.
Some business leader will probably read this and call me woke. Classic deflection. Apparently wanting to be treated fairly while you build a fifth addition onto your multimillion-dollar mansion now requires a political label.
I’d just like not to be taken advantage of.
