Historically, repairing our bodies has been a task of nature and regenerative medicine.
Now, we create prosthetics and we have machinery replacing the function of our intestines. Did you know there are companies working on things like artificial hearts?
Too often still, the original part is considered to be better, though with less hassle and better functions. That may just change over the next two decades.
With the invention of bioprinting and further rise of bionics, we may be able to grow and build new ‘spare parts’. Combined with 3D printing – which can be used to print the hardware parts like ribs and knee caps – we can potentially make robust and advanced new body parts.
Within a decade, we may have people who will be responsible for ‘growing’ these new organs for wounded persons or people with an illness. If this is something that we would want, maybe we can even create parts for healthy people who are looking for upgraded bodies.
The job of a body part designer would consist mainly of ensuring that all raw materials for the body parts are present and that a ‘growth schedule’ is kept.
Obviously, they would also need to interpret sensorial data from organs currently growing to ensure a proper high-quality delivery. That being said, software could take up that role as well.
Since every body part needs to be personalised, the body part designer would need to have a thorough understanding of DNA, its encoding and advanced body part design software. They would also have to monitor testing of these body parts to ensure that the part is functioning properly under a variety of circumstances.
Finally, the body part designer would also provide feedback to surgeons via video-conferences when they are replacing the body part.
Needless to say, replacing body parts remains quite invasive as it requires surgery. For certain cases, nano-medicine may prove to be more interesting as it doesn’t require incision.
Apart from the practical obstacles, a bigger question needs to be answered about how we are going to react to these ‘cyborgs’. Obviously, when no-one notices, for instance when an intestine is replaced, the problem solves itself. It’s a totally different thing when you see people with a bionic arm or hand.
People remain highly influenced by the opinions of others (maybe you remember the “Glassholes” wearing Google Glass), so it remains to be seen if this will touch base with people. Although people show empathy towards robots, we may not show that same kindness towards ‘real’ human beings.
This is an article from the section “Jobs of the future”. Its aim is to challenge us to think what could be the jobs of the next decades. We realise that some examples may sound far-fetched but keep your mind wide open, twenty years ago, one could not have expected that there are now businesses built on replacing cracked cell-phone or tablet screens either.
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string(3) "yes" NULLIt’s six-thirty on a Monday morning and the alarm clock buzzes. There is little time to waste. You take a quick shower, eat some breakfast and off you go. You need to go to work. You’re not in a happy place. There’s still thirty-five years to go and then, then you are retired. That is when you can finally do the things you’d really like to do.
Maybe this is your life; maybe it’s the life of someone you know.
To many people, work is just a hassle. It’s a way to pay the bills, and it’s a burden. Thousands of people are frantically juggling their work/life balance.
Well, I’ve got news for you: there is no work/life; there is only life. Your work will be a substantial part of your life and the good news is that it can be truly meaningful. Your work can be a true driver for a fulfilling, high-quality life.
How is this?
In order to pinpoint the answer, we need to explore the four reasons why people work. To be clear, work is not a synonym for your job; work can be paid or unpaid.
Reason one: Financial security
In our current economic system, we have associated work with our need for financial security.
Unless you have a pile of cash available, you’ll need to work to earn the money to pay for the things you need to live a minimally decent life. To the large majority of people, food, clothes, and a home are all paid for out of the income they receive from their work. Our need for job security is actually our need for financial security.
Our need for financial security is a negative driver as to why we work. Combating insecurity and ensuring that we feel at ease, is not something that helps us to enjoy life. In our current, increasingly globalised and robotised economy, increasingly more people are struggling to feel at ease as they face ever-increasing job and financial insecurity.
Reason two: Connection
We are innately social beings, and we need others to help us thrive. To many, work is a way of belonging. When we go to work, we become part of a group of people who all join together to achieve a common purpose. That is why losing a job hurts us both financially and socially.
At work, we meet new people, have a chat at the coffee machine to discuss the latest episode of Game of Thrones, and some people even meet their partner for life. Work has a social function.
In our current economy, the potential for connection is increasingly under pressure: as insecurity increases, we turn more to ourselves; we look out for our own interests and generally become less sociable.
Reason three: Personal growth
Although there is an ardent debate about the exact causes, there is a behavioural, cognitive, developmental and constructivist interpretation in that we all inherently have an innate drive to learn. We also want to apply our skills and become the best at what we do.
Work offers us the potential to achieve all of this. A stimulating new role which enables us to sharpen our existing skills, or put new skills under our belt, is intensely fulfilling. When we have the opportunity to bite off just a little bit more than we can chew when we are in our comfort zone, we stretch ourselves and achieve a state of flow.
In order to be able to achieve this state of flow there are two conditions:
If we stay in a job that does not allow us to learn and grow, which often happens because we are too insecure to change, we become disconnected from our work after a while and if things take a turn for the worse, we end-up in a bore-out.
Reason four: Contributing to a bigger goal
Yes, we go to work to attain financial security, build social relations and develop ourselves. However, there is more to the story: work is not only about ourselves. We all have a need to transcend our own goals as we all want to contribute to a bigger picture.
By going to work, we join a group of people (or a team of colleagues) to achieve something bigger than ourselves. This is something inherently valuable. What is better than to contribute to the mission of the organisation? Isn’t this the reason there is an organisation in the first place?
Being the loftiest reason of the four, going to work helps us to give meaning to our lives. When we look in the mirror and ask ourselves the question, “How did my activities contribute to making this world a better place?”, meaningful work will give you the answer.
You can find proof for this final reason in the millions of people offering their expertise and time in voluntary activities. Meaningfulness isn’t just reserved for unpaid work though; Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to name just one, shows that there are jobs that provide deep fulfilment.
If you have found a job that enables you to strike a balance between all the reasons you want to go to work, you are in a pretty good place. If you haven’t, don’t despair. Managers of organisations have a good reason to support all the reasons why we work: it brings organisations superior results.
So, next time the alarm clock buzzes you out of bed and you’re reluctant to go to work, think about what truly matters to you, which talents you want to develop and what type of organisation you want to work for. After that, have that coffee with your boss to discuss things. The chances are that he or she will be grateful for it. After all, your boss is a fellow person who is going to work for the same deeply human reasons as you are.
Why do you work? Do you know the answer to that question? Maybe you get up every morning for financial security or because you want to connect to people. Or is it because you want to grow? Find out your answer by using the Happonomy Value Canvas!
string(3) "yes" NULLThere are only a handful of ideas in economic theory that bring as much passion to the table as the idea of a universal basic income (UBI). It’s an idea that has excited many great minds. It is also an idea that has received new found attention, and Rutger Bregman, a Dutch historian, is one of the major contemporary voices in favour of the idea.
Historically, proponents with widely varying perspectives have favoured the idea for two main reasons:
In spite of such strong arguments in favour of this idea, there is one question that begs for an answer:
“Why don’t we have a basic income yet?”
Before you read any further, let me stop you right here. If you are a believer of a UBI, the chances are that you will revolt against some of the things you read. I urge you to take a deep breath when you feel a creeping feeling in your stomach that says, “No!”
The principles of a basic income and why they are flawed
The UBI is built on the best values humanity has to offer: equality, compassion and brotherhood. The idea that every human being can have a life without struggle is very compelling.
Unfortunately, the problem is that this is not the mainstream perspective of our species. At the time of writing, the only country that has put the idea of a UBI to a vote was Switzerland, and over 76% voted against it. Ironically, many people who would have benefited from a UBI actually voted against it.
The main reason that people who oppose the idea of a universal basic income give is that they claim we cannot pay for it, as there is just not enough money. This is a seemingly strange argument if you accept that there is an infinite money supply. Money is not something that grows on a tree; it’s just a number in a computer. There is literally an unlimited supply of money.
The psychology of this argument cuts deeper though, in that it is deeply rooted in a mindset of scarcity. Scarcity impacts the way we think and the way we feel. A perspective of financial scarcity decreases our willpower and increases stress levels, causing our limbic brain to take over.
The paradoxical consequence is that our current scarcity-driven economic system hinders the uptake of a universal basic income. People who are forced into scarcity thinking will not believe that there is enough for everybody, just because their brains tell them.
So, the plot thickens. A rarely heard argument against a universal basic income is that it is considered to be unfair, as a UBI is considered to be the pinnacle of fairness. However, this is not exactly true; it feels unfair that someone who is already rich would receive the same amount of money as a person who is struggling. Elon Musk does not need a basic income.
It feels unfair when a person who is ill and in need of additional care gets the same amount of money as a healthy person. The belief that we are all equal is something that is factually incorrect and which people do not want. People don’t want equality; they want fair inequality. Implementing a UBI would distort this.
Why the discussion about a basic income is the wrong type of discussion
In today’s UBI discussion, a powerful argument given by technologists is the claim that there are not going to be enough jobs around for all the working population. As a consequence, we would achieve more by installing a universal basic income. If we don’t, we could end up with a society of massive poverty.
This idea is quite appealing, but it misses the very important point that people do not work only to achieve financial security. We also go to work to connect with like-minded souls, to grow our talent and to contribute to something bigger, possibly the mission of an organisation.
The question we need to ask ourselves is this: ”Won’t a basic income in a largely automated hi-tech society leave many amongst us feeling depressed?” This is because people might feel useless as they cannot contribute, or learn and develop their talent.
What the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are missing is the fact that they indeed have that sense of personal growth and self-development as they are building the technologies of tomorrow.
Therefore, the discussion we need to have is about the role of technology and economy to drive the quality of our lives forward, rather than about the utility of a universal basic income. It is a debate that transcends the financial dimension of a universal basic income.
Does this mean that we need to abort the idea of a universal basic income and all of its virtues? The answer is simply “No.” We can upgrade the idea. In the next article, we explore the idea of a dynamic happiness income, which is an upgraded version of a universal basic income.
In the mood for more food for thought? We redesigned our money system in a way that it supports our quality of life. We call it the Sustainable Money System. Do you want to find out more about it? Go explore the model!
string(3) "yes" NULLWhether you are on the receiving end of our capitalist system or whether you are struggling, you probably see that the pressure on many people is growing day by day.
If you are wondering why so many people are feeling lost, why so many people are exhausted and frustrated in today’s society, the diagnosis is simple: we have built a system of work and money that doesn’t fully align with the things we truly need…
What do we need?
Face it, chances are you haven’t given this much conscious thought. Science has though: emerging research from the fields of behavioral economics, positive psychology and cognitive sciences are able to paint a clear picture of those things we find valuable, what drives the quality of our lives.
There are 21 building blocks to our happiness, and they can be bundled into 5 large dimensions.
1. we all want to survive
2. we want to feel at ease
3. we are social beings so we want to connect
4. we want to grow
5. we want to be part of something bigger
Why do we work?
If you would ask people the question “why do you work”, you would often get the answer “to earn enough money to pay the bills”. And that is obviously true, in our current system we have linked money and the financial security that comes from this with work.
There are 3 other reasons though why people go to work. And guess what, they connect back to the things we need.
We go to work because we want to connect, because we like to have a coffee with colleagues and discuss the latest TV show, we go to work because we want to grow, learn and apply our talent in a challenging job. And we also go to work because we want to contribute to something bigger, and what better thing to contribute to than the mission of an organization?
Where our system goes wrong
Our current system is failing us. It overemphasizes our need for personal growth, competition and efficiency. As a consequence, our current system increasingly fails to deliver the financial security we crave – people lose their jobs because of globalization and robotization – and at the same time we have thrown the potential for true connection and purpose under the bus.
The symptoms? They are abundantly out there. One in two people in Belgium expects to burn-out at a certain moment in their careers. Over the last 10 years, the number of people in the EU that are without work for an extended time or have a job but still live in poverty, has risen by almost a third.
Add money to the mix
Money, the second ingredient of our system, does strange things to people. It impacts our motivation, our health and our happiness. Our monetary system is built on debt and scarcity, two things that are psychologically far from neutral. In the EU alone over 10.000 people committed suicide because of financial problems after the 2008 financial crisis. Studies from researchers at Stanford and Berkeley showed that our debt based, scarcity driven monetary system hurts the brain development of children as young as 18 months.
Where does that leave us?
It seems we are stuck right? Stuck in a system where we need to work more and more and struggle to receive less and less, all this with a big bag of debt on our backs, pushing us down.
The good news is that it will be our generations who will decide whether we will use our economy and technology to improve the quality of our lives or whether we’ll sacrifice our happiness for the sake of economics.
And there is more good news, we don’t need a revolution, we can start small.
Coming next week:
Part two – Explore 4 types of solutions we can deploy.
In the mood for more food for thought? We redesigned our money system in a way that it supports our quality of life. We call it the Sustainable Money System. Do you want to find out more about it? Go explore the model!
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