Old Sayings of Quality and

quantity. How much have you lived? That’s a loaded question. It can be answered in so many ways. I guess the traditional way would probably to measure in years. This is a very business-like way to look at our existences, however, and it just does not seem to sit quite right in my heart. The things I feel about existence are not measurable in numbers. That’s why I am not a good American.

Something I have discovered in the last year is that the true driver of America is business. I don’t mean in the traditional capitalistic experience, although it now makes sense why there are so many people in the world that have a righteous indignation about the way one particular country deals with the world. We look at things in terms of business. It is not just that we are trying to make a buck and stay afloat, we actually think about things in terms of business: the numbers reveal the success.

The problem is, of course, that they are right. Numerically deciding worth is almost completely valid. If you were to set a goal for somebody, and they reached that goal, would you be proud of them? Absolutely. The problem with business is that somebody else is always making the goals. Presidents, CEOs, and Board Members do not even set goals. It’s the culture that sets the goals, because even presidents, CEOs, and Board Members all what to be as good as that guy across the street who started his congruous company a year after I did. That now becomes the goal. I want what he’s got. It’s really got nothing to do with him particularly; however, if we think about capitalism as competition drives capital, that other guys only has to exist. That’s his only job.

But we have all seen it, when two rival businesses get out of hand and start battling each other outside the lines of business. This is the really unsettling part because it is the business mentality that has gotten into their understanding of existence. They truly feel that what they need is more than what they’ve got, but their investment to get it involves so many other things that there is no way to keep track of them and it winds up being a very inhuman standard of human interaction. No matter how compassionate or people-oriented the culture of your business may or may not be, it is eventually about putting money in the register, the year-end reports, the weekly sales goals, the sales volume by department, the conversion rate, the average customer investment and (the big daddy of them all) profit.

I want to be very clear, here, and say that this is painting of big business overall, and this is not to say that within many of these companies there are not managers and directors and supervisors that feel it is a part of their investment to truly attempt to foster working relationships with the part-time staff and truly invest in them. Truly. But these guys don’t usually last all that long because it is an understood part of business that the part-time staff has the highest turnover, and that’s just the way it is. The longer you can keep them, the better, obviously, but the fact remains that you can train almost anybody to do that job or the equivalent of that job in what amounts to a grand total of a couple of days.

It gets a little bit hairier in the next steps.

This is largely because the complexity of the responsibility increases and becomes less about the tasks and more about the maintenance of the business. The tasks on any given salesfloor are not complicated. As nuanced as you want your tasks, you could probably teach a monkey to do most of these things. That’s a little bit harsh, but I’m afraid it’s true. Even when you have to deal with the human element, you can give your part-time monkey staff the skills to handle what most of the humans will throw at you.

Training people to take over a higher-complexity, less-task-oriented, business-watching position is more complicated. But even here you can train people to understand it. I’m so convinced of the ape’s ability to handle complex tasks, that were apes able to speak and read, they could do these tasks as well.

The goal of business is to make money. Anything else that happens outside of that is meant to help the business make money. Contributions to charities – good publicity. Social development – happier employees equals elevated efficiency. Careers and benefits – employees locked in for the long haul and it is easier to not have to train a new monkey.

I am not trying to pass judgment on business because there is a place for it in society. People have been in business for a long time. It is a necessary thing for the successful functioning of any society. What I worry about is the effect that the mindset of business has on the culture of an entire country when it becomes the only mindset. You can only get your music heard if it appeals to a mass of people and somebody can make money off of your efforts. You can only get a book published if it is accessible to the general reading public, especially if you have not ever had anything published previously. Somebody has to profit off of this goddamn it (tometimes I wonder why MS Word allows the word goddamn to go un-underlined whereas helluva will consistently get the underline until you tell the dictionary differently), and that had better be profit of the cold-hard electronic kind.

Digital money kills me, and has been killing me more and more lately. The fact that my enormous amounts of debt exist only in the fact that I can look at my accounts online and see what I owe is a difficult thing to juxtapose with the idea that it does not exist physically. Then again, it exists in the computer I am typing on. It exists in the diamonds I have bought. It exists in the groceries purchased and consumed long ago. But long after the physical things have gone, it exists in our hearts and our minds. Money has become so powerful that it does not even need to exist physically, the overwhelming reality of it exists so powerfully inside us—as a result of our cultural conditioning—that the ironic gap can never be bridged (i.e. because one side of the land does not have to exist). Sometimes it does exist, but it doesn’t have to.

Money has become too powerful to fight against.

Goddamnit I’m afraid I’ve lost the thread here, but then again, I think what I’m getting at is that quantifiable quantity does not equal quality. Two years of bartending experience does not mean that you are a good bartender. It means you have two years of experience. Having more money than somebody else does not make you better. Unquantifiable quantity does equal quality. Having money in your hand that you earned through a day of work that was involved in your desire to make yourself a better human being means something, no matter what quantity of money it is. Time spent in research and development of bartending skills will make you a better bartender. Qualified time, as it were, can be a successful measure, but time as a number cannot.

How much have you lived? Have you ever run around a hotel doing cartwheels down the hall and breaking onto the roof? No, there is a good chance you haven’t, because that is not qualified time to you. Have you ever wandered aimlessly because that is what you WANTED to do. That is a good investment of your time, and the quality of that time is unquantifiable in terms of the quality of interaction it will have on your existence.

Desire is natural. Desire for accumulation of things is not natural. I’ve got everything I want and still I want more.

I am in a struggle with the business-trained part of my head. It wants me to believe in that piece of the truth that the numbers reveal something. They do. But it’s what they reveal that is oftentimes skewed.

I guess I’m lost and don’t really know how to end this piece. Let’s call this a continuing struggle in my brain space, and there will be more business-minded cogitations into the meaning of existence to come.

But goddamn it I hope there’s not a helluva lot more.