Meaningful Returns

Here is a short video documenting how a few people took an app (Instagram) and decided they weren’t going to be okay with the status quo use of that app. So they transformed it into something wonderful and life-giving, providing along the way that which has become quite the commodity in our culture: human connection.

It takes guts to do this. To look at something, whether it be a camera or a pencil or a piece of wood or your vocation or a photo-sharing app, and say, “I see what this is being used for by most everyone else, but I think we can do better.” And then doing better.

There is so much opportunity for this sort of use-transformation in our most valuable assets. What if your home was a place for all sorts of people (along with all sorts of messes) to come together? What if you began to think of your car less as a status symbol? What if you traded your car for a bike?

What about our time? What if, in all of our time, we began to think less and less about simply progressing and more and more about investing? Investing in our hobbies and passions, investing in things that are life-giving to others, investing in each other.

What if we got more accustomed to the pattern of spending our moments in the pursuit of that which makes us, and the people around us, more human?