Meaningful Returns

Across the street from my office is an elementary school full of kids, and as I write this they are having a field day. An actual field day. Some of the students are shooting basketball, some are hula hooping, some are having a dance party, some are getting their faces painted. Laughter and music are the sounds I hear most here in my office.

Children are complex people, and I’m sure some of the children at the field day are going through difficulty of some sort in their lives, struggling in their own honest ways to come to terms with the confusion they’re experiencing at home, or even on the playground among their friends. But as a group, I very seriously doubt that they would trade Field Day for anything else in the world right at this moment, because school is almost out for the summer, and today is Field Day.

By any meaningful criteria, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is a masterful leader and visionary and communicator, and his watch over that company has led it to dizzying economic (and anthropological!) heights. He has in many ways upended our entire system for consuming goods and services, not to mention the expectations we bring to the other areas of our lives.

Bezos’ annual letters to shareholders are always masterclass examples, and this year’s was no different. But there’s a portion of it which has been on my mind regularly in the last couple of weeks:

One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before. It may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before – in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something’s in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more. These examples are from retail, but I sense that the same customer empowerment phenomenon is happening broadly across everything we do at Amazon and most other industries as well. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it.

On the one hand, this is the genius of capitalism. It works via desire. Capitalism is the ideology of desire, and it has made a profound impact on the globe and in our lives. And so in this way, Bezos’ comment is essentially an explanation of the way capitalism works, the way it would quite literally implode if “divine discontent” were no longer the norm.

But on the other hand, we must ask ourselves, What work does this ideology do? What do we get in return for our divine discontent?

The first thing we get is this: children growing up in an age of divine discontent do not grow up to be adults; they grow up to be consumers.

That may seem overly dramatic at first, but I don’t think it is. Go back and read Bezos’ comment: is there anything in there that attempts or even acknowledges the question, “Is this good?” He says the words Wow, Improvement, Faster, More, and Customer Empowerment Phenomenon. These are great words for selling more stuff, but there is no framework there for deciding what is good, which is a decision that I think we ought to teach our children to make. Instead, the framework of desire gives us as consumers the tools we need for deciding what will make us “happy.” 

Look, I understand that I’m asking too much from an economic system. But I do so to try and raise the point that for too long now we’ve not asked enough from it! When we ask more of it, we’ll realize we need more than what an economic system can give us. We’ll realize it will take an intentional effort to swim upstream, to keep from being reduced from human beings in relationship with one another to economic participants in relationship to markets.

If we ask enough, we might even find freedom–not the negative freedom of capitalism which says “Hands off! Don’t tell me what to do!” but the positive freedom which says “Here is what is Good, go do it.”

We might start to trade our divine discontent for the contentment of Field Day.