Auld Lang Syne: Life as a Nobody

I am a nobody. You probably are too.

When I die, I will leave no legacy beyond, perhaps, a couple of old blog posts, this newsletter, friends and family’s memories of me, and whatever I managed to impart to my children (still haven’t had to go on television and apologize to the families of their victims — child rearing number one goal still in play!). I suspect that will be true of the vast majority of people reading this. And that is a good thing.

We are taught by society to aspire to so-called greatness, that we can have a special life if we just work hard enough. We all should know by that is nonsense. Initial circumstances, systematic prejudices, and just plain luck play a huge role in who and who is not successful. And once you are rich enough, there is almost nothing you can do to ever be poor or powerless again, despite your actions. Musk destroyed the value of Twitter, advanced antisemitism and racism in a way no had in decades in this country, faces a massive recall of his signature car, has seen that car’s reputation trashed in its biggest market, and has been credibly accused of the mass murder of his test monkeys. And got wealthier in the process. When I was working my way through college, I had a lot of terrible jobs. I promise you, though, the vast majority of the people who worked those jobs worked much, much harder than any C-suite executive I have known, but their circumstances helped prevent that hard work form paying off in the same manner.

What society puts monetary value upon is often bad.

It might be tempting to be distressed by being a nobody, but I would encourage you not to be. Dreams are good — I would not have been in place to take advantage of the luck and circumstances that led me to a middle-class life if I hadn’t wanted more for myself and my family. And there are still things I would like to achieve, some more reasonable than others. (I might one day be published, theoretically. Being the starting center for the Blackhawks seems a wee bit out of reach these days. Curse you, Connor Bedard!) But I put it to you that most everything of value in our society came from a bunch of nobodies.

It was nobodies, acting together in unions, that created the economy that allowed for a middle class to exist at all. It was nobodies in academia that created the infrastructure that the internet was built upon, creating the pathway for my career to exist. It was nobodies in the UAW that got the largest contract increase in history. It was nobodies in the WGA and SAG that won a contract that gives some hope that creatives in Hollywood can have middle class lives. It was nobodies in the Luddite movement that eventually won the changes in the laws that allowed unions to exist and working people, eventually, to reap the rewards of the Industrial Revolution. It was nobodies that lead the anti-colonial movements across the world that eventually lead to end of that system. It was nobodies who lead the resistance to Trump when Democratic leaders were making noises about working with him on infrastructure and so on.

And it is nobodies that have given people like Musk their wealth. Every car, rocket, and satellite were created, built, and designed by a group of nobodies — people whose name you will never know but absolutely changed the world. Defenders of the Great Man (and they do seem to focus on men, don’t they?) theory of history would argue that Musk’s leadership made all of that possible. Maybe, but I am unconvinced.

In Musk’s specific case, he bought Tesla from its actual creators and made its success largely on the backs of government subsidies. SpaceX he did start, with the money from PayPal (where he was fired as CEO), but at both companies, his contributions were minor to detrimental after that. SpaceX employees, for example, found it a relief that he was focused on Titter since it kept him out their hair.

Even in general, the idea that a Great Man comes along and introduces a new idea/product/invention through their brilliance is often, at best, an exaggeration. Note that Tesla survived on government subsidies. That happened because a lot of people knew that climate change would be bad, saw that electric vehicles were one mitigation strategy, and elected like-minded people. This is true of almost every major turning point/idea. The ideas are in the air because of research or politics or societal change. Many people were working on the electric light bulb and how to split an atom — these ideas did not spring worth like Athena from Zeus’s head. The ideas were already percolating, and often required multiple people to come to fruition. Edison’s bulb was not especially useful, for example, until Lewis Latimer invented a better filament for it and a reliable manufacturing process.

We venerate the people at the top of the pyramid, but the truth is in almost every case, nothing gets created until a bunch of nobodies lean into the hard work of making a thing work or an idea come to its fullest expression. Often those concepts are already supported in concept by large numbers of people, and the advances almost certainly depended upon learnings and creations done by others before the “invention” or advancement.

Our society is setup in such a way as to require capital in order to bring those people together, and so we apply the label Great Man to the people who have the capital. And while there is great value in organization (Edison’s real contribution to the world was not any of his inventions but Menlo Park. Similarly, the genius of the American Constitutional generation was not in their ideas about freedom or liberty but in their ability to come together and find a system that would support a democratic government, however flawed, that could survive the fault lines of the new nation), ours is not the only possible system. If we had a system that privileged worker ownership the same way ours privileges shareholder capitalism, you would see many more nobodies come together to create companies.

Almost every aspect of society is like this. FDR did not create the movement that made the New Deal possible — he merely was its figure head. Nobodies had already decided for themselves that the system needed to change. The techlash did not start with op-eds and intellectuals telling people they should be upset at tech companies. Regular people decided for themselves that the world Silicon Valley was building was not the world they wanted. On and on, over and over, history shows us that it is the nobodies that make the world move.

So, it’s okay to be a nobody. I have tried to be a good person this year and hope to be a good person in the next. I have worked to help others, and supported the movements with time and money that I thought were making the world better. I am a nobody, but I try and help. And in the grand scheme of things, that is all that has ever made a difference.

Thank you all for reading and subscribing in the last year, and I hope this new one finds you happier, healthier, and more content.