Image © Jose & MidJourney
Two things crossed wires in my intellect this week, and while they can both be true, they are dissonant and make my brain hurt.
We are living through hard times, humanity wise. And by humanity, I mean belief and respect for all humans, all living things, and the planet as a living organism. For humanity to succeed, we all need to be active in achieving our highest potential, in harmony, with a deep acceptance of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility. I know this is not everyone’s definition of humanity, and it might feel like this is an invention driven by abused acronyms, but I wouldn’t know how to define humanity in the first place without addressing it. This is not about leveling down or up humanity, just as it is not about forgetting reality to focus on extreme humans.
Jensen Huang, the CEO of the much talked about Nvidea corporation, recently addressed students at Stanford for one hour, but the part that everyone is repeating is that “… people with very high expectations have very low resilience, and resilience matters in success. I don’t know how to teach it to you except I hope suffering happens to you… I use the phrase ‘pain and suffering’ inside our company with great glee… …for all of you Stanford students I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering”. If you get to know more about Jensen, you know that he is the latest emissary of the “American Dream”, his life story is by American standards full of “pain and suffering”. And if you remind yourself that he is speaking at Stanford, to an audience that is probably filled with students that pay dearly to be there, it is probably fair to say that many of them might be feeling much “pain and suffering” as he puts it. So, it is a message crafted by someone with a particular story, aimed at a group of students in a particular context, and if we left at that, it would probably be Ok. Even when I remind myself of the latest data stating that peak millennials are in fact correct when they say that “it sucks to be 33”.
But this is now being used as a mantra, thrown at the world, with all the underlying assumptions and biases, with an attempted strong correlation between “pain and suffering” and success, even some hints of causation. But I look around and ask myself, if all the pain and suffering we are surrounded by, just outside our doors, and in distant places, if all of it can be seen as a requirement for success, a mere stage of evolution that will render all that are in pain and suffering a glimpse of success, since it is assumed that not everyone can be as successful and Jensen Huang. Outside the context of where this message was formulated, what is the universal value attached to it, if any? When it is shared outside that context, does the message remain the same?
I am reminded of Gill Scott-Heron’s “The revolution will not be televised”, where he invites humans to realize that true change will not be brought to them by corporations, but rather through a change in one’s own mind and actions. In this age where everything is “televised”, and so much feels “revolutionary”, I ponder about message and human impact.