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Esteemed Reader of our Magazine:

Sitting and listening to the conversations around me in the Cincinnati airport, I learned that most of my fellow wayfarers were traveling on business. They were cogs in various corporate machines. They were engineers, marketing coordinators, salespeople, going somewhere to do the work of their corporations. Expressions uttered into cell phones or to companions revealed the mindset; words and phrases like “bottom-line”, “incentivize”, “return on investment”, “cash flow analysis” reverberated through the halls.

This business outlook is endemic to America. In general our lives, our ambitions, our motivations are within the context of our jobs. Business and its culture is the lens through which America sees eve-rything. Other people are viewed as superior or inferior based on the success of their careers relative to our own. Nature and its resources are viewed in terms of money-making potential.

This preoccupation with money-making and business is self-inflicted slavery. Firstly, for ourselves, because we are so much more than our jobs, our education, or our particular line of work. But the real tragedy is that implicit in the American approach to business is that it requires expansion—new markets, new materials, new labor.

Our way of doing business requires the consumption of ever-more people, resources, and currencies. Sweatshop labor, with 10-year-old Mexican children chained to sewing machines making Nikes, is a dramatic example. But it also requires the acquisition of psyches. That is, we need to get others to value what we value. And America does this with the hubristic assumption that our values are the best. Much of the world is convinced by our well-marketed argument. But recently we are feeling the growing anger that the world feels toward America. This anger represents a disillusionment with our values, with American dollar business, and the real perception that not everyone can prosper.

In fact, no one prospers. Hearing the sound of business-doers in the airport, I hear the inner poverty of our values. It is the sound of getting and having, closing deals that will bring in more bucks, machinating within corporate hierarchies. It is a system that turns people into machines that are hired and fired—that are valued—on the basis of their ability to function in a very limited role. The sound of it is quietly desperate, hollow. In fact, it sounds dead.

But we need to do business. We all need to make money. And that won’t change—at least in the short term. But there is a way to do business that remains true to what is actually valuable. And that is the person. A person is rife with gifts and qualities that can be developed—both for her and her feeling of fulfillment, and also in service of others.

Instead of making the function more important than the person, we can put the person—ourselves—first. To do this we need to consider what we love and are really suited to. We need to find the occupation that is uniquely our own and then boldly embark upon the journey of actualizing a career that serves our being and makes us whole.

We cannot depend on the American system to help us do meaningful, productive work. The system doesn’t care about us. It cares about the bottom line. It is up to us to find the thing we are to do and carry it out. The first step is an inquiry, a quest into ourselves to discover who we are and what we can become. Finding direction is not a matter of picking a career from a list prepared by the Department of Labor. We need to be willing to invent a vocation for ourselves, one that reflects who we are, instead of molding ourselves to fit a prescribed function. And then we need to venture forth courageously with one overarching rule: Don’t quit.

Here at my destination—sunny Santa Fe, New Mexico—I was lunching outside with some fellow New Yorkers. In the course of a conversation I was asked where I had studied. “In life,” I answered. The questioner was puzzled, as she was clearly wondering where I took my degrees.
“I learned all I know by doing,” I continued.

“But then how did you know how to start a magazine,” she persisted.
“By starting a magazine,” I insisted.

The knowledge for how to do what we need to do to fulfill our lives—or at least the knowledge of what we need to learn—is apparent in the doing itself. It is a matter of hearing that knowledge and obeying it.
If a number of us can begin to do this we can create a new economic culture. We can create a community of people who do what they do because they love to do it—people for whom what they do isn’t a job. It is their calling, their life.

So take heart, take courage. Undertake the unprecedented. And don’t wait until tomorrow. Seize the opportunity that is your life, and become yourself!

—Jason Stern