Agape

I made a mistake during my time at Sheertex. It fucked with my head for a while after. I encouraged a culture of conflating a human’s value to a business / process with their human-ness. Someone failing to follow instructions became a reason to dislike / engage less with them.

Super toxic. I regret it.

One of the big weights that lifted for me in my months after Sheertex was realizing that all humans need agape (for a minute I called it deserving love - but thats was two wrong words trying to be one I didn’t know existed).

Agape is an ancient Greek word that means unconditional, selfless, and sacrificial love.

Value exchange is orthogonal to human-ness.

Why am I writing this? Three reasons:

1. Accountability: If you see me conflating someone’s usefulness with their humanity again, call me the fuck out. I want to be a human with agape for humanity first, I want to be surrounded by highly effective people second.

2. Permission to remain ruthless: I wasn’t, I’m not, and I refuse to become - soft on value. I want to work somewhere brutally honest about who/what creates value.

3. I fucked up. I’m sorry to those I hurt forgetting your humanity.

Advice from someone who lost the path: Maybe don’t partner with some people. Definitely don’t hire others. But every single human needs agape - love and decency and respect for the human inside. You still need to fire the unaligned / low-value ones. But you need to do it while acknowledging their humanity. Tricky.

Side-Quest: For me, this is why universal income is complicated and political. Income is revenue. Revenue happens when exchanging value. The term badly needs a rebrand… universal revenue is fully nonsense. Revenue for zero value should die as an idea. If only there were a way to provide universal agape… a non-monetary token… though realistically mailed out as dollar-bucks… but somehow explicitly not ever considered income/revenue…