Lost Art

We are all looking for practical solutions for the uncertain future of work. But we also need to make spiritual changes.

We live in a winner-take-all world. As children, we grow up to compete in our family's concerns, grades and friends' victories in school and sports and debates. Later, when we enter the world of work, we learn how to win over others. But we must always win. Management literature is full of instructions on "how to win customers", "how to win competitions" and "how to win in the stock market". In business, politics and other fields, victories are never bittersweet, while failures are always sour.

Of course, there are nights like fools, where a global spoken series of public repentance, entrepreneurs and business leaders fail miserably. But failure does not mean loss. You can "fail quickly," in Silicon Valley folklore, turning around quickly but failure is a long way off. Loss can be extremely slow, and it is impossible to fully recover. What fails can be corrected, and what is lost is lost. This is a problem. That's why loss is actually a lost art.

For decades, we have been shrinking the space that we can lose without social stigma. Our obsession with victory makes the efficiency of tyranny that composer Claude Debussy calls "the space between notes" is not music, but as waste. In a society, the only thing left is the "art" of the deal, the winners are the best dealmakers, and everyone can only get what they give, is a failed society. In a climate where we know the price of everything but have no value, we lack the material and spiritual resources we need. Economic principles now encroach on every aspect of our lives. From a market economy, we have evolved into a market society where business logic consumes the hearts of politics and the fabric of our citizens. We regulate the zero-sum worldview of a transaction.

In tomorrow's workplace, loss will become a more important trait. Not only as a way to show and form the character, but as the character of our time. Work will become a far less reliable vehicle for the distribution of wealth, ensuring economic stability and affirming our identity. With software and robots expected to replace up to 50 percent of human resources over the next two decades, we will see many job opportunities disappear, employment cycles shorten and the economy take off. In this new super-flexible workplace, we will have less status, less power and less control over our work.

Many of us will find ourselves at an unfair disadvantage to compete with smarter machines for maximum efficiency. In the face of the ruthless winning mechanism of machines, forced to become intelligent machines themselves, the ultimate bastion of human beings may be the ability we have lost. Machines just stop running, they may fail, but they will never be lost. Unlike machines, we can choose to act morally, even if it is not worth it, if this is an unwinnable argument. Winners don't fight for defeat. The rest of us should.

We need to create systems, rituals and support for us to find ourselves, even if we lose. These may include peer-to-peer mental health services, career transformation counseling, communities like burning people, ouishare or giving lectures, piecemeal assembling and providing us with a linear logical path of sanctuary, of course stronger than ever in the humanities and arts as access points to other lives, hidden, foreign or lost worlds. We need leaders to humbly admit that their victories are always better than victories unless they address deep human desires or create true social justice, not just short-term customer satisfaction or one-sided wealth.

The task of all of us is to lose class and dignity to remind us of something more valuable than victory. And the opportunity for the great future will understand loss as an important condition for human survival: "I lost me." In the Tour de France, the famous yellow jersey is awarded to the Cavaliers who are leading the game. Worst of all, there is no visible placement of the knight to honor him: people simply call him a "big red lantern, carrying a red lantern with memories" hanging in the back of the train guard. Writer Max Leonard wrote a whole book about "the guy at the end of the year," because, Leonard said, "he saw more games, and there were many rich stories there to say:" it's a refreshing point of view-and one we need to adopt more.

When we give in to the machine-thinking regime, let's try to see our life as a long-term, ever-changing concession speech. We should not regard professional failure or personal loss as a small mistake on the road, but should accept the fact that failure is a failure.