My new perspective on American entrepreneurship
If Travis Kalanick came to Fiji, the first question he would ask is, “How do I get these people to buy smartphones so they can start driving for Uber?”
As a citizen of the western world, I view everything though a western lens. When I approach a problem, the solutions I devise exist in the framework of a WEIRD society. My last post before leaving for Fiji was about self-driving cars. That feels so absurd now that I’m here.
Poverty here is not what I expected. I honestly didn’t know enough about Fiji to have any real expectations, but by most standards this is a poor country. Many of the houses have no screens on their windows and are roofed with corrugated sheet metal. Clean water is a mile walk away for some people. Cyclone Winston decimated the local villages last February and they have yet to fully recover.
But for all of the necessities and luxuries that people here lack, they are happier than 90% of the people I’ve met back in the states. The culture here has bred stronger communities, and most people I’ve met seem far less lonely.
In Western society,there is trickle-down shame associated with poverty. We are all victims of pervasive advertising and a culture that prizes commodities over communities.
This culture compels millions to live a lifestyle focused on working jobs that enable you to continue working and raise a family that can take your place in the workforce after you are dead or retired. People work unnecessarily long hours, eat unhealthy foods, and spend no time on emotional or spiritual well-being. The downsides of this work culture are well-documented.
Just to be clear, I’m mostly talking about middle class workers. Poor families work long hours as a means of survival. Middle class folks, though, work more than they need to after they’ve secured necessities like food and shelter. You work overtime so that you can afford unnecessary luxuries that likely will not improve the quality of your life.
On my second day in Fiji, I met a man named Joseph the other day. He lives in a village and said that all he does is sleep and eat fruit all day. This isn’t true, because we know he’s been helping to rebuild the villages houses wrecked by Winston.
The fact is, though, that his environment, a poor village in Fiji, provides him with the food and shelter that needs to live happily without working nine to five.
In my most popular blog post, I wrote briefly about Ecovillages. I don’t think I did a good enough job articulating why I believe that sort of lifestyle would benefit the world. Now that I’ve spent a bit of time in real villages, though, I think I can do a better job.
When Joseph is hungry he simply climbs a coconut tree or walks over to the gardens where they grow their papayas and cassava. They produce food locally, so they’re not dependent on agricultural corporations or worthless entrepreneurial projects like Juicero for nourishment.
In most big cities, there are farmers markets where its easy to get affordable produce. If we work on innovative new methods of urban agricultural production and distribution, then people can live healthier, more localized lives. If cities begin to function as clusters of independent ecovillages, then we can build stronger communities and live healthier lives.
Entrepreneurship is the solution to poverty, but in America, entrepreneurship is often focused on the wrong problems. There are countless stories of people who have founded companies, built apps and designed products that were utterly useless and wound up failing.
Apps like S’more, which allow you to subject yourself to needless advertising for the reward of amazon gift cards, thus fueling the endless cycles of consumption and material unfulfillment, come to mind. The sad thing is that advertising built America, so S’more has tapped into a market that will likely never be depleted. Its founders combined our smartphone obsession with the ubiquity of advertising. Slam dunk.
I’m still marveling at the boondoggle that is Juicero, the Keurig machine of fresh fruit. This is the most useless machine ever invented as far as I’m concerned.
Entrepreneurship is a tool, so like any other tool it can be easily misused. A hammer should not be used to pull weeds, and a weed whacker should not be used to drive nails. Entrepreneurship should be used to improve the lives of everyone so that any entrepreneur has the resources to improve their communities.
It’s no surprise that most entrepreneurs in America are more focused on profit than on community improvement. Remember: commodities over communities. It’s unlikely that we will see an entrepreneurial project designed to help people work less and still live in comfort. The big companies don’t want that. They want us to stay busy and unfulfilled so that we keep buying their products.
There is no need for people to be so busy that we can’t take time to get our own fruit and veg. The western obsession with productivity is detrimental in that we rely on people who don’t care about us to take care of us. Juicero doesn’t give a damn about your health. They want your dollars. That’s why they made an unnecessary machine to do something that you can accomplish with ten minutes and a blender.
In order to improve the world and move forward and build a better future, we need to work on entrepreneurial projects that create better communities and allow us to tap into local resources to improve our lives. We don’t need apps that allow people to pollute our consciousness with more advertising.
As always, thanks for reading. My GoFundMe will be active for the whole time I’m in Fiji, and I‘ll appreciate any amount that you feel like donating. All of it will go directly to HELP International to support their volunteer programs worldwide. Please follow me on Twitter @JeremyCummings3 or on Instagram @so.tall.im.in.space to see where the adventure takes me.
