Beginning with Love

My partner Amelia publicly mentioned me by name for the first time in her recent post How Technology Really Gets Created. She introduced me under the heading "What Actually Matters," which is how I knew it was a love letter.

Her piece, while ostensibly being about how technology is created, at a higher level reveals that human endeavors are inherently interdependent processes, with countless important roles, both direct and indirect. The myth that the only jobs that matter are the prestigious ones - those awarded the most money and status - is a lie perpetuated to justify and maintain society's oppressive hierarchies and thereby further exploit us.

For years before we first met, Amelia held a lofty place in the company she worked at, where she consistently used her influence to try to flatten the organizational hierarchy and bring more equity into her workplace. At first, this seemed welcomed; however, her egalitarianism had actually only been tolerated due to her positionality. After she came out as trans, her status decreased, enabling the higher-ups to depose her for her efforts. This left her almost entirely bereft of connections.

One of the tools of hierarchy is that the further up you go, the lonelier it gets. The enforcement of barriers between levels means that the mutuality necessary to build deeply supportive connections is only truly possible with one's peers. The higher up you are, the fewer peers you have and the more competitive the space is, so the less likely you are to get the social support you need. This would be untenable were it not for the societal pressure to prioritize money and status over love, and the fact that the hierarchy funnels resources upward, reinforcing the artificial divisions between different social strata.

What might the world look like if we instead prioritized love?

Love as a guiding principle is an ancient idea. However, it tends to result in supporters who pay lip service rather than implement change. Why?

Because making love our lodestone would reveal the evil at the heart of modern society: we have been enculturated to accept our own dehumanization.

The slash in the phrase "work/life balance" is a symbol of the violence of exploiting people for their labor - of the expectation forced on workers to dissociate from their lives for 40, 60, or more hours per week while maximum value is extracted from them and minimum returned. We are expected to pretend our working hours are separate from our "personal" lives (any room we are given to be a person in the workplace is considered an exception we should be grateful for), yet still prioritize working over all other aspects of living, including sleep, health, wellbeing, and our loved ones. We are pressured to continually borrow from our current and future health and happiness just to make it through the week (leaving us exhausted, desperately trying to replenish ourselves in our "spare time," as if subsisting on scraps was feasible), fearing the day the debt comes due.

However, if we oriented our lives towards love - loving ourselves, loving each other, loving the world we live in and the other beings we share it with - our lives would instead be characterized by a sense of ease.

What do I mean by ease? Love would lead us to create systems and networks of support to ensure that everyone's basic needs are met (including accessibility and accommodations); no one would have to struggle just to survive. Love would guide us to limit our work to a manageable portion of our capacity, making it satisfying rather than burdensome; we would still have ample time for the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social aspects of our lives. Love would interconnect us, giving us a sense of security that would allow us to relax - to embrace rest, joy, and pleasure.

There are a few things in this world I can confidently say I do superlatively well; loving is one of them. In Amelia's love letter, she communicated that because I have loved her as I do, and because we have loved each other as we have, she now has a felt sense of security that she is Loved. It is from this place of secure love that she has been able to learn so much more about herself, to figure out what her true values are, and to begin creating technology founded in what actually matters.

What she did not say, but is also true, is that because she has loved me as she does, and because we have loved each other as we have, I now have a felt sense of security that I am Loved. It is from this place of secure love that I have been able to learn so much more about myself, to figure out what my true values are, and to begin creating a philosophy to guide my praxis, founded in what actually matters.

There isn't an imbalance of emotional labor between us. Rather, through the responsiveness and reciprocity of our love, we have been able to support each other through challenges, to encourage one another in the face of risks, and to nurture our internal resources together. Loving each other does not deplete one to fill the other - it instead nourishes us both, and gives us more capacity for the other parts of living.

Together, she and I are envisioning a future quite different from the present, knowing that the bridge from here to there is love. As we've journeyed forward, guided by our values, we've been building community along the way. As a result, the amount of love flowing into and out of our lives has grown, as has the amount of ease, and things continue to get better and better. I'm filled with hope, and am so grateful to be on this trajectory with such a stellar partner, making sure her rocket is fueled.