Using the delusion that you’re going to “change the world” to justify your workaholism is the void of meaning in your life desperately crying for help.
Can you imagine Gandhi bragging about the long hours for some trite commercial bullshit? This is the delusion of grandeur so ripe in startup land. WE ARE GREAT MEN OF HISTORY!
It’s exactly because stakes are so low for the bulk of these startups that the compensating bravado about changing the world and working yourself to the bone is necessary. To justify the personal sacrifice and the company-wide exploitation. All for a chance to 10x some VC fund.
The irony is that the last thing the bulk of these startups actually want to do is change the world. On all the meaningful parameters of life, they’re about sustaining the status quo. Who has the money, who has the power. The point is stasis.
But understandably it’s hard to convince others that the whole jig is about providing monstrous unicorn returns to some VC fund. So that’s why the same old bullshit is wrapped in this WORLD CHANGING rhetoric.
It’s also telling that the original list of characters included such opposites as Thatcher and MLK. Because the means are divorced from an end. It’s not changing the world FOR THE BETTER. It’s just this performative bullshit of change. Much startup change is for the worse.
“I’m here is to remind you that maybe, just maybe, you too have a nagging, gagging sense that the current atmosphere of disrupt-o-mania isn’t the only air a startup can breathe.“ m.signalvnoise.com/reconsider/
