Money: Is it everything?

Key Learnings from this Article:

• Disruptive Innovation and Competition: Emphasizes how disruptive innovations have enhanced convenience and resulted in heightened competition for limited resources in the modern capitalist world.
• Perks Beyond Money: Underscores the importance of non-monetary benefits in the workplace and encourages individuals to value both financial and emotional rewards.
• Shifting Values and Prestige: Suggests that younger generations may prioritize ethical and meaningful work over high-paying jobs, and it encourages considering a company's mission and social impact when evaluating job satisfaction.

Disruptive Innovation, Competition and Money

The wheel and the mobile phone share a prized accolade – they are both disruptive innovations that improved convenience in that passage of time. Now, disruptive innovations are mushrooming in so many neglected niches ushering in human capital, which also comes with competition for limited resources. Competition is found, more often than not, to get ahead in wages and ranks, in the rat race of modern capitalist establishments, seeing themselves as chasers of dreams, but not as rungs in an ecosystem. An ecosystem is filled with specialists working for their employer’s gains, fortifying the ecosystem’s goals, while quietly benefitting from a myriad of outcomes, out of which money is perched right at the top.

Perks that transcend the rupee

Perks that come from work, can be pigeonholed into ones which are measured entirely in currencies and ones that have a rupee value but are appreciated from a more emotional viewpoint. Yes, salary is both the monstrosity as well as the muse of work. Outside of salary, there are industry-based perks that comes in the form of holiday packages provided in the hospitality industry, international travel opportunities that are part and parcel of the aviation/travel setup, the overseas training in Denmark or Vietnam streamlined for budding optometrists, and a kilogram of tea that is provisioned to those that are wage earners in the tea packaging industry. While all these are healthy additions, there is still that notion to address on net salary being the crème-a-la-crème of perks of any white or blue collar job. The wealth predisposition should not ruin your place in the ecosystem value chain, since we are living in an era of “money walks and money talks”. Still, supplementary benefits go a long way in making you more appreciative of the non-monetized perks that are significant feel-good factors

Tackling the Two Way Street

?“Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country", which was actually an extract from the inaugural address by John F. Kennedy, the US President, on 20 Jan, 1961, has echoed into the hearts of many generations, and not just in the U.S. This quote resonates in times such as the present, where many, including sportsmen and sportswomen, prioritize wages before their country of birth or nationality. It is a reality that sports careers can be limited to the summers of your youth and that prioritizes you leave something behind for your retirement, when your earning potential can be compromised due to age-related factors.

We should never point the finger – like Uncle Sam – at those who wish to make the best out of “make hay while the sun shines”, when you are earning a healthy pay packet in the prime of your youth. A paycheck is important when you wish to invest in your first house or apartment, or to get ready for the birth of your first child, or to hop on a plane and to quench your sense of wanderlust in a wildlife park in Kenya.

So, serving yourself a platter, can be a status quo to ensure a modern sense of eudemonia (flourishing) in contemporary life, but loyalty to your employer is no fleeting passage of feel-goodness. For some, it can be a vow of cherished honor or longevity to an enterprise that is bigger than a simple paycheck. This is why many transnational powerhouses champion and celebrate those who have stayed with the same outfit for 10, 20 or even a quarter of a century, in work years. ?

Prestige – No Longer Entirely a Quiet Pleasure

No longer are Millennials and Gen Zs striving hard to join global giants (traditionally high-profile jobs), still they can show a preference to be reaching for ethical altitudes. Many charismatic and do-gooder organizations (albeit ones with deep pockets) still steal the limelight away from large fossil fuel companies and entrenched banks, but the heyday or glory of working for ethical outfits over those that gently misshape modern-day ethics, is now surprisingly blurring. Again, money can be a recurring factor in all this. Still, those working for NGOs for the dedication, altruism, and protection they offer - and not for a fat paycheck -, still make up a strong collective of grassroots employees.

The Trump Card: Is money everything?

The glamor, glory and glitz of money is now growing, as opposed to honor and virtue. Very rarely can anyone resist capitalism, but there are workers who are changing the paradigm of working for money, into achieving a sense of quiet fulfilled passion, contributing to equality, and being custodians of a feel-goodness that arrives at the doorstep, faster than a thrown Sunday newspaper.

So in propaganda terms, these are some invaluable tips to better appreciate your holistic status quo, outside of merely a “double-edged sword” paycheck. ?

• Cherish the company’s mission statement and vision and always tally up the projects, both money spinning and generous to social goals, to the company’s sense of worldliness.
• Be an invaluable part of the ESR (Environment and Social Responsibility) activities of the company, not just for show and tell, but for quiet appreciation. ?
• Learn about the company – its humble roots and its footprint to societal upheaval and to be a beacon of positive change.
• Bring fresh ideas to the table, so that you are contributing actively to new ways of doing things, especially ethical additions to existing outmoded laws.
• Focus both on monetary value as well as tangible measures that are brought about – both negative and positive – by a company’s actions. For example, if the company is a polluter of local waterways, demand ethical ways of transforming or disposing effluents. Another brilliant idea is to build math societies and coding labs in surrounding rural girls’ schools to encourage participatory learning in neglected STEM fields. Such ethical offshoots can be good for society, the company, as well as for the collective conscience.

The Cancer and the Cure

Money can be a social evil, but money too is a great leveler. A young man from rural Sri Lanka armed with an education, can be an integral part of an ethical and conscious outfit, leveraging parity and charity, while drawing an obese paycheck, in direct comparison to someone born in Colombo or one of its suburbs. Rural beginnings are no longer road blocks to a meaningful career.

The other side of the coin is money can be a cancer with no slowing down of ambition to metastasize the collective dimensions of a human being. It was Benjamin Franklin who once said “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest”. So let’s invest in multiplying knowledge more than accumulating wealth. Knowledge is not just about capitalist gain but also empowerment, to diminish historical pains that were broadcasted by human neglect, shortsightedness and error.

Lessons to Learn

It is a fact that we cannot control where we are born, what religion, race or caste we belong to, who our parents are, but we can control the wealth of our contributions by channeling them to championing an ecosystem, enhancing social cohesion and to eradicate societal evils

“Show me the money” is no longer the key resource, only bolstering the infrastructure of humanity is, to upraise lives above glass ceilings that history had conveniently built, what the future will change one disruptive innovation at a time.