What is Business Dharma?
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Today, we celebrate the release of our new podcast, Business Dharma. For us, it’s far more than a simple name change. Business Dharma is an aspirational concept we are subscribing to as an underlying business philosophy. But what the hell is Business Dharma and why do these words belong next to one another?
Let’s begin by defining the word “Business”:
My favorite two definitions:
1) The practice of making one’s living by engaging in commerce (Oxford Languages)
2) A serious activity requiring time and effort and usually the avoidance of distractions. (Merriam-Webster)
Work is typically the place where this ‘business’ of ‘making one’s living’ comes alive. It’s where we spend a large portion of our ‘time and efforts’ and ultimately life, approximately 90,000 hours or 1/3 of our human existence (Gettysburg College). This stat becomes even more imperative when we realize the other 2/3 of our life includes childhood, sleeping, and our elder years. This means most of our prime adult time is spent ‘engaging in commerce’. And “how we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives” Annie Dillard.
In 1947 Viktor Frankl, Austrian psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and Auschwitz survivor authored the book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, chronicling his experiences as a prisoner, and explaining the significance of having Meaning in one’s life. His work highlighted the link between personal meaning and the will to live. His work was also important in demonstrating the correlation between a sense of meaninglessness criminal behaviors, addiction, and depression (Daily Stoic).
Work is the place where John O’ Donohue says, “our souls deep desire for expression and meaning can become visible in form and action,” and yet our ability to derive meaning from our work is on the decline. With fewer than 20% of American’s listing their jobs as a source of significant meaning in their lives (Pew Research, 2021).
Happiness and meaning are different yet often conflated. Happiness is usually about feeling good, while meaning arises from participating and contributing to something bigger than ourselves (The Atlantic). Meaning is the life force that sustains us through the inevitable ups and downs, happiness, like all feelings, is a fleeting state.
All animals desire happiness, the feeling that an internal void can be filled by an external object (The Atlantic). Our consumer-based society is founded on the exploitation of desire, our addiction to things now entering pathological levels as we try, as all addicts do, to satiate the Hungry Ghost (Gabor Mate) within. Robin Wall Kimmerer encapsulates this concept with the Indigenous teaching of Windigo, “a state where human selfishness over-powers self-control to the point where satisfaction is no longer possible”. In short, we are overtaken by greed, with true satisfaction forever evading our reach.
Science is continually proving what nature-based peoples and philosophers have always known, humans are intimately connected to the web of life in ways that elude our limited senses and surpass our wildest imagination. Because of this profound connection our disassociated perception of our engagement in business has universal repercussions.
Specifically, we are now living in the era known as Anthropocene. A unit of geological time where human activities are now the greatest force of planetary change, shaping our climates, ecosystems, and global geography (National Geographic). We are also in the sixth mass extinction, a period of time where biodiversity and species loss are taking place at unprecedented rates.
As someone who has studied environmental science and business, I find the definition of the Anthropocene incomplete, contributing to our inability to address human causes of planetary collapse. In my observations, it is not simply ‘human activities’ shaping the planet, it is our notion of economy and the destructive paradigms of which it is based that drive the most damaging facets of this change.
Buddhist philosopher and environmental activist, Joanna Macy, describes this moment as the great unraveling. “A place where our industrial growth society, in an effort to squeeze every last dollar has become blind to the exploitation of people and the unraveling of delicate systems in which all of life depends.” She places us at a crossroads juxtaposing this moment with another alternative called the Great Turning, “a place where we become fully present to our world and its pain and awaken in defense of life to the grandeur of who we really are.”
Making this evolutionary step means we must awaken from our slumber and blind participation in business and stop acting from our primitive instincts which tell us to fill the insatiable void within.
Collectively, as Bill Plotkin and Jerry Colonna state, we are being asked to grow up, to leave the familiar houses of our youth. To become aware of our ego’s and surrender the illusion of a life without struggle in service of something larger than ourselves, in the hopes of achieving perhaps the most prized jewel, a life of meaning.
This is where Dharma enters the business lexicon. Where we realize the impact or Karma of our actions, understanding our interconnect-ness, and plant seeds for the future aligned with our basic good.