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Hi! Welcome to The Friday Fix! You’re reading this because you probably stumbled upon this post somewhere on the internet instead of where it should be—in your inbox. But no worries; we can fix that.
Who am I? I’m Shem Opolot, a health professional turned content creator, passionate about helping people be their best selves in life and work.
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I have over ten years of work experience in healthcare, program management, and data analytics on two continents. So, I know a little about helping you work smarter
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I’ll occasionally make you laugh
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Hi! I'm Shem Opolot, and this is The Friday Fix, my weekly newsletter. If you've received it, you’re either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you. If you fit into the latter (yes, I’m the kind of person who uses words like “latter”) camp and want to subscribe, then click on the shiny button below:
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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 I'd like to get to know you better if you’ll indulge me. This week, in a small way, and next week, in a more substantive—but fun and non-intrusive—way. So…tell me this:
1) Do you eat the fries before or after the burger?
It’s fries first for me always, even though growing up with 4 older siblings should've taught me otherwise.
2) Do you sip your drink intermittently throughout the meal or only at the end?
I always drink after the food is done unless it’s an emergency.
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LIFE
Wages of wealth
Listen, if we’re going to get through this, we’re going to have to agree that two things can be true at the same time.
The thoughts I’m about to share are incomplete. And despite the fact that I know stupidity can come from having incomplete knowledge on a topic—as Robert Greene alludes to rather harshly if you ask me—writing is a good way to process thoughts. Writing, I’ve found, is a good way to tussle with tension, to think. Writing forces you to find logic and coherence—for better or worse.
***
I’m thinking about a tweet I read claiming $299 million is the critical threshold beyond which wealth takes on a wholly dis-human form.
Ignore the figure and focus on the threshold. We can't prove the figure is accurate, but I think we can agree that the threshold exists and several people have crossed it. Several people want to cross it, myself included.
Beyond this threshold, money replicates itself, and an individual achieves a supra-position in society, insulated from the experiences of “ordinary” people. At this point, they have hired help for everything: food, healthcare, travel, shopping, you name it.
Because capital is king in capitalism, those with the most of it become de facto kings with—absurdly and unwarranted—outsized moral authority. Your village church service on Christmas Day might come to mind here. You should see how high-ranking government officials and heads of large multilaterals, with more experience and qualifications, defer to Bill Gates on development forums.
It also doesn’t help that men tend to, above all, idolize other men, particularly rich and powerful men. And since we live in a patriarchy, the Bill Gateses, Elon Musks, Jeff Bezoses, Peter Thiels, etc., of the world become rulers.
And we end up ruled, directly or indirectly, by people who have forgotten what it’s like to live like us.
I’m thinking about one of the segments on Trevor Noah’s What Now? podcast where Trevor pulls his guests into a thought experiment about what they would do if they ruled the world. In this particular episode, Tressie McMillan Cottom—a juggernaut in her own right—builds a world that tries to solve this issue of privileged people being out of touch with reality: everyone has to work meaningfully in a customer service job for a time. And while in the job, they must live the lifestyle of someone in a customer service job. They can’t clock out and go back to their mansion, turning the experience into some romanticized poverty-porn excursion. They must work in the job long enough to really appreciate the stakes: public transport, tiny rent-controlled apartments, no healthcare coverage, terrible hours, all of it.
I’m thinking about what William Shoki pointed out, as has been rehashed before, that the trophy in capitalism—the great benefit everyone longs for—is to escape capitalism, surrounded by an embarrassment of their life earnings. Which, if you ask William and I, is an indictment of the entire philosophy that underpins capitalism. But I’m weary of brow-beating capitalism constantly because I can’t propose a better, practical alternative. I’m working on it.
Cuba is experimenting with “controlled capitalism” and I’m both skeptical and encouraged. Skeptical—because the neoliberalism implicit in capitalism bucks control (See America). Encouraged—because a socialist or communist state (depending on who you ask) is recognizing the flaws in their current state and is willing to soft-launch a new philosophy. This bodes well for an otherwise rigid human race with massive evolutionary potential.
I like the idea of controlled capitalism—naivety aside—because money isn’t bad. Money, besides its obvious utility for facilitating trade, in huge amounts, can drive society forward and build beautiful things. After all, without money—sidestepping how it was accumulated—we wouldn’t have Leonardo da Vinci. We wouldn’t have Michelangelo. We wouldn’t have Shakespeare, for God’s sake. We wouldn’t have Leo Tolstoy.
And yes, I know that just because a bad thing can produce a good outcome, that doesn’t automatically justify the existence of the bad thing. Like I sad, we’re going to have to tussle with some tension here.
I’m thinking about how capital achieves primacy in society, forcing things that should just be to not only justify their existence, but to bow down and worship it. Take education, for example. Universities are facing extinction. And this reckoning is useful because technology advancement (driven by capital, in a good way), has forced us to rethink what is worth learning and how people learn. There’s an entire PhD thesis herein, but I’ll say: everyone needs a basic education. We can debate what should or shouldn’t be included in this baseline. But as long as education is only imagined as a pipeline for jobs, then at the extreme—in the age of say, AI overlordship—it could be deemed unnecessary.
And it might be tempting to think that education has no place in a world where AI is doing everything for us, but I’d ask you to just think about that for a second.
I’m thinking about how voting rights in some societies only belonged to land owners because they were the only ones perceived to have a stake in politics. About people today who say only young people (however you define that) or people with children should vote because they are the only ones invested in the future. To be frank, these suggestions are crass, but understandable.
They are crass because they are easy—lazy, even. It will not be easy to build a new world that works better for all of us.
We have major philosophical tensions to untangle. In global health, for example, funding is shifting the landscape, but the quiet thing not being said out loud is we will all [literally] live and die by the prevailing “global” philosophy around whether health is a human right, and if countries should prioritize justice for all over power, territory, and profit.
But I don’t want this to remain fantastical. I see the work of building a new world as part of the thankless work of, as they say, planting trees under the shade of which you will not sit. I see it as an opportunity to raise children who are knowledgeable about the flaws of the world and set them on the path to fixing them. To pursue public office when possible, espousing the right values, and starting transformative dialogue your successors can operationalize. To invite micro-evolution into how we think and live today. To look beyond the black rectangle in your hand and recognize that you’re part of something bigger. To dedicate space and time to think critically about the world we’ve built, the world we can build, and the role you can play.
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THINGS
A quote
A civilization worthy of the name would not just redistribute money within this frame. It would begin by refusing the frame. It would say: wealth is not primarily what we can produce, but the amount of our finite time that is actually available to us to live as social beings—to raise children, cook meals, make art, sit quietly, argue, pray or not pray, visit parents, go on long walks, watch a film from beginning to end. It would measure prosperity by the expansion of that free time rather than by the multiplication of commodities.
A picture
On my first work trip in my new job, I visited Lakewood Church for a Mobilizing Medical Missions Conference in Houston, Texas. I have so many thoughts. But for now, I’ll say, I had to Joel Osteen, the church’s celebrity pastor. I told him that considering my mum had his services on our TV when we were kids, she wouldn’t forgive me if I didn’t take a picture with him:
His hair is, in fact, inch perfect and that smile never leaves his face.
WORK
Cheap, safe file share
This site lets you share files to nearby devices quickly, privately, and offline.
PRODUCTS
A course
Sheets for People who Hate Sheets
This course is designed to take you from zero to good enough, even if the last time you opened a spreadsheet was by accident. We'll start with the basics—no judgment—and build from there.
A guide
How to learn Excel
If I had to learn Excel again, this is what I’d do.
FUN
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Your picks
> Why you wouldn’t love living in the Bridgerton era
> How strong is your financial knowledge?
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Have a great weekend,
— SO
