The Motivation Ranker
I have always wished I had a technology that could display floating statistics above people’s heads. When the last time they showered was, how many beers they’ve had in their lifetime, how many times they’ve been married. Dystopian, but interesting.
Let’s pretend for a moment that my fantasy technology is real—and now I can float any metric I want above anybody’s head. Tomorrow, I walk into the latest trendy startup’s office and I use it to show something seemingly innocent: motivation. Now, everyone’s motivation for working at that company is on display for all to see.
Panic sets in fast. Half the office has Greed floating over them in big bold letters. Others look up in horror at the word Status. The social media manager is labeled Attention. Then there is Pressure, Legacy, FOMO, Fear, Student Loans, Laziness. And the one guy over in Accounting who has Passion floating over his head all of a sudden feels a bit silly for caring about his job.
If you worked at this company, how would you react?
My own experiences indicate that you—or at least most people—would adjust the way you view people based on their motivation. But this is sort of odd, isn’t it? Do you really know what motivations are good? I find that, more often than not, critiques about motivation turn out to be ridiculous upon investigation.
Take status. I have been part of conversations during which someone has said: “It’s kind of lame, all they care about is status.” This is ironic, though. Haven’t you just ranked them as lower-status than you?
Take money. I hear and read disdain about people who just “do it for the money”. But what makes money a bad motivation to do something? Are you so sure?
The list continues. Maybe you want to make fun of someone for doing something “because they want to be lazy”. Or doing it “because it’s easy.” These are all real motivations that drive people to do real things, but are they really bad? Maybe humans just like finding ways to put others beneath themselves.
The thinking extends outside of work; see the recent rise of the term performative male. Reading a book because you’re interested in literature is good, but reading a book because you feel it will make you more attractive is bad. It’s unclear to me why this should be true. Are we gatekeeping reading now? Do I need to pass a ten-question motivation test the next time I check out at the bookstore?
I lied to you at the start of the essay by pretending the Motivation Ranker technology is fantasy. It isn’t, really. Most of us have and use one on a daily basis, albeit imaginary. We constantly judge other people’s motivations. We even use the Motivation Ranker on ourselves; the voice in our head tells us we can’t do things because we’re doing them for the ‘wrong reasons’.
But I think our Motivation Rankers might be miscalibrated. I think that, maybe, we should throw them out altogether. If there is a list of the ‘good’ motivations and the ‘bad’ ones with bulletproof reasoning, I have yet to see it. I doubt I ever will. And so, in the meantime, it might be possible to make the world a modestly better place by putting the Motivation Ranker down for a moment and considering that, maybe, you and I don’t need to analyze motivation before we decide whether something is good or not.
(If we did have to analyze motivation all the time, then I have bad news for you: most things you enjoy were made by someone with a motivation you don’t like. I bet even the Fast and Furious movies were made by someone with a motivation I might find strange. I like them anyway, though.)
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