First, on expectations (once more): What makes you think there is no call to action here? As I asked Dan above, what right have we to wait until whatever ideas we’re husbanding become fully formed, “polished”, edited and made into consumable goods of broad appeal?

We have stickers for that.

Other people are writing books, and making a living selling those books and coworking facilities and the whole indypreneur/antipreneur/polypreneur lifestyle.

You invoke “polish”. What’s that, exactly? A demonstration of technical design expertise, or a kind of “inauthenticity” when there’s no “message” behind it? I imagine Chesterton, GS Lee, Milton, and (maybe) even George Lucas would feel there was content and therefore an arguable “message” in their works, so I’m not sure you can make a case that it’s absent in extracts.

You ask for a “call to action”. What right have we to be passive and silent, like an audience for our own content, waiting for a gleam of sloganicious koanic brilliance to take us all by storm and convince of the obvious truth of something-or-other? What right have we to ape everybody else, or to fall into trite aphorisms of received wisdom? Where’s the value in that?

And while we’re on value: you and Dan have pointed out this site’s apparent inutility.

See, it seems to me that whenever one encounters something that appears useless, or ill-made, or incomplete, one is presented with a series of choices.

What do you want? If it’s not here, and yet everything seems “polished” in a way that makes you expect it, then what is it about human nature that drives you to assume a mistake has been made on our side of the screen?

Maybe it’s all just a poorly-executed joke. That ever come to mind? Many find solace in that explanation of the world.

A lot of people, most people even, faced with enigmatic things they don’t understand, dismiss them and move on. Life being short, work being hard, and the economics of attention and the costs of discourse and insight being what they are. All that stuff is expensive and hard. Thinking, talking, discussing, finding, paying attention, engaging, participating. Hard, slow, and boring.

On that note, can I suggest a quick side-trip into WIlliam Byers’s How Mathematicians Think. Or Gerald Stanley Lee’s The Lost Art of Reading if you prefer. Either might do, in a pinch.

Now, onward:

Who the hell told you we thought society doesn’t need bosses, or that any of us here imagine “all people” would be better off without them? That’s lunacy, and I’ll thwack the person who said it explicitly. Indeed, we say explicitly we’re not against bosses, and that one can be employed and still be Not an Employee.

So I’m not sure what website you’re reading, but it ain’t any of our stuff.

Bosses have money, and as it happens they are also people. Almost all people these days need money. So it’s pretty damned obvious that of course there should be bosses, somewhere out there, giving money to people who need it. That right there, with minor variation, is a core design pattern for economic life in the world.

We’re not an organization. We’re not a union. We’re not consultants, or organizers, or authors. If in the course of your life you should encounter a person who does answer all your questions, then (not to put too fine a point on it) either they or you are an idiot. Maybe both.

If you want simple and succinct solutions and rabble-rousing clear-seeming calls to action, go see the guys at Not An MBA. They are all over the straight answer and the useful link, and they’ve got their finger on the TOC for the book of Alexandrian Design Patterns for Sustainable Worklife. They’re doing a fine job bringing together all the threads other people have been discovering in the last ten (110? 3010?) years or so. They’re developing a nice clear message, which luckily is sounding less like “We can do it! Yeah! Stick it to the Man with Collaboration and a New Book!”

Those guys got all the focus, and bring to bear clarity enough for most, and if you watch them over time you can see they’re learning things we’ve suspected for a while around here but just not bothered to share.

You want to use community and helpful list-making to save the world? Go see Dave Pollard and his surprisingly vast communitarian conspiracy over at How to Save the World. He’s smart, he’s full of dialog and thoughtful commentary. It’s good stuff. Go participate. It’s a whole fully-formed community, just sitting there waiting to be joined.

We’re not writing a book here. Shop around.

See: Either you see the dichotomy clearly, or you don’t. There’s no middle ground. Right?

There are two basic reasons I feel a need for bosses.

One reason is to solve problems of how to make an income, which thus far I have consistently failed to solve without bosses. But if I strike on a solution to that, so long as it isn’t just as boring as cubicle work, I’ll leave the cubicle world forever. One great thing about this blog would be to collect resources toward how to get clients or an audience, and all the other bits of “how to be your own boss” that school doesn’t teach you when teaching you how to practice a skill.

The second obstacle is that, so far as I know, you either have bosses, clients, or an audience. I don’t know about audiences, but in my experience, clients are consistently worse than bosses, without any of the responsibility that bosses take.

I see you changed your “About” page since I last visited. It’s much better.

By saying people expect what they’re “used to”, I think I’m talking about “polished story” and “completeness” and “solutions” — more or less what you’re pointing out is missing, Dan. As far as I can tell, people are used to Googling something they want to address their question, looking at the top hits, and picking the one that answers it. They expect Google to be their oracle.

But I don’t think we can say that we set that expectation up. We have ill-formed ideas. We have intuitions and a sense that something could be done, but not what.

And we keep running into people that say more or less the same thing. So, practically speaking, all we’re presented with by the world is a growing group of people. Diverse ones. They seem to share unfulfilled needs in their worklives, and some have found some solutions that may or may not generalize to other people’s lives. I can’t offer advice on how to be an Important Consultant, because most of these folks don’t want to be one (and maybe I don’t want to, either). Laura could spend a dozen posts describing how she did the graphic design for the site and why, but most of us are not graphic designers. We could set ourselves down and investigate the quotations and epigrams Brian has collected, but as you suspect we might end up as mere dilettantes in a book club.

What ties us together is not our domain, not our approach, not our attitudes, not even our toolkits. I guess it’s a realization that we’re enjoying our individual worklives better working “together”, sometimes in the same space and sometimes in the same online networks. Not sharing an office, but overlapping.

And I think if you asked we would all say that we perceive that advantage–whatever that positive edge is–has something to do with being thoughtful and undermining our own assumptions about working relationships, contracts, marketing, community and support. Being erstwhile philosophers and economists about it. Actually thinking and working it through, together, even before any of us has decided what the Right Answer is.

Also before any of us has decided what the right question is.

You want the end result, to follow through with what people who come here expect. We haven’t got it; we don’t even have what we expect, yet. Something better. If it seems that we lack it here, then that’s more a success than a failure as far as I’m concerned.

What do you want, Dan? Do you want us to tell you when we’ve found an answer? When we’ve got what you’re expecting?

What are you expecting? Lists are useful.

Follow through is what they’re expecting. That all this build up leads to something. They don’t know what it is, but it is not “nothing.” And that’s what you seem to have here.

What is it that makes you expect an explanation? What makes you think you’re “the visitor”? What makes you think we want or intend anything (at all)?

These are not challenges. But they are more or less the point. I think sometimes we expect a story to be complete before we hear it. That’s a modern folly. Most stories, historically speaking, aren’t ready before they’re told. Some aren’t even fully conceived.

I’m glad you posted a comment. But why here, when you imply the other posts have been oblique? What does the visitor expect? An answer? A narrative? Some polished solution? Some aqua regis to dissolve their problems, about which they can express summary approval or dismissal? Those are all things I tend to see in other places. Maybe we have to look there to find them.

I’m thinking sometimes the visitor is wanting what he’s used to.

We don’t have much more of that left around here. Seems to be less all the time.