Bees at work (XXVIII). Living to work? or working to live?
Je vous souhaite le plus heureux vendredi d´Avril 2022. In our last post, we explored different arguments about why are employees quitting, and also why a hybrid working arrangement is an interesting test to prove by trying different testing loops over the next decade. A hybrid flexible working model provides us a middle ground in which we can obtain the benefits of working in the office and the benefits of working at home. This arrangement is the one that may offer enough flexibility in schedules and might be a solution to the lack of a good quantity and quality time for our families. Be sure that our families require not only more hours but adequate rate time too. We also reconciled the possibility of reducing our workloads globally to 6 hours of work per day for a total of 120 hours a month. Particularly, this might be a measure that can help all workers with children and teenagers.
Today we will continue with the subject: “Living to work? Or Working to live?”
The bees are an example of working efficiency. These little bee ladies (all workers are female), since their outset, go through an “inside-out” of the hive working process, learning the most basic activities inside their beehive, such as cleaning the cells, feeding the larvae, building the cells and keeping the perfect organization in their house. For the bees: family matters. With time, once they learn to do everything for the family inside the hive, they get prepared to forage, and finally, the exclusivity for finding a new home is on the shoulders of the scout bees who are the readiest for it. We also have understood that bees are threatened by several situations, which are conceptually the same risks that humans are facing. Regardless of the sophistication of our societies. We have studied the chaos that is affecting the bees naming 7 factors: pathogens, diseases, pesticides, pollution, excessive disruptive technologies, wrong beekeeper practices, and lack of food.
For instance, societies that have built a remarkable infrastructure in the Middle East, such as any of the United Arab Emirates countries are situated in places where the arid, barren regions with deserts are the norm. No matter how much petroleum dollars these nations hold, the leaders and sheiks from all these countries and beyond the UAE in the Middle East, know their natural environment weaknesses by heart, irrespective of the high luxurious modern buildings they have built. According to the USDA, due to limited arable land, increasing climate change issues and acute water scarcity, the UAE continues to rely heavily on imports to meet almost 90 percent of the food needs of its expanding population. Just in 2020, UAE’s food import bill hovered around $14 billion dollars (1). As a result, the UAE is compelled, like the bees, to find solutions for feeding its population in a short time using its own ecosystem or food technology innovations as Israel has done it. To rely on imports of food is not the way to continue, for them, or for any other country on earth. The UAE requires to put its scale of “inside-out” priorities in a new perspective. The latter example shows how vulnerable is UAE, because of not following an “inside-out” strategy like the bees!.
Our working priorities are messed up because we don´t see the importance of going from the “inside-out”. By observing the bees, who are so clever to teach us how to go from “inside-out”, we immediately perceive that humans are far from being right when it comes to priorities. Contrary to the bees who are so well organized to fulfill their prerogatives, humans have lost the pivotal rationale for our well-being. Along with our misplaced roadmap of priorities, we have not set our main concerns on the right scale. Being the most important priority the well-being of our families and ourselves, we are urgently demanded to put our “house in order”. From inside out. This has to occur at a micro-level (in each of our homes) and then at a progressively expanded macro-level, (from our place to our neighborhoods, towns, cities, countries, and the planet). For example, in our families: The first thing to do in our residences is to start to repair our feeding and hygienic ritual habits and to put boundaries to the education of our kids under the hands of Smartphones. We have to help our kids to regulate themselves when it comes to NAIQIs (Nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Supremacy, and the Internet). Undoubtedly, if we don´t fix our homes, the result is what we leave to our children, or what we get from the new generations (Generation Z) who are graduating and starting to work in our societies. Repeating it again: with the appearance of the disruptive technologies for these digital natives, parents forgot to help kids with how to eat a balanced diet, how to exercise or how to practice hand-made hobbies properly, or how to create a nurturing nest for their correct cognitive development. The result: this new generation has billions of information kept in their smartphones (not in their brains). It has weak problem-solving skills. It doesn´t possess a 360-degree contextual mindset. We can´t blame them, the moms and dads from the Millennials and Generation X did not stop the utilization of NAIQIs in parenting. So we are reaping what we sow 20 years ago. Let´s step one deck further: Working.
When working doesn´t allow us to have a good family life. In quantity and quality. Integral strategy means to put people (as the most beautiful creation of God) in the center of our decision-making. Our mission on earth is to care for this planet, and love others as ourselves. So our companies are not for making profits at expense of the good quality and quantity time for our family life. Our enterprises are here for helping each other to be better off, not just in the economic abundance of life, but in educational and moral quality too. If we spend more time working than caring for ourselves and our families, then something is wrong. Our days have 24 hours, and we are working more than ever with the NAIQIs. It is too much. We will get sick. Even if working only 6 hours a day, we are not providing time for our kids and teens. Watch below:
If you wish to download the last slide in PDF, click below:
Our 6,000 years of past slavery are the foundation of our messed and wrong priority working schedules. Our progression and advancement as human beings require putting our families and people (employees) at the core, so we can begin to organize ourselves in the function of our families’ wellbeing and ourselves, and not in the function of economic results. It is not possible that after understanding how valuable is to offer the conditions for nurturing a healthy and balanced family, we stubbornly continue with a working framework of 8 working hours a day. Meanwhile, childrearing is not taken seriously by those who make corporate decision-making in the companies, when it comes to comprehending the engagement of employees to procreate and parent a family, we will continue designing and validating atrocious inhumane working schedules.
A healthy lifestyle and balanced work-family. More than ever in our history, it is of vital fulfillment to have a work-personal life balance. We need to spend time with ourselves, particularly practicing any type of activity that replenish us. It could be fitness or sport, reading enough daily from paper books, or learning something new. In addition, practicing our hobbies is the highest endeavor in our maturity. Apprehending that we need to shut off our smartphones for some hours a day denotes that you hold higher cultivation or instruction of spirit. We can provide our brains a replenishment time of experiences that can help us to be in equilibrium. In the segment of hobbies, we include the practice of any type of hand-made or traditional art, making crafts, artisan interests, reading, writing, any extra-curricular education such as new languages, visiting nature, or restorative diversions that are not related to technology. In the segment of spiritual refilling, we also need more time to study the Bible and pray daily. The Internet’s ubiquitous presence is triggering inadequate mental health because our brain is not focused, it is too much to bear or handle. Our cerebral capacities will be affected in the long term, because of the utilization of the Smartphone and NAIQIs in everything we do. In consequence, more than ever, we need to acknowledge that a healthy lifestyle is a result of putting boundaries to work and to the imbalance and instability that we are currently living within the Giga-NAIQIs society.
Living to work? Or Working to live? Our reflection of today, as Eleonora Escalante Strategy is to make you answer which is your priority: living to work? Or working to live?
Strategic Music section.
Why did we pick up Jon Batiste?: Jon Batiste made waves last weekend when he took the Grammys 2022 for his album called “We are”(3). Jon Batiste is a composer, pianist, bandleader, and singer (2). Sort of an “opera” sharing joy man of our times. Since he was a kid, it is known that he played with his family in New Orleans. By listening to Batiste, we can breathe what he is from inside out. Despite his pains and family problems (his wife has been through a very delicate health issue recently), he composes beautiful lyrics, and you feel the love of God in his work.
We chose Batiste because we believe that many young artists are trapped in the wrong strategy. They believe that they will win fame and recognition by exposing nudity in their performances and videos, by making sour violent scandals, or by showing dangerous addictions (such as smoking, drinking alcohol, or running at high speed, among other unpleasant practices). The majority of new young artists are using the Trump media-political approach of January 6th to get our attention, a communications strategy with tons of tactics designed to be virally replicated in social media, attracting our notice and awareness as the way to get followers and sell music. We don´t think that is the right path: Batiste won his medal because of his lovely, enchanting, and splendid lyrics of “love is all we need” in the middle of trouble. When God is in the middle of our efforts, we do amazing things without recurring to the Trump way of advertising, without showing off our intimacy (which needs to be cared for in private). When God is in the middle of our art-creations, we create delightful rhythms and blues like Batiste. Wishing the Batiste family a complete recovery for Suleika during the next months.
Songs for today belong to J.Lo: Three of her top songs and interpretations are included here: the Theme from Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To). The second one is “Let´s get loud”. And the third song is “Waiting for tonight”. You will see why we favor Lopez this time in our next post. Enjoy!
Some news for the coming summer: We are almost done with “Bees at work”. Three more episodes and we will be done. Our last chapter is scheduled for April 19th. Afterward, we will jump into a 15 days replenishment of vacation mood. Our second saga of the year is coming!. We will kick off our summer 2022 saga “What´s up with water” on May 3rd, 2022. See you next Tuesday, blessings, and thank you for reading to me.
Sources of reference used for this publication
- https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/opportunities-us-agricultural-exports-uae/
- https://www.npr.org/transcripts/976023961
- https://www.grammy.com/news/jon-batiste-we-are-album-year-2022-grammys-speech
Disclaimer: Illustrations in Watercolor are painted by Eleonora Escalante. Other types of illustrations or videos (which are not mine) are used for educational purposes ONLY. Nevertheless, most of the pictures, images, or videos shown on this blog are not mine. I do not own any of the lovely photos or images posted unless otherwise stated.
Eleonora Escalante Strategy 