The joy of redundancy
Replaceability is the price we pay for resilience
“A diverse system with multiple pathways and redundancies is more stable and less vulnerable to external shock than a uniform system with little diversity.” - Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
When I first joined BCG I was excited by the impact I would be able to have. BCG does a lot of work with the Gates Foundation, and I was optimistic that I could get on one of those projects and help solve global poverty or something.
But I quickly realized two things:
Those projects were incredibly competitive to get onto. My odds were not good.
Even if I did get on a project, I would know that had I not been assigned to it, someone equally-capable would have been on it. If I vanished, the slide deck would still ship, the meeting would still happen, the world would not notice.
I was a cog in a machine, and ultimately extremely replaceable.
This is just one example of a feeling I suspect others may share. A melencholy about the fact that if we were to disappear, our work would go on without us. Though our would be sad of course, overall the world would be unaffected by our disappearance1.
But replaceability is the price we pay for resilience. Human societies are flexible, adaptive systems that do not depend on any one member. If a person disappears, work gets rebalanced and the ship keeps sailing.
Imagine that you really were indispensable to the functioning of your town, or nation. That you were the bolt holding the entire artifice together. How crushing would that feel?
I for one am happy to be redundant rather than indispensable.
It is noble to be part of a flexible system - where none of us individually are ultimately mission-critical, but where all of us collectively can achieve great things.
Personal relationships are the only environment where most of us are truly irreplaceable. Which is probably one of the reasons that healthy personal relationships are so important to happiness.
Your post made me re-consider the EA discussions around the counterfacual impact of competitive positions where one is likely to be repleaceable, hence have low counterfactual impact. I had felt that type melancholy, which is one of the reason I imagined startup work would feel more impactful. I still believe that, but the third person perspective you describe brought the factor of resilience. It birngs a sense of relief to associate competition with resilience, as in places that are competitive ( hence one is replaceable) will also be resilient ( following your reasoning) —> doctors, BCG Gates Foundation projects. Hopefully politics?