I was recently told that I’d be giving an interview soon to someone
interested in the project, which inspired me to really dig into the answer to
this question. At the most concrete
level, I know that I am creating JoKno because I want to solve the career
search problem, a problem that I struggled with greatly myself. But, why do I want to solve this
problem? This is my attempt to peel back
the layers of my motivation.
I watched a great documentary recently called I Am, and it asked, what is the
essential problem, the underlying problem from which all other problems of the
world are derived? The answer was that I am the
problem. And this notion was teased
out and supported throughout the film by first showing the growing evidence
that as individuals we not only affect the world materially through our
physical actions, we affect it through our consciousness, and through our
emotions. We are, on every level,
co-creators of our world. Our
perceptions really do, at a fundamental level, shape the world in which we
exist.
Second, it showed how this clashed with the current story
driving our perception of the world.
That is the story of competition.
This is a distortion of Darwin, who believed that cooperation was the biggest
part of the story of evolution, to a narrative of progress being driven by
competition and individualism. This
story led us to believe that we are all separate,
and to perceive the world as a collection of separate individuals. It is this lie, that competition
drives progress, that has led to the profound loneliness of our
private-property hoarding society. This
narrative has colored our perception so thoroughly that we can’t help but see
ourselves as fundamentally separate and alone. Our loneliness is a symptom of the
underlying disease of perception from which all other problems derive.
And when the movie got to this last bit about loneliness,
something clicked for me. That word
describes completely what I felt during the career search: a profound, debilitating
loneliness. Here I was trying to answer
one of the most fundamental questions of my life, and it felt like for all
intents and purposes I must discover the answer alone. Whether it was the career centers telling me
to figure out what I liked, articles telling me that I needed to first figure
out how I was wired and use that as a compass, to adults telling me to pick a
career where money was a certainty, to professors telling me to network, in the
end I was alone.
Yet this matches the ideals of the present society
completely. Even the job search out of
college is a kind of competition. Each
individual college student pitted against each other, and those best able to
leverage their individual resources (family network, natural gregariousness,
luck, etc) are the ones able to land jobs.
But, my question was an even more complicated one than simply how can I
get paid to do something. I wanted to
know, how can I do work that makes me happy? How could I, a priori, determine the answer to this question? I felt doomed, doomed to travel aimlessly
through the job market, a single explorer hoping a path would magically reveal
itself.
JoKno is my attempt to cure this loneliness. At the core, I think, that is what I am
trying to do. It is my attempt to bring
this one thing into alignment with the fundamental truth that we are not alone, but in fact, are connected.
There has been this thread within my thought, and the
thought of many others, that true evolution is accomplished through cooperation
and empathy. The human being is itself
an example of this fact: we are a cooperative system of atoms and molecules and
nerves and neurons, all working together to create the magnificent potential
that is each and every one of us. How
does the human mind transcend the existential loneliness of our own
consciousness? By evolving into the
societal mind, the societal consciousness, just as the molecules that make us
up transcended themselves through us.
The internet may be one of the greatest tools we have ever
created to accomplish this evolution. What is the internet if not a communal
brain? But just having the information
stored where people could get it
isn’t enough. It needs to be made easily
accessible to those who need it. What
good is a memory if we can’t recall it?
That is why there is a specialized portion of the brain specifically for
recalling memory from wherever it is stored elsewhere in our brain matter.
That is what JoKno is!
A specialized societal brain, meant to retrieve our collective
experiences about the job market. With
this resource, a college student is no longer alone, like I was. They are in conversation with all the alumni
who went before them. Our trials, our
elations, our regrets, and our learning are available to each other. JoKno is our chance to each transcend the
limitations of our individual selves, and approach one of the most fundamental
questions of our lives as a cooperative.
And I believe, with all my heart, that we will all be happier because of
it.
The last sentence of my tattoo says,
“The world I create
will be populated by Gods, and together we will create a story of joy.”
I hope that Chapter One of the story we create together will
be entitled: JoKno.
