What It Takes
Adios Zero Sum
By Shawn Coyne | Published: May 18, 2012
My five-year-old daughter felt bad.
One day at school, a frienemy teased her about having had a play date with another girl in their class. My daughter had not been included. Nah…Nah…Nah Nah Nah.
I discovered this while helping her put on her tights. It was the day she’d planned her revenge.
I’m pleased that my children were born in an age of abundance. I grew up in the era of scarcity. In my day, there were only so many jobs at the steel mill, there were only so many football scholarships available…there were only a few opportunities to “make it.”
If someone won, someone else lost. The sum of the positive and the negative equaled zero. That made a lot of sense back then when our worlds were provincial and closed.
But this competition for scarce resources (jobs, education, status) created a “give as good as you get” culture. If another person was kind and generous to you, you owed them something in return. If they attacked, you hit back with equal ferocity. Accepting a kindness as a gift or turning the other cheek upset the social balance. (more…)
