Written in a moment of helpless frustration, dreaming of a box-less world with support for creativity and innovation.
These past months have made me realise that my culture is filled with boxes. Some boxes are very obvious and are almost thrown at you every second, other boxes are more hidden. The hidden boxes tend to hit you harder than the obvious and visible ones.
I’ve grown up thinking that I could be whatever I wanted to be. I hadn’t realised that ‘what I wanted to be’ was limited by several boxes and that I, little I, was hidden under layers and layers like in a babushka doll. After getting my high school diploma, I stepped up one layer of the doll. The following years, I spent within that layer, within a certain frame of status, of possible job options. Moving out one more layer, I became a student at the university and new doors opened, because I changed boxes. This pattern continued until now where I am finally finding a way out of the babushka doll and starting to learn to live my own life.
Most people are comfortable inside the doll. Some because that’s how they’re taught to live. Some because the doll is their frame of reference. What I think very few people realise is that they live according to certain standards other people have set up for them. I agree that society would be a messy place if everybody tried to escape the babushka doll at the same time. There’s no doubt that the boxes help create structure, rules and boundaries. Adding to this, most people are happy living with structure, rules and boundaries.
What I think is rather interesting is that innovation and growth need creativity and space, it needs enthusiasm, risks and strange shapes. Hardly any new ventures are started inside a box. Most are more likely to be combinations of several boxes, creating new un-thought-of shapes and sizes.
How come the welfare system in Denmark is built around boxes when innovation and growth make the wheels go round? How come entrepreneurship (iværksætteri) becomes ‘self-employed’ (selvstændig) when you’re unable to work full-time and, hence, is impossible to combine with paid employment because you suddenly move out of the box you were in? How come someone who is unemployed has to fight the system for permission to start up a business part-time? And how come you are either unemployed or full-time employed? Why are initiatives to work part-time while applying for full-time employment dismissed?
What is our goal, really? Is it to rest on laurels like Nokia and learn our lesson too late? Being run over by emerging nations while picking our noses?