the pace, not the purpose

i drove up into the mountains last weekend for a coffee cupping at a roaster in Ojai. Eight beans. A buyer who rides his motorcycle through Mexico and Central America for months at a time, talks with growers, takes photos on a film camera, and makes them into little books.

The coffee was great. The buyer was something else.

i wasn’t drawn to him because of what he does. i was drawn to the pace. No rushing. No quarterly target. No we need to scale this. Just an old motorcycle, bags of beans, and time.

i drove back thinking about it.

We were promised, wave after wave, that technology would give us our time back. Computers, the internet, mobile, AI. Each one was supposed to make us more efficient so we could work less. We didn’t work less. We just filled the efficiency with more work. The 4-hour work week became the 60-hour work week. We kept the speed and ate the savings.

i’m not saying sell everything and ride a motorcycle through Central America. (Although that does sound quite lovely.) i’m saying we need to find our way. Our motorcycle. Our coffee farm. The thing that reminds us the work was supposed to create a life, not replace it.

i wrote about it in more detail this week on Substack: the pace, not the purpose →