Banks Benitez

The Insider - October 2024

Banks Benitez -

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the October edition of the Insider. Do you know someone who would enjoy the Insider? Forward this email to them and they can subscribe here.

The soul of cultural change

You can trace the passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 back to an album in 1970 that captured the mysterious songs of humpback whales. The album, Songs of the Humpback Whale, sold over two million copies and became an anthem for the environmental movement. The haunting sounds of whales did more to help save certain species from extinction than years of cut-and-dry, dispassionate advocacy. 

It’s easy to get stuck making the logical argument for how to save the whales, tackle climate change, or claw away at injustices. But when we stick to such rational approaches, we miss the rare cultural leaps where something enters the zeitgeist through song or poetry or theater and then springs forward. Too often the work of social change is missing its spiritual heartbeat. This is true for organizations as well: many are doing important work, but they’re bereft of soul. They’ve focused on the logic and missed the poetry, they’ve obsessed about the theory of change and forgotten the artistry. 

In Denver, I’ve been working with the climate-focused real estate developer Urban Villages as it opens a new nature-inspired hotel called Populus. As buildings go, the Populus hotel checks all the boxes: LEED-certified, sustainable building materials, energy-efficiency this, circular economy that. All of this is good and necessary; these should be the new standards in the real estate industry. But when you enter Populus, you feel something. The entire experience—from the biophilic exterior architecture to the warm interior design to the hundreds of pieces of original artwork—is designed to inspire a reverence for nature, to collapse the emotional distance between humans and the natural world, to retie the ecological strands that we’ve long ago severed.

The evocative soul of our work exists, it’s just hiding beneath all the reasonable, incremental efforts we convince ourselves are necessary to make forward progress.

Instrumentalists vs. Artists

“Nobody dreams of being a billionaire anymore. Everyone just wants to be a $10-100 millionaire with lasting respect, a balanced life, and time to do what they want.” This was the perspective of Anu Atluru, a startup founder and writer about Silicon Valley culture. Her tweet struck a chord amongst instrumentalists: those who view their careers and entrepreneurial endeavors as instruments to escape the grind. In contrast, there are the artists: those who have found something to dedicate their time to with more intrinsic rewards. As Bob Dylan once said, “Artists must be in a place of always becoming.” There is no desire for escapism or retirement for an artist: the reward of the work is more work.

In the world of tennis, Andre Agassi’s racquet was his instrument. In his autobiography, Open, he wrote “I play tennis for a living even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion and always have." Novak Djokovic was an artist. He said in an interview years ago, “I can carry on playing at this level because I like hitting the tennis ball.”

The point is not that artists are better at their life’s work than instrumentalists. And the point is not to just “do what you love.” I think the point here has nothing to do with the work itself. Instead, it is to ask ourselves: who is the person I am becoming as I go about my days? Regardless of what I make out of my work, what is my work making out of me?

The changing American dream

Embedded within our society’s collective psyche is the idea that homeownership is central to the American dream. But that could be changing, or maybe should be changing. Homeownership is not what it used to be. In 2023, home affordability reached its lowest level in 40 years. Only 16% of the nation’s home listings were affordable for the typical American household. 

With the growing number of climate disasters like Hurricane Helene and tectonic shifts in insurance markets, owning a home also means concentrating a disproportionate amount of wealth in an undiversified—and increasingly under-insured—physical asset. Research last year found that residential properties across the US are overvalued by an estimated $250 billion because they’re not pricing in flood risks alone. Another study found that 39 million residences (or nearly one in five American homes) are “significantly overvalued due to artificially suppressed home insurance costs”.

Unaffordable housing will require many to continue renting. Billion-dollar disasters will force some to relocate from vulnerable areas. Out-of-reach homes will nudge people to build wealth outside of real estate. We’re in the midst of a great reimagining of what security, belonging, and prosperity look like in an age of volatility. This reimagining will prompt us to ask questions about when our default impulse to rebuild is misguided, and why homeownership is conjoined with our sense of permanence and security.

Can you help?

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What I am reading

  • Can the rapid speed of technology move ancient traditions and spiritual practices? Rest of the World has produced a multi-part series on digital divinity. Rest of World. 
  • The predictable and proven path to failure. The fable of the startup that lost it all. The Heretic.
  • There’s a trend where people are seeking more intimate, smaller online spaces. Gone is the promise of mass scale and mass reach. In its place is a much smaller internet. Posting Nexus.
  • A profile of Richard Powers, author of The Overstory, on the profound resilience of the natural world and what it means to see the earth on the timespan of trees. New Yorker.
  • Algorithms have removed the humanity and serendipity of discovering new music. The perils of technology optimized for efficiency. MIT Technology Review.

Something personal

This fall, Lisa and I are practicing a new skill: living in a different city for a month at a time. This month we’ve rented a flat in the West Village of New York City. Next month, we’ll be based in Mexico City.

It’s easy for the routines and duties of our lives to ossify into a life of inflexibility and nearsightedness, where the thought of living in a new city for a few weeks at a time can feel like a fantasy. We’re afraid that if we’re not careful, what used to be functionally possible might increasingly appear to be impossible. So we see these trips as ways to strengthen our shared muscle of taking annual sojourns and being open to the world beyond the life we’ll always return to in Colorado.

~~~~

From the West Village,

Banks