About Purpose

I think that a business becomes alien to humans when it stops serving their needs.

Take McDonald’s for example. It all started like a normal restaurant business, aiming to feed hungry people fast. Time goes by, preparing meals becomes more and more automated and efficient to the point where the McDonald’s food is no longer about nutrition, health, quality of life at a fast pace, but becomes in itself a process of how to produce more food for more people for more profit, cheaper. This has narrowed the customer’s importance severely. Now the business serves its own purpose and agenda in an equation where the customers is replaceable by the $ symbol.

Q. Why is a restaurant that does not serve the basis of its purpose (nutrition) still in business? Keep this in mind.

Take the PC industry, now. All PC notebooks are designed to be as cheap as possible to make, ship and sell. So are phones and most cars. There’s no thought going into their purpose and use.

They are not designed to enhance, better, improve, ease, or simplify computing, communicating or road transportation. This means they are not designed for humans and, implicitly, it means they don’t serve a purpose.

All such businesses were originally honorable,I’m sure, and looked at ways to satisfy a certain need or demand. Their mass production means helped serve the business purpose. Up until it became the business purpose.

And all this would be perfect on a planet inhabited by businesses.

But this planet has humans on it.