We all wear badges of honor. Be careful what those badges suggest.

Many Badges are not signals, they are noise. Daily, we wear many badges. We are parents, partners, entrepreneurs, yoginis, wine connoisseurs. We are busy, bored, tired, awake, workaholics, and fitness freaks. Our possessions serve as badges, too. Our Teslas and Fords, our pools, and our AllBirds. It’s not the experiences we have on our vacations, it’s the photos we post on social media.

We can wear more badges than ever, and we are forced to wear many others. In the past, we could maintain privacy and seclusion. I could move 100 miles away and start over. I could have a private conversation with a friend or attend a concert or rally without worrying about getting fired or being forced to apologize.

Our personal and work lives used to maintain separation, but that luxurious time is over. There is no clear demarcation of when life starts or where work ends. As a result, we hear phrases like

“I had 14 Zoom meetings today.”

For some reason, having 14 zoom meetings is a badge of honor. Since we can’t show how busy we are in person, the new busy is to tell people during meetings how many other meetings we’ve had. Similarly, yesterday, we wore fancy shoes and suits to show status. Today, we tell people about and wear our comfortable t-shirts and sweats, which shows our status differently.

I voted

The I Voted sticker represents this post because it illustrates the larger point. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that everyone should vote to ensure our democracy. But the sticker is a badge. It’s a literal badge that we wear when we go back to the office and back to our homes after we’ve completed our civic duties.

A problem with the I Voted badge is that all it does is encourage voting. Voting is great, but informed voting is even greater. If we vote just to vote, we likely aren’t moving the needle on important issues. If we vote, but we rely exclusively on others’ perspectives when making our decisions, we are in the same place as voting just to vote. The badge is only meaningful if the action behind it is also meaningful.

Are we voting to vote? Or are we voting because we care about certain issues and want to cast our informed votes towards the ideas and concepts that we feel like make our city, state, and country better? The next time we put on our I Voted stickers and show the world we voted, will we be able to articulate what we voted for, and more importantly, why?

This is not to shame uninformed voters into becoming nonvoters. We are all hypocrites in one way or another, and we have a choice in which badges we choose to wear. The badges we choose are inextricably linked to our identities.

Badges are identity

If we could wear all our badges on our shirts to show everyone else what we believe in, it would quickly become apparent that many of our badges are superficial.

If you’ve seen the movie Office Space, you might remember a scene where Joanna’s (played by Jennifer Aniston) boss nags her about her pieces of flair. Stan (her boss), says

What do you think of a person, Joanna, who only does the bare minimum?

to which she replies that the minimum is a moving target. It’s an important scene for Joanna’s character in this comedy, and it’s illustrative of the badges we wear.

I Voted is a badge that illustrates something important, but it’s just the bare minimum. There are countless examples of badges serving a purpose without substance. You’re only working eight hours a day? Not busy enough. Do you only have time to meditate for ten minutes? Not mindful enough. We’ve built-in “not enough” into our culture without understanding whether there is any depth behind these badges.

We all have the same twenty-four hours, and no one can do enough of everything, so we supplement doing the work by showing a badge. We say that we are busy, then proceed to waste hours on mindless tasks and distract ourselves every twenty minutes. Our claims to practicing mindfulness result in our downloading apps and going to expensive group meditation retreats.

Going deeper

As soon as we realize that our badges are not impressive, there may be a pain. This new, powerful knowledge is painful. And with all things painful, our first reaction is to avoid the pain and revert to false signaling. It’s easier to vote than to research issues and candidates. Spending half of our day talking to people in virtual meetings is easier than moving the project forward. Attending a weeklong meditation retreat makes us feel better than sitting with our thoughts for 30 minutes a day every day.

Taking the time, and it takes time, to go a little deeper is challenging. And because it’s challenging, we know it’s worth it. Next time you put on a piece of flair, whatever that may be, consider diving a little deeper. I spend more time rewriting and editing this than I do writing the first draft. The reason that I rewrite this so much is because I want to ensure what I’m saying is concise and clear. I believe that spending the time to go a little deeper into a topic, idea, or concept, and spending a little time editing and rewriting ultimately makes a better product. What do you believe?