“The Need for Roots” by Josh Davidoff
July 13, 2025, First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Adults love to ask kids this. Now, we don’t tend to ask, “what do you want to have when you grow up?” Or “What do you want your employer’s 401(k) matching percentage to be?” and especially not “What is your maximum tolerable debt-to-income ratio?” Those are bad questions. We want children to pursue passions uninhibited by material concerns; to dream without practical restriction. So why don’t we have more default questions for kids, like “What do you want to give back to the world?” or “What kind of community do you want to belong to?”
These days, I ask myself these questions a lot. I have a day job in nonprofit management that is basically spreadsheets and emails for 40+ hours a week. I’ve said that I want to spend more of my free time playing music with friends and advocating for immigrant justice. But sometimes, when it comes time to do something prosocial—to sit down and write a song or help a migrant friend draft their asylum application—I find myself booting up a computer game instead.
I actually procrastinated writing this sermon by playing a computer game known as a spreadsheet simulator. It’s called Big Ambitions. In Big Ambitions, you play as an entrepreneur in the streets of Manhattan. Your uncle has given you $5,000 and his old car. You rent a tiny apartment in the Garment District and run around starting as many businesses as you can. If you drive your uncle’s car, you have to parallel park it legally or get a ticket. So, like any New Yorker would, I sold the virtual car and took the virtual subway instead, balancing digital boxes of merchandise on my digital hipbones.
They call these kinds of business simulation games “spreadsheet simulators” because when you’re not roaming the city grid in search of storefronts for rent, you’re just manipulating data to optimize your fake profit margins for your fake businesses. That may make Big Ambitions an unexpected escapism choice for me given that, like I said, I already spend a lot of time getting paid to look at spreadsheets. So what is it about making that pretend bank balance go up and up that is so much easier to confront than creative and community-oriented tasks like writing a sermon, a song, or a strongly worded letter to my state representatives?
Now, I own that this sounds like a strange habit. Maybe you, too, have some way that your work blurs the lines with your resting hours. Still, I felt uneasy while playing Big Ambitions, with its worship of profit margins, and I set out to determine why this dumb game was distracting me from the work of tending to my community and my roots.
For perspective, I turned to the radical, mystical French philosopher, Simone Weil, who is the trendy patron saint of people who take themselves too seriously. Weil saw money as the leading cause of “uprootedness,” or disconnection from our obligations as humans and community members. In The Need for Roots, her 1949 proposal to rebuild Europe after the Third Reich, she wrote: “Money destroys roots wherever it goes because the drive to make money supplants all other incentives. This drive easily overshadows all other incentives because it requires so much less attention. Nothing is as clear or simple as a number.”
Weil’s anti-capitalist proposals to recenter the incentives of Western civilization on interpersonal and spiritual pursuits led her detractors to paint her as a sanctimonious ideologue with her head in the clouds. And though some of her ideas are bananas (ask me about it later), her determined screed against money strikes me as a critical warning given the untold existential risks humanity now faces. What do I want to be when I grow up? How about a citizen of an egalitarian democratic state inhabiting a planet with thriving ecosystems? Is that so much to ask?
Weil rails against money’s position as “almost the sole motive for nearly all actions and sole or almost sole measure of all things.” She charts an erosion of community values worsened by the widening wealth gap of the industrial age. We know that now, in our digital age, so much more of our energy has been hijacked for the profit of the few; our attentions and aspirations yoked to commercial enterprise; our collective vision for the future blinkered by the tunnel vision of someone else’s balance sheet. Big Tech companies do not find it profitable for us to be in Beloved Community together.
With her concept of rootedness, Simone Weil diagnosed what she saw as the overemphasis on the individual in 20th-century Europe. She felt that a rising focus on money and efficiency weakened the self-sustaining power of local communities and left gaps for a fascist regime to drive its wedges between us. For Weil, a key function of belonging in any tight-knit community is the foregrounding of our collective obligations in tandem with our civil rights. She writes that “the successful fulfillment of a right comes not from the person who possesses it, but from others who recognize that they have an obligation towards that person.” We develop rootedness by fulfilling our obligations and exercising our rights, as Weil says, “through our […] participation in a collectivity that keeps alive treasures of the past and has aspirations for the future.”
Such a rooted collectivity might be found here, at First Unitarian Brooklyn, where we have practiced free religion since 1833. Our sixth Unitarian Universalist principle exhorts us to
pursue “the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all,” and here at First U, our members covenant to “foster an environment of compassion, generosity, fellowship, and creativity.” (That’s from our Right Relations Covenant.) We assume these obligations to each other along with the right to rely on our neighbors to fulfill those same obligations to us.
By contrast, capital recognizes no obligations to humanity except those imposed upon it by its dwindling regulators. Its only memory is of itself. Blind faith in the invisible hand of the free market to act in the public interest is an ineffective and dangerous substitute for a shared covenant grounded in community values.
And our community values can’t be translated into monetary worth. In his popular book Bullshit Jobs, anthropologist David Graeber notes a distinction between value, singular, as in “the value of gold […] and financial derivatives,” and values, plural, as in “family values, religious morality, political ideals, beauty, truth, and integrity.” Graeber points out that society hypocritically deprives our values of almost any value. For instance, housework and childcare are the most common forms of unpaid work— without which, by the way, no work of any other kind would get done.
Still, these two realms of value are not completely separate. “After all,” says Graeber, “it’s not as if life is really divided between an ‘economy’ where everyone thinks only about money and material self-interest, and a series of other spheres (politics, religion, family, and so on) where people behave entirely differently.”
So, we know modern capitalism stinks, but it’s also not going anywhere fast. Case in point: our very congregation has an annual operating budget of just over $1 million. That is a lot of revenue which comes from various marketplaces where we barter our space, our time, and our talents for money to support peace, liberty, and justice for all the world and to maintain our Brooklyn environment of fellowship and creativity. Members of the congregation pledge annually to help keep a roof over our heads and staff employed towards the pursuit of these aims; to fulfill our obligations to each other and to the world.
And to get the money we pledge, we sometimes have to compromise our values by engaging with the market, selling our time according to a complex personal calculus of cost and benefit. Even the many teachers, librarians, and charity workers at First U may often feel like our labor benefits a system we don’t fully believe in. (Though I will say, if you are living in NYC and you have figured out how to make a living without compromising your values at all, please see me after the service and bring me a copy of your self-help book.)
But I contend that pledging your hard-earned money is not enough to create a rooted community. Money is a necessary evil, but it’s not the only tool in the box. Sometimes it’s your time that is most valuable; priceless, even, with no fungible equivalent. For instance, how could you pay millions of people to turn out to the No Kings march? (Contrary to the constant accusations of paid protestors, that would be an accountant’s nightmare.) And how much would it cost to provoke deep empathy for the immigrants who come to our country seeking refuge? What amount of money could convince you to care about what happens to the planet after the time of your death? Remember, you can’t take it with you.
So now, as we collect our monetary offering, which will be shared with the inspiring NY-based organization Rural and Migrant Ministry, let me also prompt you to pledge your time to creating the community that you want to grow roots in. There’s that old saying, “put your money where your mouth is,” but I would rather that we put our time where our beliefs are.
I challenge you to pick a cause you believe in and give to it the hours you have to spare. Volunteering opens so many doors! You will meet and be led by changemakers and idealists, and you may even become one such leader. You will discover community spaces that get you out of the house and off of your phone. You will learn how your city works and where it needs fixing. And if you do have money coming out of your ears, you will learn more about how best to put it to work for the public good.
If you’re looking for in-house opportunities, First U has our Social Justice and Immigrant Solidarity Committees, the Green Team, and Brooklyn UUs for Justice in the Middle East. We also have connections with partner organizations who always need boots on the ground.
Listen. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, though I do want to spend less time on real and fake spreadsheets. But the more I focus my time and energy on growing my roots strong in the soil of Brooklyn community, the less the career parts and the money parts seem to matter.
