Separation Anxiety

DotLoop is growing and, with growth comes departments and teams. We have the forms team and the sales team and the marketing team. Each has its own function, of course, but we all work together quite seamlessly, kind of like DotLoop itself.

It's working great here at DotLoop, but I've been thinking a lot lately about how erroneously compartmentalized we have made our world. As a news junkie, I stop by all kinds of news sites and see the same separating tabs: politics, business, entertainment, science and technology, health. Of course lately, everyone - even those not within the industry - are clicking on that other tab: real estate.

But after reading about the TARPs and the DOWs and the NASDAQS, I'm starting to see how silly all of these little categories are. After all, it only took one tab - real estate - to affect every other tab in one way or another.

And now that the housing bubble has burst, it seems more and more clear how interconnected everything really is. The effects of one thing collapsing can and do resonate throughout the rest of the economy not only here in America, but all over the world. A defaulted mortgage in Iowa can cause a farmer in Taiwan to lose his job. Not only are you and your neighbor Jim feeling the effects of this crash, but so are Otto in Germany and Kim-Ly in Vietnam.

If we have learned anything from this financial crisis we've all been trudging through, I hope it's this. Everything is connected. Your loss is your neighbor's loss is the world's loss.

While I understand that this need to categorize and separate is a natural thing to do, I feel that we've gone overboard. We're suffering from separation anxiety, that is, our need to separate and categorize is making us crazy.

So I am calling an end to all of this distilling and dividing. Get rid of the marker that draws lines around us. Pop those barrier bubbles faster than that housing bubble. After all, most times, it's not about black and white, wrong and right, or day and night. It's about the dusk that connects all of us.

Can I get a little kumbaya here?