A Testimony

I grew up going to a little 13th century church in Bushey. There was a lot of talking and listening. I enjoyed listening to testimonies the most: ordinary people talking about how Christian ideas had helped them to live their lives. The stories helped the big ideas feel more personal, relatable and relevant.

I was reminded of this last week, when I met Thaer, one of my former Facebook colleagues. We naturally ended up talking a lot about the past and present of Facebook (now Meta) London. I mentioned that one of the reasons I left Facebook was that I wanted to stop flying and felt that I couldn’t successfully do my job if I wasn’t prepared to fly to New York and Menlo Park pretty often.

Thaer was amused: his immediate reaction was that sacrificing a sweet job at a tech company to make a principled stand against air travel was nuts. Although Thaer cared about the environment, as an engineer he could see that the savings in greenhouse gas emissions were negligible. No fewer planes had flown as a result of my actions and I would be better off seeing if I could help make sustainable air travel a reality.

I accepted Thaer’s arguments, but pointed out that my principled stand also allowed the conversation we were having to happen. I no longer preach fire and brimstone to people for living unsustainably (apologies to my family for earlier blunders), but do share my story when the opportunity arises.

I haven’t flown since 2019 and honestly it hasn’t felt like much of a sacrifice. I have had success working as the CTO for a tech startup after letting the CEO and COO know that I wouldn’t be able to fly for business, I have been able to spend more time with my family and I have enjoyed some lovely holidays by train to France, Spain and Belgium last week. I understand that not flying would be a much bigger sacrifice for many people with family abroad, but there are also many people in a similar position to mine who could make a similar sacrifice pretty painlessly: enough people to quickly reduce the number of flights taking off during a climate emergency.

Christians changed the world by sharing their good news. People in Parisian coffee shops talked about how it might be nice to stop living in the dark ages. Last week Thaer and I met in London and talked about how it might be time to stop living unsustainably. The change I made might seem laughably insignificant, but stories can be powerful; conversations can be powerful; the Internet can make those stories and conversations more powerful. There are second order effects.

(Christians also understood that music can make stories more powerful. This is the story of the my final flight for Facebook along with some lovely flute playing by my son Natty)

In 2012 I met Philip Su at Browns in Covent Garden to talk about setting up a Facebook engineering office in London. When I left Facebook there were over a thousand of engineering staff working in London and I had interviewed a thousand more. One of Philip’s favourite reminders in those early days when things felt daunting was that everything that was ever done in the world was started by one individual.

We can be the change we want to see in the world and by sharing our stories we can make those changes bigger.

Thanks for reading and listening to my stories, please share them with others who might find them encouraging.