The first thing he did was ask about the refrigerator.
It was June 2015, at Wieden+Kennedy in Portland, and the room was full of people who run things. Executives, founders, researchers, a few civil servants, a scattering of academics and artists. Freddy Ehlers came to the front, listened for a second, and asked whether someone could unplug the refrigerator so the room could be completely silent. Someone told him it was the projector. He said that was odd, because they had told him it was a refrigerator, and then he took off from there.
He was sixty-nine. He wore a Panama hat, which he mentioned more than once, because he wanted everyone to know it was Ecuadorian and not Panamanian. He had been a journalist for thirty years before he was anything else, and he had run for president of his country twice. At the time he was standing in that room, he was Ecuador’s Secretary of Buen Vivir.
An office for the good life
Buen vivir translates roughly as good living, though the Spanish is carrying something wider than the English suggests. It renders the Kichwa sumak kawsay, which is less about individual satisfaction than about living well in right relationship, with your community and with the natural world you’re part of. Ecuador wrote it into its constitution in 2008, in the same document that recognized rights for nature itself, and a few years later it created an office to make the idea operational across government.
Freddy ran that office from 2013 until 2017. His job, put simply, was to look across every ministry and ask whether what the country was actually doing was letting people live well, rather than whether the economy had grown.
It didn’t survive the change of government. Lenín Moreno signed the order closing it on the night of May 24, 2017, his first day in office, and its twenty-one staff were let go over the months that followed.1 Freddy’s own account was less dramatic than the headlines. He pointed out that it had been a presidential initiative funded through the end of that year anyway, and that the closure was more or less the plan running its course.
I’d rather the office still existed. An idea in a constitution isn’t the same as a department with a budget and a staff, and someone whose job it is to ask the question on a Tuesday morning. I don’t think it’s sentimental to say the difference matters.
What did survive is the language. Buen vivir is still in the constitution, and the national development plan still carries the name. That isn’t nothing. It also isn’t the same thing.
How progress became a number
The measure it was built against is younger than you’d think. The national accounts that became GDP were built in the United States in the 1930s, largely by the economist Simon Kuznets, in response to a depression that had made it painfully clear nobody could say how bad things actually were. It was an act of genuine invention, and for the first time, a government could see the shape of its own economy.
Kuznets himself was careful about what he had made. In his report to Congress, he warned that you could scarcely infer a nation's welfare from a measure of national income, and he spent much of the rest of his career repeating variations on that caution. He wanted people to remember that he’d built a thermometer, not a definition of health.
We forgot almost immediately. Within a generation, growth in that single number had become the thing governments were for, the thing companies were for, and increasingly the thing our own lives were held up against. Freddy’s version of this is blunter than mine. He said that after the Second World War, we decided that progress was measured by GDP, and that is where everything went wrong, because we came to believe that economic growth was the reason for our existence.
He wasn’t the first to say it. Bhutan had been talking about Gross National Happiness since the 1970s. New Zealand would build a wellbeing budget in 2019. University College London’s Institute for Global Prosperity comes at it from another direction: their Citizen Prosperity Index is built from what people in east London said prosperity meant to them, rather than from what economists assumed it meant. The difference in what gets measured is not small.
Why a better number isn’t enough
Almost every serious attempt to fix this problem proposes a different measurement. You can count wellbeing, or ecological cost, or the unpaid work that holds households together, and people have done careful work on all of it. I don’t want to wave any of that away.
But Freddy stood in front of a room of people who hold real power and said something else. He said that we have been selling a life meant for ten percent of the world to one hundred percent of its people, that we can’t continue living the way we live, and that it isn’t a question of whether that’s good or bad; it’s simply not possible. And then he said the way out runs through love.
Not love as a feeling, and not love as a private consolation for a public life that stays exactly as it is. He meant love as something you build with, govern with, and decide to use power for. Which is a considerably less comfortable proposition to raise in a room full of people who have some. A better indicator is a change to the instrument panel. What he was proposing was a change to the relationship, and no dashboard gets you there
Four minutes of silence
Early in the talk, before any of the economics, Freddy asked the room to do something.
This part didn’t survive the final edit of the video, but it’s in the transcript, and it’s the reason I remember the day the way I do. He asked everyone to sit up straight, backs off their chairs, both feet on the floor, and to close their eyes for four or five minutes. Then he told them what to do with the time:
Give all your love to all your family, to all the people you know. But basically, all the people you dislike, all your enemies, all the people who have done you harm.
And the room did it. Hundreds of people who had come to a conference in an advertising agency sat in complete silence and, as far as anyone could tell, tried.
When it ended, he said it was a nice feeling, and that very few times in our lives do we make silence.
I’ve been to a great many events where someone asks the audience to close their eyes. This was not that. He wasn’t creating a moment. He was demonstrating the argument, because the whole of what he came to say is that we have built a civilization of words that doesn’t mean anything, and that the heart doesn’t need to speak, and the thing that speaks is the mind.
The young woman who called
There’s one more part.
Partway through the talk, without much of a segue, he told the room about a young woman who had been calling his office in Quito every week for six months, trying to get him to come to this event. And then he said that one week she didn’t call, and he asked his staff what had happened to her.
That was me.
I kept calling because I hoped he would come, and when he did, he gave that room something none of the rest of us could have. But the thing I keep returning to is smaller than that. He was running a government office with a presidential mandate and a staff. I was a stranger on the end of a phone line in another hemisphere. And he noticed a week when the call didn’t come.
That kind of attention is what love is. Not the feeling about it, and not the word. The noticing.
What we’re building now
I’ve thought about that distinction for ten years, and I spent one of them chasing it. After the second Love Summit, I went to London to research love as a social ethic at the Institute for Global Prosperity. The plan was to come back with that work behind me and build a third summit on it. Life went another way. We’re rebuilding the Love Summit now, and going back through the archives is where that started.
The question we’re building the next one around is the one Freddy was already answering in that room: how do we practice love within structures of power? Not as a private virtue that we carry home from work, but as something that shapes how organizations are run, how countries are governed, and what we decide power is for.
He was standing in a concrete auditorium in Portland when he told us this would matter. Near the end, he said something I wrote down at the time and have thought about often since: that this was the seed, that it would become a big tree and then a forest, and that we would always remember one day in June 2015.
Ten years later, I’m going to take him at his word.
You can watch Freddy Ehlers’ full talk from the first Love Summit here. It runs about twenty-five minutes, and it’s the least TED-like thing you’ll ever see. It isn’t engineered to land; it just goes where he goes. Excerpts above are lightly edited from the transcript.
This is the first in a series from the Love Summit archives.
We’re building the next Love Summit now, a small group of us, and we’re looking for a few more: speakers, partners, and people whose work already lives inside this question. If that’s you, reply to this email. It comes straight to me.
If you want the story of the years in between, I wrote about that here.
A note on how this was made: I worked with Claude to organize the transcript, check the research, and draft this piece. The judgment about what to keep is mine. I include this note because I’d rather you know how a piece was built than wonder. There’s more on how Love Summit essays are made on my About page.
Executive Decree No. 3, signed May 24, 2017. Reported by El Universo and El Comercio; the latter carries the staffing and budget figures alongside Ehlers’s own comment that the project had been scheduled to end in December 2017. Both articles are in Spanish.
Well done, Samantha! This has legs.