Things I Like
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If you’re prone to thinking you should be helping more, that’s probably a sign that you could afford to direct more energy to your idiosyncratic ambitions and enthusiasms. As the Buddhist teacher Susan Piver observes, it’s radical, at least for some of us, to ask how we’d enjoy spending an hour or day of discretionary time. And the irony is that you don’t actually serve anyone else by suppressing your true passions anyway. More often than not, by doing your thing – as opposed to what you think you ought to be doing – you kindle a fire that helps keep the rest of us warm.
I'm not very familiar with Bukeman, having read none of his books (although I just added one to my list) but much of this column resonated with me. The above quote, but also the fact that we can't possibly do it all so acknowledging that is freeing. This is a short column packed with so much good thinking.
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Many Americans see work as a thing to deal with, that hopefully gives them enough stability or money to have a shot at being who they really are. Which is a good father, or a good mother, or a Bucs fan, or great golfer, or a rising dirt track racer, or the person who throws the best block parties, or a reliable singer in the church choir, or a competitive BBQ-er, or a good solid friend that will do anything to help out anyone else, or someone ‘keeping their head above water and doing it without losing their cool because it is easy to lose your cool in this crazy world.’
I think about this a lot, how many folks are working and not thinking about a career or where they want to go or how they want to advance. They work to be able to have the life they want and it may or may not be something they enjoy. I especially think about this in relation to my own work, I'll admit it, it's a day job, I do it for the money and because I'm working towards other life goals. But the rub comes when my place of employment insists I need goals, I need to want more, I need to make this a career that maybe I don't want to make it.
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Every time I start a new post, I never know for sure where it’s going to go. This is what writing and making art is all about: not having something to say, but finding out what you have to say. It’s thinking on the page or the screen or in whatever materials you manipulate. Blogging has taught me to embrace this kind of not-knowing in my other art and my writing.
I read this post and it made me look at what my earliest post is and it's from March of 2011, nine years, wow. I don't blog for exactly the same reasons as Kleon, much of my site is for me, memories and triggers that take me back in time, but much of my writing is what Kleon is talking about. I like working things out through writing, and this place seems a good one to share that.
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Extreme love, extreme loneliness. Ever since then, whenever I listen to a Bruckner symphony I ponder that Shinagawa Monkey’s personal life. I picture the elderly monkey in that tiny hot-springs town, in an attic in a rundown inn, asleep on a thin futon. And I think of the snacks—the kakipi and the dried squid—that we enjoyed as we drank beer together, propped up against the wall.
This story is lovely.
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But after a certain point, the expectations become the anchor, not the engine.
I love this.
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I think the American obsession with symbolic freedom has to be traded for a desire for actual freedom: the freedom to get sick without knowing it could bankrupt you, the freedom for your peers to live life without fearing they’ll be killed by police. The dream of collective well-being has to outweigh, day-to-day, the dream of individual success.
There's a lot to quote in this piece and it was a toss up for me between this one about freedom and one further on when she talks about hope. But the entire thing is worth your time, there is so much in this interview that had me pausing and rereading the words.
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‘Florida and Ohio, man,’ the barista at the local café said to my husband, when he asked about the tourist trade. ‘People here at least acknowledge that it’s real. But people from Florida and Ohio don’t even seem to think it’s happening.’ Having lived in both places, I believe him: I have long had a theory that the surrealism that has overtaken the political landscape in America can be traced back to the poisoned ground of Ohio Facebook.
I have no words to describe this piece, but read it, it's worth it.
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Stegner’s settings range from academia and the literary world to mining camps and boomtowns, but his most consistent subject is marriage, represented in a mode more epic than romantic. Monogamy, with its crags and chasms, is the most salient and imposing feature in his imaginative landscape, the human undertaking around which all the others are organized. Marriages in his books are not always harmonious — spouses quarrel, separate and sometimes stray — but they always endure.
Stegner is one of my favorite writers and I really enjoyed this piece by A.O. Scott looking at his work as a whole. He is by no means perfect, but I'm always drawn into his books because of the focus on relationships and as the above quote says, marriage. I find marriage a fascinating thing, how it works so differently for everyone and how it changes over time. Stegner writes about all of that in ways that never fail to make me think or see it in some new way.
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My perspective is, I’m trying to talk about what I believe is wrong systemically that gives us corrupted outcomes because the system is incentivized to do that. It is incentivized for conflict as well as for corruption in a more classic sense, which is money from larger sources pouring into a place not to help but to gain control.
There's a lot in this interview and I could've grabbed several different quotes. I don't always agree, but wow, Stewart is bringing a perspective that I find really helpful right now. Looking at the systems and how those systems in so many ways are problematic. Until we change them, I don't know how anything will truly get better.
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The price of collaboration in America has already turned out to be extraordinarily high. And yet, the movement down the slippery slope continues, just as it did in so many occupied countries in the past. First Trump’s enablers accepted lies about the inauguration; now they accept terrible tragedy and the loss of American leadership in the world. Worse could follow. Come November, will they tolerate—even abet—an assault on the electoral system: open efforts to prevent postal voting, to shut polling stations, to scare people away from voting? Will they countenance violence, as the president’s social-media fans incite demonstrators to launch physical attacks on state and city officials?
This piece goes in depth with history and our current situation and it is so worth the time. Applebaum's writing over the past several years has continuously been good, but this piece goes so much further into how much what's going on in the US right now is akin to that which has happened before in other countries. I deeply wish it weren't so.
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Put another way: what kind of decisions does your technical stack make about who’s allowed to contribute to the front-end? And how expensive will it be to alter those decisions, and introduce a different way of working? For many organizations, the technical barriers to cross-functional collaboration can be unacceptably high. And what’s more, the cost of that complexity is rarely acknowledged.
I think about this a lot. I recently worked on a project where the designer had our code base up and running locally and felt comfortable and preferred to do a lot of the smaller customizations of the design himself. It was amazing, we both worked to our strengths, but it's also a rarity. Our code base is difficult to run locally and not something many non engineers want to dive into (even I dislike it, to be honest). But it changed the entire tenor of the project to be able to collaborate in that way.
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For even when our food system is functioning “normally,” reliably supplying the supermarket shelves and drive-thrus with cheap and abundant calories, it is killing us—slowly in normal times, swiftly in times like these. The food system we have is not the result of the free market. (There hasn’t been a free market in food since at least the Great Depression.) No, our food system is the product of agricultural and antitrust policies—political choices—that, as has suddenly become plain, stand in urgent need of reform.
Ever since the pandemic started I've been reading about supply chains, about how the things I buy get to me, about the way in which these systems feel invisible, yet they so obviously broke down quickly in the face of the lock down measures that were taken and people worrying about having enough of everything they normally eat, use, buy. Pollan speaks to how these systems are so broken. The one system that's kept going during this entire time has been my CSA, delivering me quality food every Friday, like clockwork.
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In fairy tales, form is your function and function is your form. If you don’t spin the straw into gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career. The future for the sons who don’t inherit the kingdom is vanishment. What happens when your skills are no longer needed for the sake of the fairy tale? A great gust comes and carries you away.
An amazing piece on academia, fairy tales, motherhood, and life in quarantine.
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All this comes down to the need to recover and sharpen a functioning sense of justice based on a reverent appreciation of humankind, all together and one by one. The authenticity of our understanding must be demonstrated in our attempting to act justly even at steep cost to ourselves. We can do this as individuals and as a nation. Someday we will walk out onto a crowded street and hear that joyful noise we must hope to do nothing to darken or still, having learned so recently that humankind is fragile, and wonderful.
A piece that I'll need to read several times to let sink in, to think about how we're reacting to this moment and how we can learn from it.
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This is where pandemic-induced reductions in spending, decadelong resentment over income inequality, the resurgent progressive and labor movements, sustained millennial/Gen X burnout and precarity, and burgeoning Gen Z idealism collide. What if we decided that things didn’t have to be the way they were before all of this happened? Part of that shift would involve taxing the rich and disarticulating healthcare from employment; it would involve forming and protecting unions and focusing on reimplementing regulatory systems, decentralizing production, and restoring the supply chain. And it could also mean disabusing ourselves of the idea that buying things is a solution to our problems.
Petersen talked about this in an email newsletter and it got me thinking. I've been very careful about where I spend my money for a years, not just if I'm buying now. I know, Amazon doesn't miss me or notice that I'm not spending there, but how I spend my money is one of the only ways to send signals in this society of ours. And during the pandemic, I've hardly bought a thing and I waited for my local shops to open up before getting some things I needed, like new running shoes.