Things I Like
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For the first time, she experienced life in the city as a teenager without an iPhone. She borrowed novels from the library and read them alone in the park. She started admiring graffiti when she rode the subway, then fell in with some teens who taught her how to spray-paint in a freight train yard in Queens. And she began waking up without an alarm clock at 7 a.m., no longer falling asleep to the glow of her phone at midnight.
I love that kids are finding a different way, at least a small group of them, but I found it really odd how worried the parents were about this change. How in the world did previous generations survive and thrive when our parents couldn't track our every move?
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The wiggly line in the centre is the equatorial line, and the grey cloud represents the plane of the Milky Way. The Sun, Moon and planets also make an appearance - dating the sky depicted precisely to Friday, August 31 at 6 pm British Summer Time.
Filed under: really cool. Also I've put at least one of the smaller knitting projects in my queue.
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What’s surprised me most as Twitter has convulsed in recent weeks is how threadbare the social media cupboard really is. So many are open to trying something new, but as of yet, there’s nothing that feels all that new to try. Everything feels like a take on Twitter. It may be faster or slower, more decentralized or more moderated, but they’re all variations on the same theme: experiments in how to capture attention rather than deepen it, platforms built to encourage us to speak rather than to help us listen or think.
Klein makes some really great points throughout this piece and he quotes a piece by Robin Sloan that I've seen quoted a lot in recent weeks, but I think the above is what I've been thinking about the most. How do you have a way to listen, really listen? Is that possible online or is that easier when together with people in real life? I'm not sure another platform is what we need, but I definitely think reaching out and trying things that haven't been done before and looking to other models may be helpful in how we move forward.
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For ambition to be sustainable, it has to be personal and complex, not just about rising through the ranks. For every woman who is burned out after placing too much value on work as a key component of her identity, the task isn’t letting go of ambition altogether. It’s relocating those ambitions beyond the traditional markers of money, title, and professional recognition. Ambition does not have to be limited to a quest for power at the expense of yourself and others. It can also be a drive for a more just world, a healthier self, a stronger community. And it’s definitely achievable in soft pants.
I lost ambition to climb the ladder in my career quite early and recognized that it was OK for my job to be the thing that made it possible for me to be able to do the things I loved and kept me going. The hard part is dealing with both family and a culture that expects so much more and being OK with disappointing both.
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In this way, smartphones consume rest. I mean to defy the usual consumption metaphor—in which we (the users) consume whatever the device makes available. Instead, I think the devices (and their attendant systems and modes, the apps and news feeds and platforms and whatnot) consume us. We are consumed: our rest, our ease, our leisure, our breath—all are eaten up by the flickering and frittering and jittering of inconstant screens.
There's a lot in this piece Mandy wrote that I love and it was hard to pick a quote, but with all that's been going on lately, I think this is what I'm thinking about the most. How does being online and using all of the devices make us feel and what has it done to us? As I've stepped away from them more and more, I feel more like myself in many ways. I'm not sure if it's all about being online less and less, but I do think it's playing a significant role.
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Should life give me the opportunity to have another story, then I’m hoping for space and time to be able to explore and do the same kind of work I’m doing now but with more intention, more time for it to unfold, more thoughtfulness, more walks, more photography, more words.
Really interesting interview with a woman who I knew nothing about, but she's done amazing work. Hand sewing isn't currently my thing right now, but maybe in the future. I definitely want to read some of her books.
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As I’ve written before on this subject, people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either. From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality. That’s no surprise, I guess, given that the model was forged in the fires of Big Tech companies such as Facebook, where sociopathy is a design philosophy.
This short article sums up a lot of history about how we got where we are with social media, but it also does a great job of pointing out the inherit problems with it. We aren't meant to live life this way, it's not good for us, so maybe the beginning of the end of Twitter could point us to better ways instead of finding replacements.
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At this stage in my life, I simply do not have the time or energy to shake my little pan in a stream of information, trying to sift out the nuggets I want to engage with.
I'm with Rach Smith here and I'm not going to another social network now that the bird seems to be thrashing and possibly in the last throws of life. But I'm here, right on this site, and, for those so inclined, I'm really good at and like email, my contact form is always available to start a conversation.
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Many people don’t want to quit because they worry: without my Twitter account, who will listen to me? In what way will I matter to the world beyond my apartment, my office, my family? I believe these hesitations reveal something totally unrelated to Twitter, and if you find yourself fretting in this way, I will gently suggest that it’s worth questing a bit to discover what you’re really worried about.
Some interesting thoughts in this list.
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This is about more than naps. Thank you for saying that. I say it so much - it is about way more - it's a paradigm shift. It's mind-altering. It's culture-shifting. It's a full-on politics of refusal. We have been brainwashed by this system to believe these things about rest, about our bodies, about our worth - this violent culture that wants to see us working 24 hours a day, that doesn't view us as a human being, but instead views our divine bodies as a machine.
I want to read Hersey's book, but this is a great introduction to her thinking about rest as resistance and so much more. Our culture, and capitalism in particular, drive us to think that rest is bad. It's taken me years to move towards a place where I slow down regularly and I realize that it's a privilege that I can do that, but we all need it so much. In addition I really enjoyed the way Hersey talked about certain activities as being rest inducing, that you can be doing something that is restful for you even as you move. For me walking and knitting and yoga are these things.
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What motivates us to act is a sense of possibility within uncertainty – that the outcome is not yet fully determined and our actions may matter in shaping it. This is all that hope is, and we are all teeming with it, all the time, in small ways.
I've learned so much reading Solnit's writing on hope and this piece is no different. The despairing among us are defeatist, but there are reasons to hope and if you're willing to look, you can see them. Note: this is paywalled, but I was able to read it by using Pocket and I think you can get at least one article free before the paywall goes up.
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The categories of “technical” and “non-technical” serve wholly to privilege those in the former, at the expense of the latter. But literally no product organization would survive a week without the deep—and, I’d argue, technical—expertise of the people who are usually lumped into the “non” bucket: a bucket that includes knowledge of financial systems, laws, business models, operations, ethics, research tactics, user behavior, cultural patterns, learning development, communication practices, organizational psychology, and so much more than could ever be listed in a single paragraph. The “non-technical” nomenclature not only does a disservice to that work—and to those people—it also diminishes the ability of the organization to really get the most benefit from those skills.
A reminder that no one is less than in an organization and we need to remember that in how we talk about the work folks do, it takes skill to do all the jobs needed to keep places going.
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Unyoking your love from your job—fundamentally an economic transaction—frees up your energy to put work into your relationships and your community, inside the workplace and out. It also, crucially, frees you up to put work into loving and caring for yourself, and pursuing the things that make you more of who you are.
This entire essay is wonderful and I'll be rereading it and thinking about it in the days to come.
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When a phrase takes off, it's often because the new words fill a space of uncertainty, like the coining of a new diagnosis. A lot of workers are seeking an efficient way to describe the colliding pressures of wanting to be financially secure, but not wanting to let work take over their life, but also having major status anxiety, but also experiencing guilt about that status anxiety, and sometimes feeling like gunning for that promotion, and sometimes feeling like quitting, and sometimes feeling like crawling into a sensory deprivation tank to make all those other anxieties shut up for a moment. If quiet quitting is fake, the popularity of anti-work neologisms is its own data point that deserves to be taken seriously as a cultural phenomenon.
How often the media writes about things that aren't really happening, but the phrase is born and beaten to death. Related: it's ok to have a job and just work your job and to move up the ladder so you can use your energy for things you like to do outside of work. It doesn't mean you don't do a good job, it merely means you have boundaries. That's been my way of working for years.
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LinkedIn’s new posting culture feels like a signal to workers on how to behave online: be personable and even personal, but don’t rock the boat—always be on guard, to remain in your employer’s good graces. In that way, it seems like corporate culture is influencing our behaviour and conversations online, further blurring the boundary between our personal and professional identities.
I don't use LinkedIn much, but found this article interesting. It seems LinkedIn is actively encouraging a lot of posting (no surprise there) and now people are doing it and also looking at how they can make money and be LI Influencers (so much ugh at that phrase).