Space and Place is only about 200 pages of thoughtful prose, but I’ve never finished it; I read a paragraph at a time, and that fills up my brain. and if it was a big day in bonds the fourth floor would be loud, loud; the fifth floor, though, focused on shorter-term investments, would be almost silent. You could hear the economy.
It is my 37th birthday today, and what I really crave, more than anything, is a continuity to my days. Not an accumulation, the sense that they’re adding up to anything, not necessarily, just a continuity. The sense that one day leads into another leads into another leads into another on and on and on.
What Happens When Your Career Becomes Your Whole Identity
Psychologists use the term “enmeshment” to describe a situation where the boundaries between people become blurred, and individual identities lose importance. when you engage in any intense activity for the great majority of your waking hours, that activity will tend to become more and more central to your identity — if only because it has displaced other activities and relationships with which you might identify.
Mister Rogers And The Dark Abyss Of The Adult Soul
— like seeing a good friend, long neglected, after so many years. He asks him questions, and then more questions, and waits through silences when Lloyd can’t answer them. — instead of sitting with those feelings, again, we work. Because work means money, and money brings a modicum of stability, and relief, however temporary, from that same fear. Work doesn’t actually give us peace or solve our problems. But for a lot of us, it’s what we’re good at and what we know, which is far more comforting than staring at the abyss of what we don’t. He brings us back to the openheartedness of childhood, when we lacked the skill to deflect, or compartmentalize, or resort to work. nonetheless a practice: a decision, made every day, to care deeply about others, but also to refuse to insulate himself from the emotions that care requires.
The problem, and it’s obvious, is that whatever sucks that I’m running away from will be there once I stop working. or doing things like not being available on the weekends, because they’re the weekends.
But really I work not because it's super-happy-fun-time each and every time I turn on my computer, but because if I do a bit of work first, then I have the freedom to not work later.
There is an almost mystical element to this search for a quick fix; it is rooted in the same misguided beliefs that once led Ponce de Léon to search for a “fountain of youth” upon landing in the so-called New World, scouring the ponds, rivers, lagoons, and lakes of the Florida coastline for the mythic fountain. (There’s debate about whether this actually happened, or if the quest is itself a myth — but the myth’s endurance tells us about its staying power.) The fountain of youth would be the ultimate recharge — a reversal of time in a single instant. The contemporary recharge is about continuously undoing the day before, quickly erasing the wear and tear of living, creating a fresh start or a blank slate or a best self. But it’s aimed at a singular objective: productivity. At its heart, the myth of the recharge is about turning away from what might be broken about the structure of our society — the constancy of work, the absence of affordable healthcare, the expectation that we will be “plugged in” or “online” 24 hours a day — in search of short-term, generalizable solutions. We do not ask ourselves whether all this might be untenable, but instead what supplement we might take to make it a little more bearable. We rise and grind and rise and grind and sleep in between. We deplete, recharge, deplete, recharge.
many people now rely on their employer to pay the premium for insurance against the erosion of their social life. Hardly a cause for either company’s success, but certainly a tailwind. Ironically this would mean that WeWork didn’t stand on the shoulders of Facebook as a user acquisition machine so much as it cleaned up what Facebook left in its wake as an alienation machine.
the major skill that all of you have acquired is how to be a more thoughtful, invested, engaged person in today’s world. That’s hard to put on a resume, and even if you could, I don’t know if employers would value it: somehow “understanding how ideologies of race, sexuality, and gender are encoded in the media that surrounds us and influence our interactions with each other” isn’t as marketable as “Proficient in Excel.” There’s an old union slogan I’ve been thinking about a lot: 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for work, 8 hours to do what you will. What you do with that time “to do what you will” — go outside, read deeply and widely, go to the Bijou every night for popcorn with brewer’s yeast, run for office, go to church, advocate for things that actually matter to you — that is just as much who you are, if not more so, than the time you spend at work. Unions understood and still understand: work is part of life. But only part. We don’t have to monetize our hobbies.We don’t have to value education for its ability to provide readily marketable skills.
“Is it writing if it never gets published? Is it really work if I’m not being paid for it? I keep telling myself yes, hang in there, it'll all work out, but some days I feel like I'm just mouthing the words and I don’t really believe them. Today has
As a writer, the question of worth is still one that plagues me. Today’s existential anxiety attack was set off by missing the compost drop off bc I was working on an essay. Not a solicited essay, one I want to write so I am (hopefully it'll be published but who knows) Especially on days when I’m not earning $, I put great stock in doing chores. Since I can’t contribute $ to the family, at least I can do the dishes, make dinner, dust, etc. This in part stems from my working class upbringing. And perhaps the masculine stereotype of “providing” So when I missed the compost drop off, I had a moment of absolute panic and an irrational dip of self-esteem. I had one job to do! Dropping off the goddamn compost. If I can't do that, then what good am I? As a partner, a dad, a human being. It got BIG real fast. Is it writing if it never gets published? Is it really work if I'm not being paid for it? I keep telling myself yes, hang in there, it’ll all work out, but some days I feel like I’m just mouthing the words and I don’t really believe them. Today has been one of those.
The phrase doesn’t really refer to the internet; it refers to a place, but not one that exists in any substantive way, concretely or even conceptually. Instead, it uses “offline” as a metaphor for a place that is simply Not Here. while also providing a catch-all that allows one to blame technology for the annoying tendencies of its users.
The last minute is basically my only real skill. In college, (and high school, and since I can remember) there must have been things I occupied myself with in the hours between when I left class or left a social event and when, at 1am, or 3am, or 6am, I sat down to start work. But mostly what I remember is those frantic hours, the world around me silent, tunneling to the forced singularity of focus. There was a street lamp right under my dorm window, five stories down. It came back on at 5am, and at least once a week I would watch it spark to life, as the morning leaked back into the world, and I would feel like I had acquired some substance, like whatever was coming next would be survivable, like this version of myself, awake, capable of driving the work of two weeks into two hours, was worthy of praise. I felt tangibly good at something, the way I imagine athletes feel. I liked writing, but I liked at least as much being able to say "I wrote it in an hour" about something I’d written. I still do. At this point, after many years of operating this way, I can see the seams, the flimsiness of it, but I have been relying on the last minute for so long that I don’t know how to do otherwise. If television in the last ten or fifteen has a cohesive thesis - and I believe it does - the thesis is that work will save you. Work replaces the family. It orders the world into meaning, and lifts singular identity into a high and visible register. It's easy to see why the promise appeals. You don't have to love anyone, or make anyone love you; you just have to be really, really good at your job. To do something reasonably, in manageable pieces, means to admit my limitations, to turn work from the register of miracles back down to the everyday, where it is just work.
“The fact that you can fool yourself, for the most part, into thinking that you have done something really valuable with your time is really dangerous.”
I never make products because I want to make money while I sleep or hear beeps on my phone alerting me of sales, while I sit around in my underpants. I make products because I enjoy making things and providing value to others. I also make products because I enjoy actively doing work. I don’t care about the easy road or hacking the system to make money without effort. I like making money because there’s effort involved. It’s hard work, and it feels good.
“Viewed through this lens, employment takes on a feudal quality, where companies no longer provide the tools or resources for getting work done, but instead primarily offer security, a mission, and a tribe to be part of.”
“For more open-ended problems, much of the challenge lies in figuring out what to do next. These rich questions offer deep satisfaction on longer time scales, but without a clear sense of progress, each day ends ambiguously. Was today good? Will these tinkerings add up to anything? In what timeframe? Who knows. Ultimately: what structures around progress, self-correction, and operations can help us in open-ended mode? These questions are intensely personal, but I hope that notes from my journey here may help your own.”
“I have always felt like this blog is my refrigerator. I make something, or I clip out something I like, and I put it on the refrigerator. The next day, I go and find something else to put on the fridge.”
“We have a vague idea in our head of the “price” of certain accomplishments, how difficult it should be to get a degree, or succeed at a job, or stay in shape, or raise a kid, or build a house. And that vague idea is almost always catastrophically wrong. Accomplishing worthwhile things isn’t just a little harder than people think; it’s 10 or 20 times harder.” “But the switch towards taking on a practice and discipline is admitting to yourself that you suck and you want to get better.”
