Things I Like
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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).
-
But here’s the big difference I’ve seen over the last few years in the people I work with: They don’t have a big relationship to their hands. I’ve had to show them how to cut a circle out of paper.
I really like Barry's books and this interview once again made me wish I could take her course at Madison.
-
It may be the case that many personal infirmities can only be fully repaired in a repaired world, but this does not obviate the need to pull ourselves together as best we can in this broken one. Any serious attempt to topple capitalism would require more discipline, more courage, more endurance, more capability, not less.
I enjoyed this counter argument to a lot of the writing I've read about burn out and the way in which the world is difficult to live in right now. But I do agree with the author that change will only come by folks working towards it and that for many of us (I realize not all of us) we have some power and control over how we organize our lives.
-
Really what I was pointing out was that we have to stop playing the short-term game of just cheerleading on our firefighters as they fight these impossible battles, and die, while not addressing the root cause which is, we need to be proactive about managing fuels on the landscape. So, my plea to Rachel was to be truthful with the public, to be honest about these trade-offs, to not treat every fire suppressed as this major victory, and to really start to be culpable. That fuel accumulation that we have out there on the ground is the responsibility of the state and federal fire management agencies who strictly focus their efforts on fire suppression and fire exclusion, and they don't get their offense on the field in off-season to any meaningful degree to deal with the fuels problem.
I've been reading and listening to a lot of podcasts over the past few years about fire and our forrests and the point above is one that keeps coming up over and over again. We aren't approaching managing our forrests correctly or telling the truth to the people who live near or in them and until we do, the fires will keep burning hotter and more out of control.
-
But if we are concerned about land abuse, we have begun a profound work of economic criticism. Study of the history of land use (and any local history will do) informs us that we have had for a long time an economy that thrives by undermining its own foundations. Industrialism, which is the name of our economy, and which is now virtually the only economy of the world, has been from its beginnings in a state of riot. It is based squarely upon the principle of violence toward everything on which it depends, and it has not mattered whether the form of industrialism was communist or capitalist or whatever; the violence toward nature, human communities, traditional agricultures, local economies has been constant. The bad news is coming in, literally, from all over the world. Can such an economy be fixed without being radically changed? I don’t think it can.
More Wendell Berry, but this is one of his non fiction rants (at least I think of certain pieces of his that way) and even if I don't agree with everything he says, he always makes me think about things. I do believe we need radical change in many areas to care for the planet and ourselves.
-
We live in an era that has been profoundly warped by the headstrong impulses of men who are technically sophisticated but emotionally immature. From the whoopie-cushion antics of Elon Musk to the Panglossian implacability of Mark Zuckerberg, a particular personality profile dominates these times: the boy emperor. While reporting this article, I often wondered how the C.I.A. could have missed the obvious combustibility of this profile when it hired Schulte and gave him a security clearance.
This is a bizarre story that is told so well and written so well, Patrick Radden Keefe is one of my favorite non fiction writers at the moment.
-
When a ritual is written out or explained, the activity can seem overly simplistic or fruitless to outsiders. The best way to understand a ritual, according to practitioners, is to engage with it, even if that participation is limited to empathy.
I'm a huge fan of Mason Curry and was glad to see him included in this article, but I also really enjoyed the other perspectives and I love the idea of ritual over routine.
-
It is this space that I want. The space to move on, to tinker, to discover things I haven’t even thought of before. To be capable of giving up, letting go, quitting. I don’t wish to be fixed to something. It may give me more anxiety, but it gives me the freedom to explore and experiment.
I really liked this take on purpose and life and if having a well defined purpose leaves us closed off to change and new things.
-
Despite Berry’s veneration of his ancestors, he can be unsparing about their sins. “I am forever being crept up on and newly startled by the realization that my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors, by the awareness that people were once bought and sold here by my people, by the sense of the violence they have done to their own kind and to each other and to the earth,” he wrote in his 1968 essay “A Native Hill.” He saw the rapacious practices of modern agribusiness, Big Coal, the military-industrial complex, and Wall Street as the perpetuation of “some intransigent destructiveness” that drove the European settlers in America.
I've read a lot of Wendell Berry's work and I don't love all of it, but I do find his voice valuable, especially as we think about how we live in places, how we treat the earth, and how we think about our place in history. I'm fascinated by where he's going now in old age and I'll be adding his latest book to my list.
-
This is anything but an argument against technology, were such a thing even coherent. It’s an argument for taking technology as seriously as it deserves to be taken, for recognizing, as McLuhan’s friend and colleague John M. Culkin put it, “we shape our tools, and thereafter, they shape us.”
Klein is asking all the right questions about technology and what it's doing to our minds and our society.
-
“It’s very strange in prison,” Sebastian says, as he sips tea at FCW’s London community hub – a safe space, beneath railway arches, that provides work experience and employment training to ex-prisoners, with the aim of getting them back into work. “Everyone thinks it’s going to be terrible and scary but, in fact, it’s mostly very boring. Nobody tells you how dull prison is going to be. Having that kind of structure, having something to do with my hands, something to work on, something to take pride in – it really changed everything.”
I've been reading a lot about knitting and I enjoyed this article about sewing, it's so amazing how much learning a craft and working your way through it can be helpful in other areas of life and give meaning to someone's life.