Things I Like
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One of the points I’m trying to make in that essay is that, where there’s money to be made from intermediaries establishing themselves, intermediaries will appear. If there’s money to be made by controlling a DAO and the DeFi protocols it administers, then somebody will be in there making a majority of that money. And those will be the people who’ve been in the ecosystem from the beginning. That means those in the venture-capital firms. They’ll make a ton off this. To suggest that what I’m describing is democratizing the ability to control how our financial system works is totally disingenuous. Because we haven’t changed the underlying incentives of the financial system. We haven’t changed any of the structural or political issues…
I learned a lot reading this interview and found it fascinating. I'm a complete Web3 and crypto skeptic and this interview points to a lot of the reasons why and explains them well.
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I’m going to go about my business, thinking some things, and some of those things I will want to write about and share. I enjoy having this space where I can do that without deadlines, word count, or pay.
I really enjoyed this piece on newsletters (and I'm not even a subscriber to this one!) and I think the reason is because so many of them have now become revenue sources it was refreshing to see someone who talking about it being the opposite of that. I'm definitely not against folks getting paid for their work, we all deserve that, but I've been wondering a lot lately how this will all play out. As communities created by various newsletters become echo chambers and as people realize they may not be able to afford to pay everyone for their work much less have time to read it all, what will become of all these newsletters?
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The advice from my publishers was just to move on. It was not worth the effort required to get these kinds of account taken down. But I was already in too deep. I started up another, different, fake Instagram account and, again, began the humiliating rigmarole of trying to seduce myself.
This made me laugh but also made me sad, why oh why is crypto the thing that is capturing everything these days.
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So the numbers are bad enough. But then there’s the way the hard facts of the economy interact with our emotions. Consider this theory: that the current office ennui was simply the inevitable backlash to the punishing culture of the previous decade’s #ThankGodItsMonday culture. And furthermore, sometime around the rise of #MeToo (and after Donald Trump’s election), ambition began to seem like a mug’s game. The enormous personal costs of getting to the top became clear, and the potential warping effects of being in charge also did.
I could've pulled a lot of different quotes from this article because I found it all really interesting and was nodding along a lot. But what I find the most interesting about it was both how complicated what's going on in the labor market right now is and how difficult that is to put into words. So many folks are unhappy with work right now and I can't help but wonder if maybe it's because work has never been that great. The disruption of a stressful, global event has been the catalyst for many folks to figure out what is important to them and work has fallen way down the list.
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Why are we committed to requiring people be physically present in the office if many workers report being more productive while working from home? Why do we insist on keeping video on during Zoom meetings, which causes fatigue? Why do we make people sit at desks all day when the human body simply was not biologically engineered to sit for eight-plus hours at a time?
So much this. The 40 hour work week, where you go to an office and sit for five days in a row with two days off is, in the grand scheme of human history, a relatively new thing. It also assumes a lot about people and how they must shape themselves into that mold. I think a lot of companies have learned over the past two years (and just as many have turned a blind eye) to how productive and how well folks can work when you trust them and let them make their own schedule. This of course is thinking primarily about knowledge work and there are lots of folks who aren't working in that type of field.
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Looking out the airplane window at the great blue sky, I thought about how making friends in midlife, while challenging, might also be a gift, a chance to enlarge one’s world and one’s self. It sometimes feels at 40 as if our lives have assumed their final shape, entrenched as we so often are in our careers and cities and relationships. But to meet new people like Steph—who has already taught me about the Mountain West and what it’s like to grow up in a Mormon community, and who sees me as I am right now, not as who I used to be—is to acknowledge the growing that we all have left to do. When I imagine my life in another 40 years’ time—full of old friends, yes, but also friends that I have yet to meet—it looks like a sketch of heaven indeed.
This piece spoke to me so much! I've found as we've moved twice as adults, importantly, adults not having children, how incredibly hard it is to make friends, true friends. And this article hits so much of it on the head.
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To stop this from happening again, I have come up with a personal Theory of Stuffness, a way to structure and understand my local stuff ecosystem, especially the digital stuff. I divide Stuffworld into the Object (drum machine), the Enhancements (all the extras), and the Experience (sick beats). Another example: The Object is the phone. The Enhancement is the Spotify app. The Experience is that of listening to music. In the past, you might buy a record player and spend 10 years curating a collection of really good jazz albums. You'd read the liner notes and learn new things over time, boring your friends in the process.
So many quotable bits in here, but and I gotta say, thinking about the experience of the stuff and what it brings you is a great idea, I'm gonna use that in the future.
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The first thing to understand is that your nemesis is not your enemy. Or, put differently, your nemesis is more than just an enemy. Rather, the nemesis is an adversary is who is like your dark twin. Even as you battle with the nemesis, you share a kind of DNA. The gaze at your nemesis is like looking into a mirror, but one of those fun house mirrors at the carnival, where everything is both recognizable and distorted.
This made so much sense to me and I can totally look back at my career and see that when I had a nememsis,even if that person never knew it, I was spurred on to do better work.
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Before, I wished that BookCourt would last forever. Now I wish that someone, anyone, will love Books Are Magic as much as I loved BookCourt, that it will be a part of children’s internal maps of their neighborhood, that couples will stroll the aisles together and flirt and marry, or flirt and not marry, but still think about those dates fondly. I hope that some of my booksellers will think of their time at the store as warmly as I think about BookCourt. I hope that my husband and I will get better and better at being bosses, which is a hard thing to learn.
A beautiful piece on both working at a bookstore and owning a bookstore. Also: books are magic.
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That’s the kind of cooking I’d like to do more of in the new year. If I resolve to find those small moments of “all-powerful joy” in the kitchen and out, at my desk and in life, maybe they’ll be more likely to reveal themselves to me.
I'm not gonna lie, I'm a bit tired of cooking so I've been falling back on dishes that I can cook in my sleep. I have a chicken soup recipe that is easy and my partner loves. But I've also spent this winter upping my game with beans, being able to take a type of bean and throw together a soup that is satisfying and delicious and, most of all, easy to cook.
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Move Oregon’s Border’s true purpose is threefold, McCarter told me: First, obviously, to move the border. Second, to send a message to the state legislature “that you’ve got some very unhappy people, and here are the reasons why.” But the third is more subtle: “It provides a vent for all this anger.” McCarter sees himself as a peaceful guy proximate to violent movements.
The best article I've read on the Greater Idaho movement, that acknowledges all the various views and complexity of these issues. Also: that kicker, woof.
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We need to stop thinking a dashing rescuer in a red slicker or yellow fire-resistant shirt should come save us from wildfire. We don’t fight hurricanes. We don’t fight tornadoes. No one assumes there will be an armed defense from an earthquake or a flood. Instead, we bolt our houses to our foundations. We raise our homes on stilts. Now we, Californians of the Anthropocene, need to grow up, take responsibility and stop expecting to be saved.
I've been reading a lot of the long form articles on wild fire as well as listening to podcasts, given where I live and what my area experienced in the fall of 2020, it makes sense. This paragraph is very much a theme I'm seeing emerge from a lot of what I'm reading and listening to. Wild fire is gonna happen and it's up to all of us who live in these regions to start taking some responsibility and stop thinking that it's all the job of government and fire fighters to save us.
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It’s possible that the metaverse idea is too flawed to exist in any incarnation. Connecting services so they can collect our data, track us, and dominate our attention even more completely will likely make the world worse, not better, at least for those of us who aren’t VPs at Meta or Microsoft.
Everything old is new again, at least it feels that way a lot of the time, and with the introduction of the metaverse I fear we aren't seeing anything new, just a rebranding of the same things these companies have been doing for a very long time.
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Americans began thinking about health care decisions this way only recently; during the 1950s polio campaigns, for example, most people saw vaccination as a civic duty. But as the public purse shrunk in the 1980s, politicians insisted that it’s no longer the government’s job to ensure people’s well-being; instead, Americans were to be responsible only for themselves and their own bodies. Entire industries, such as self-help and health foods, have sprung up on the principle that the key to good health lies in individuals making the right choices.
So many things have been laid bare by this pandemic, but one of the biggest is how we treat health and how much the idea that individuals doing what they think is best for themselves is how we should be living. Is there an idea of common good anymore? Do so many not want to acknowledge that we live in a society together and that means we have a responsibility to each other? I've found this the hardest thing to understand during the past two years.
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So ask yourself this: Who would you be if work was no longer the axis of your life? How would your relationship with your close friends and family change, and what role would you serve within your community at large? Whom would you support, how would you interact with the world, and what would you fight for?
I think much of my family doesn't really understand my lack of ambition when it comes to work and career. I've thought for a long time that a job is just that, a job. It provides me with money in exchange for my knowledge work and, if I'm lucky, doesn't overtake the rest of my life. I'm very much not my job and that feeling only grows every day as I cultivate hobbies and connections in my community.