Things I Like
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That's something most of us do, Lewis said. "People waste years of their lives not being willing to waste hours of their lives. If you mistake busyness for importance--which we do a lot--you're not able to see what really is important."
I'm so on board with this idea. I spend a lot of my weekend time just puttering around, doing whatever, and yes, sometimes being totally lazy.
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Adaptability seems the key here. Many believe that normalcy and consistency breeds monotony, but what about the trap of an overly accentuated, hyper-specific identity? When the world changes around you, what do you do? Personal identities are not corporate communication or software, though now we prescribe all to have brands. All contain the aching desire to be noticed when instead they should focus on being useful. Which leads me to something my grandfather used to say occasionally while I was growing up, “Not everyone gets to be special, but everyone can be useful.” It is so plain, yet so sweet.
Not much to say here other than Chimero's thoughts are interesting and lovely. I am a huge fan of vanilla, and I love the way he describes that and uses it in relation to thoughts on design.
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When I make my own clothing, I think about each stitch and every color. As I pass fabric through the machine, I think about my friends, my week, my mom. Turns out developing consciousness around one thing makes you conscious of lots of other things. You think about the things that really matter to you. Or sometimes you remember the theme to Gilligan’s Island and that's a thing too.
I really love this piece, so much. I don't sew, but I crochet now and I've been drawing for years. I make all our cards (I even did our New Year's cards for last holiday season and had a local print shop do the printing). As I make birthday cards, thank yous, and others, I often think about who I'm making them for and then I end up going all over the place. Drawing, and crochet, is meditative for me. Thank you so much Ethan for sharing this piece.
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My family’s generous health insurance costs about $20,000 a year, of which we pay only $4,000 in premiums. The rest is subsidized by taxpayers. You read that right. Like virtually everyone else on my block who isn’t old enough for Medicare or employed by the government, my family is covered by private health insurance subsidized by taxpayers at a stupendous public cost. Well over 90% of white households earning over the white median income (about $75,000) carried health insurance even before the Affordable Care Act. White socialism is nice if you can get it.
If you live in the US and you don't know how employer provided benefits are also government provided (through tax subsidies) then you need to read this. Too many people are unaware of how much our government already subsidizes our health insurance coverage and how that system is just reserved for those with good jobs. I went on a little Twitter rampage about this last week and this article explains it well. I'm not sure I agree with why certain groups of people voted the way they did last November, but I completely agree that most people don't get how this system works and how utterly awful it is.
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But the facts need a champion. Facts rarely stand up for themselves — they need someone to make us care about them, to make us curious. That’s what Rosling did. And faced with the apocalyptic possibility of a world where the facts don’t matter, that is the example we must follow.
This is a long, but really interesting article regarding fact checking, trying to report the truth, and how people deal with facts. Along the way you get a glimpse into the fascinating history of how the tobacco companies fooled the public for years while knowing their products were dangerous and horrible. I really like the idea of using curiosity to get people to find the truth and the idea of truth champions who are able to do this for social sciences and politics just as has been done for other areas of study.
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Austin's blog continues to point out stories of interest and things to think about, along with helping me to see that I don't need to know everything that's going on in this crazy world right now.
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At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig economy’s rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear.
I'm not much of a fan of the gig economy or the sharing economy or whatever else you want to call it. I think it's a bunch of BS and is using nice talk to disguise how it's screwing everyone but those at the top. And this article shows how that spin works to the companies advantage but the workers disadvantage.
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I know not everybody wants to write on the web, and that’s fine. But it makes me sad when people choose not to publish their thoughts because they think no-one will be interested, or that it’s all been said before. I understand where those worries come from, but I believe—no, I know—that they are unfounded.
Jeremy's dead on with this sentiment. I haven't written many longer pieces lately, but there are things brewing and I do a lot of drafts as I think through things. And I do write other places, mainly my work blog, but this is my home on the web, even if I'm not always writing longer form pieces but am talking about books and links for a long while.
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Accept that all I really want is a small, slow, simple life. A mediocre life. A beautiful, quiet, gentle life. I think it is enough.
A friend sent me this link with the words "thought you might like this" and she's right, I do like it. I like it a lot. I live a very slow and unplanned life. Most weekend we have zero plans and we love it. I love time to putter, ponder, listening to myself to see what it is I want to do with my free time.
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All of this is much more than just moving the goalposts from where they were for past candidates. It’s a disembowelment of Christianity’s most cherished principles, ethics we have deemed to be part of America’s moral bedrock since its very founding.
If you've ever been a part of an Evangelical Christian community, this read is really interesting. Most of the people who know me now don't realize that I studied theology in graduate school and while I'm no longer deeply involved in that community, I do know many who are and this piece describes how many of my friends felt after the election.
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The quote above comes from something she tweeted once that stuck with me: “for anyone trying to discern what to do w/ their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. that’s pretty much all the info u need.”
Love this quote and it is very true. I don't track my days and time as some do, but I've shifted my attention a lot recently and it's been amazing.
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True diversity means true disagreement. Political correctness exists at public institutions, but it doesn’t dominate them. A friend of mine who went to Columbia and Yale now teaches at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York. “When you meet someone at Hunter,” she told me, “you can’t assume they see the world the same way you do.” That’s about as pithy an expression of the problem at selective private colleges as I can imagine. When you meet someone at Columbia or Yale or Scripps or Whitman or any of scores of other institutions, you absolutely can assume they see the world the same way you do. And anyone who threatens to disrupt that cozy situation must be disinvited, reeducated, or silenced. It’s no surprise that the large majority of high-profile PC absurdities take place at elite private schools like Emory or Oberlin or Northwestern.
It is somewhat ironic that I hesitated to post this link. But this link captured a lot of how I feel in some of the communities that I participate in. I didn't go to a small liberal arts college, but rather a huge university with a total of 50,000 students (graduate and undergraduate), but today as I age and I struggle to keep up with some of the fast paced changes in our culture, I often feel I can't express thoughts or work out how I feel in certain places. I censor myself and instead have a group of trusted and safe friends with whom I talk about these things. And in some ways that's probably the way it should be, but in other ways I am saddened that people can't work out their thoughts without being targeted in some way, that we can't be our true selves with most of the world.
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As political artefacts, standards embody certain ideologies. For the internet, it is an aspiration towards openness – open systems, open access, open source. In the US, this ideology has deep historical roots. Some ideas inherent in this openness can be traced from the civil liberties driving resistance towards England’s Stamp Act in the mid-18th century to 20th-century ideals of open societies as alternatives to fascist and communist regimes. The philosopher Langdon Winner argued in 1980 that artefacts have politics, beliefs and assumptions about the world and society that are embedded and written into their very fabric.
I really wanted to quote this whole thing, but you know, you should read it. It reflects on so many good things about how we make things and how we move forward and it reminded me of The Real World of Technology in all the best ways.
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Without homogeneity, there would be no variation. It is the mechanics of sameness in some areas of our life that allows us wild diversity in others.
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When the world is brash, fast, and stupid, we must seek out what is quiet, slow, and intelligent to brace ourselves against the world’s madness.
I'd never heard of the films that Chimero talks about here, but now I want to watch them. I also appreciate, more than I can say, how he points out how hard it is for our culture to slow down, to be patient, and to soak in things that may be hard or different or something we're not used to. I've been trying, especially in the last month, to do just that—focusing on one thing at a time and leaving behind the distractions. It's a change for me, not always easy, but it's been worth it for the calm it brings into my life.