Things I Like
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Learning to sew will not only help you avoid the environmental horrors of modern retail; it will show you the thrill of wearing clothes that actually fit. This is not an argument for a cottage-core lifestyle in which you hand-make every raw-linen garment that touches your body. I’m more for an incremental approach: Acquiring a few basic sewing skills, little by little, will change how you get dressed. Even if you never make a whole garment from scratch, knowing how to adjust a seam will make secondhand shopping easier and more accessible. And when you’re looking for new clothes, knowing your measurements will help you order only items that are likely to fit. The goal is not to become a master tailor. It’s to become fluent in how clothes fit your body.
This, this, this! If I could emphasize one of the things Ann Friedmans says it's knowing your measurements, really knowing them. And, guess what? You have to measure yourself again every so often because bodies change all the time. I find making clothes to be so satisying, but especially because I've often changed things after a few wears to get things just right. I realize not everyone will do this, but everyone can get to know their body better and make better choices when buying clothes—at the rate we throw things out, that's a start.
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The recent stumbles of Twitter, which is in the process of being rebranded as X, and the likely ill-fated attempts of Threads to do better, present an opportunity to pause and reconsider this particular trajectory of our digital world. If aggregating connections mainly serves the investors who fund big conversation platforms, there’s no reason why the rest of us should have to play along.
I'm using social media less and less. I didn't join Threads, I didn't get a Mastodon account, and I'm checking Instagram less (or at least actively trying to stay off of it more). But I do use a site that has smaller forum sections allowing me to connect with folks doing what I'm doing, Ravelry. The smaller connections, the niche sites, I think there time may have come, but people have to be willing to seek them out and let go of the larger sites that are cosplaying at connection, at least that's how it often feels.
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I felt most out of place on the bus. Imagine these Greyhound-style buses. Carpet seating with cigarette holes and old gum stuck on them. Broken armrests, missing headrests, and non-existent A/C. Massive windows that were dangerously unsealed. They would open and flap like an uncaged bird as we flew down the freeway. And the smells. Smells that come to mind: smoke, urine, feces, ammonia… How, why?
A veteran baseball player who just finished his 16th season writes about the beginnings. I love Joey Votto, he's a character in the sport, a talkative first basemen who loves to joke around and now he's revealed he's a good writer as well. Hopefully he writes more.
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There will always be too much to do, no matter what you do. But the ironic upside of this seemingly dispiriting fact is that you needn’t beat yourself up for failing to do it all, nor keep pressuring yourself to find ways to get on top of it all by means of increasingly extreme multitasking.
Yup, another thing about time, routines, how you spend it, etc. But I've been quietly rebelling against a trend I see in the knitting world and that is knitting all the time, everywhere. I get it, I love to knit as well, but I also recognize that breaks are good my; full presence in many instances is better than getting in a few more stiches. And, like Burkeman, I do try and do one thing at a time as I find it less draining.
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Because it’s not really Twitter that I miss: it’s the activists and artists and writers I followed; the voices who weren’t like mine, the people who walked different paths than I did, each of whom taught me so much. I miss the many, many friends I made on that website. That place we all gathered was, bluntly, taken from us. From me.
This is so well said from Ethan, with links to some super great pieces, some of which I'd never seen (and have linked to here myself). It isn't the scrolling of that website that I miss, it's the people and connections I've made. They've all scattered and are no longer all in one place. I've opted not to go to another site like Mastodon or Bluesky, but instead I'm trying to be on this site more, posting more thoughts and links with throughts attached. We'll see how that goes.
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It reminds me that even if social media is crumbling around us, people can endure. The impressions we make on one another outlast the silos and the buyouts and the implosions.
I'm with Bellwood here, as I just got a delightful email from an old friend and now I'm thinking about the ways in which I can come out of my shell a bit and connect more with people without the intermediary of a big company.(link via Ethan)
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Now the whole cornerstone of my life is sleep. There is almost nothing that doesn't seem to me to be fully affected by whether or not I'm sleeping well and enough. It’s really shocking to me how much the way I respond to situations, the kind of attention I can bring to a podcast or to my children, or whether or not I'm able to eat a healthy diet comes down to whether or not I’ve slept enough to have a buffer against my own reactivity the next day.
I'm not saying we should all do what Klein does to have a good day, but what I really liked about this piece is how much he talks about doing the things that he needs to fill him up. Just like another piece I'm linking today, figuring out what fills you up and gives you energy helps you do your work and all kinds of other things so much better. And it takes noticing and getting to know yourself to figure this all out.
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The question to ask with all those things isn’t, “how do I make time for this?” The answer to that question always disappoints, because that view of time has it forever speeding away from you. The better question is, how does doing what I need make time for everything else?
This, this, this. And this ties in to so many of the links I'm posting today. Doing the things you know fill up your cup (as my yoga teacher says so often) are worth it. They are what give you the energy to do all the other things that may not be the most exciting or energizing.
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Many things that were once true – that we didn’t have adequate solutions, that the general public wasn’t aware or engaged – no longer are. Outdated information is misinformation, and the climate situation has changed a lot in recent years. The physical condition of the planet – as this summer’s unprecedented extreme heat and flooding and Canada’s and Greece’s colossal fires demonstrate – has continued to get worse; the solutions have continued to get better; the public is far more engaged; the climate movement has grown, though of course it needs to grow far more; and there have been some significant victories as well as the incremental change of a shifting energy landscape.
Reading Solnit on the climate is always a good thing. I don't always feel optimistic but she always makes me see things are better than I think they are.
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One thing I’ll say, though, about 2023 and beyond, as I head into my 50s: I mostly want to make art, not arguments.
I love this way of thinking about life and I'm with Hendren here as I think we must be around the same age. As I move away from being so involved in tech day-to-day, I've found my interests lie in making in many different forms. (link via Ethan)
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But we don’t live in an ideal world; we live in a world where we’re going to be very lucky to make it through the next decades with a climate system more or less intact. We have no choice but to build renewable energy, and its attendant appliances, and to do it fast. But it would be a shame to waste the vast effort entailed simply trying to re-create our current society on a lower-carbon basis, because we’d soon run into the other barriers that the degrowth activists warn of, from too much nitrogen to too little solidarity. Instead of halting the build-out of green energy, it would be wise to use that enormous process, one of the biggest economic shifts in human history, to nudge our societies toward greater equality and greater conviviality.
Lots of interesting things to think about and it made me think a lot about Small is Beautiful and how maybe we need to be thinking much smaller and more locally to do things better.
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I say “whatever” because I am still unsure what that looks like. Questions I’ve been asking myself a lot recently are about how much of my personal life do I want to make public. What stories are appropriate to tell? How much of my travels, of the restaurants I go to, of my dating are relevant to the world at large?
I feel this post so much. If you've followed me a long while, then you know that I used to post here more frequently and write on tech topics and that has all stopped. I post links like this and a reading round up most frequently and I've struggled, really struggled to figure out what else I want to put here and, like Snook, I'm just not sure.
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What a relief that this chaotic and dark time of midlife isn’t requiring me to set a bunch of goals! In fact, after I read this passage, I made some different decisions about my week and about my summer. Giving myself permission to tinker, be an amateur, have more fun, leave more things unfinished, not sign up for the gymnastics class but just tumble around instead.
Again for those in the back that didn't hear it, we don't need to professionalize the things we enjoy doing.
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I’ve always felt that great teams don’t need day trips to wine country or mini vacations. Instead, the best team building exercise is to give folks good, worthwhile work. Honest work. What kills great teams isn’t the lack of team offsites but the lack of focus, direction, resources, support, and financial recompense. A trip to the arcade or the bowling alley is incapable of fixing any of these problems.
Robin nails it here, I've gone to so many offsites and done so many team building exercises and the team that I worked with best and felt I did my best work was the one in which we were working well together and focused on the work rather than trying to build a team. Pretty much all of my offsite experiences pointed out how I didn't fit into the team merely because what I found interesting and fun to do when not working is not what they found interesting and fun.
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There’s something to Epperson’s insight that less work can yield better work. From 2015 to 2019, Iceland conducted two large-scale four-day-workweek trials. Combined, they reduced the workweek from 40 hours to 36 or 35 for more than 1 percent of the nation’s workforce without cutting pay. The workers came from a wide range of industries and included teachers, police officers, construction workers, and employees in the Reykjavík mayor’s office.
Working less, overall, is better for us as people. Productivity is an obsession in our culture so it's hilarious to me that the way to be more productive is to work less.