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Today we look at doing without existing in the world, don’t delegate your thinking, and the absurdness of the wealth of some people in the world.

Always Doing, Never Existing

I don’t know how to exist without doing anymore. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to just be rather than constantly move to the next thing. The person underneath all the actions has disappeared and I’m not sure how to get him back. – Greg Morris

Greg hits a note that many of us feel, the inability to simply sit and do nothing, or at least nothing that’s classed as “productive”. It’s easy to fall into the desire to continually further our career, or catch up on a chore list than never ends.

Earlier this year book club read Meditations for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman, where one of the key ideas is that our list will never end so stop worrying about it. You’ll never finish your TBR pile, or watch all the movies that seem interesting or finish all the chores around your house.

Recognize this and then just do the few things you can do. Stop worrying about the rest.

That second statement about “stop worrying” is the hard part though. This is where Burkeman says to embrace the futility of trying to finish.

This is a book about how the world opens up once you realise you’re never going to sort life out. It’s about how marvellously productive you become when you give up the grim-faced quest to make yourself more and more productive, and how much easier it gets to do bold and important things once you accept that you’ll never get around to more than a handful of them (and that, strictly speaking, you don’t absolutely need to do any of them at all). – Meditations for Mortals Pg XIII

Don’t Delegate Thinking

The bottleneck now isn’t typing, it is understanding and problem solving, it is the thinking that happens before and after the code appears. What problem am I actually solving? Does this approach make sense given what already exists? Will this make the codebase more comprehensible or less? Those questions don’t get faster to answer just because the code appears faster. If anything, they get harder, because now you’re reviewing 500 lines instead of 50. – Don’t delegate thinking, delegate work

I use LLM’s to do some of my coding work but like the author above I spend much time thinking about the problem I’m going to solve and how it would best be solved before I just throw it out to an LLM. Unfortunately many companies now think that they can delegate the thinking to some AI bot and thus not need to pay a developer with any experience to think.

Maximum Wealth?

Hamilton Nolan makes a case for having a maximum wealth for people in the world and there are a number of good quotes in the article to show the absurd world we live in where a few people have more wealth than generations can spend while many many people live paycheck to paycheck…or just starve and die.

A few quotes I liked:

The rich employ armies of functionaries whose sole purpose is to convince you that that emotional reaction to how the world works is unsophisticated. It ain’t. Hold that disgust tight.

This is the deal that we already have for the gains of the past 30 years of tech advancement, by the way. Jeff Bezos gets a hundred billion dollars and you get an easy way to order toothpaste. Elon Musk gets four hundred billion dollars and you get a neat car you can buy. This is the standard offer of capitalism. The population at large is supposed to be satisfied with the incidental benefits of the technology itself, as those who control the technology ensure that it is deployed in service of maximizing their own wealth.