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I’m continuing the look through my old notes to find topics to write about because you need to spend time working your old notes if you really want your note system to be useful.
How People Treat Your Time
the people who are happy to intrude on your writing time would never ask to intrude on your teaching time, your time you spend with your family, or your sleeping time. They simply see your writing time as less important. – How to Write a Lot Location 178
I find this idea to be true in so many more ways than just writing time. When people don’t show up on time they’re telling you how important time with you is to them. I have a close family member who embodies this idea, she always tells me I don’t call her enough but she never calls me either. In my case there are layers of guilt trips going on about how I should be a good family member and call her regularly.
My response is always to reply that if it matters to her she could call me as well. There are always excuses about why she doesn’t and pushing the entire responsibility back to me.
In reality what this family member is showing me is that the effort to call me and do anything to maintain the relationship is too much work for her so she’s not going to do it. I’m not that concerned about the relationship either, but I acknowledge that the baggage of it is far too much work to spend time on and don’t worry about it.
This holds true in work, if you always get the random jobs that take you away from your core work and saddle you with admin (think getting the office coffee or donuts for meetings) then what people are saying is that your time is less important than their time.
Increased Productivity = Increased Consumption
In Basic Income for Canadians the author puts forward the idea that we have had enough productivity increases in the last few decades that we should have far more free time than we do currently. The problem is that instead of using our extra productivity for leisure we’ve fallen into the capitalist mindset of increased consumption1.
North Americans work 30% more than Europeans and we use that to tie up wealth in huge houses, which previous generations didn’t need in some effort to keep up with the perceived wealth of those in our social circles. But we’ll never be able to keep up with them because as soon as get what those people have we nominate new people that are a few steps further ahead of us and try to keep up with them instead2.
For the last few years I’ve tried to reduce my consumption so that I can need to do less. It’s gone okay, but not great. The hardest part is all the stuff my kids are involved in. I have 2 figure skaters and one dancer/piano player. Last year my oldest figure skater grew lots and needed 3 pairs of figure skates at $2000 a set. Plus the travel costs to get the skates because we don’t live somewhere that you can purchase them.
All told when I look at our household expenses we spend about $30k a year on skating/dance for the kids. That’s a lot of income we wouldn’t need to earn.
Social Media is collection without compensation
At their core, social media are vehicles for the relentless collection and monetization of the personal data of users. Reset Loc 225
Hence my comment this week that if you don’t own your domain you own nothing but you don’t have to do POSSE you can simply write your site and let those who find it enjoy it without turning everything you do into a side hustle.
- Basic Income for Canadians Pg 65 ↩︎
- Four Thousand Weeks Pg 11 ↩︎