Categories
Entrepreneurship

Work Mode as Protest

Quoted A Big Walk, Book Success, Work as Protest — Roden Explorers Archive by Craig Mod (craigmod.com)

“One of the big fumbles (sort of) of my 30s was concocting a false narrative that went something like: We need someone on the outside (read: in a position of “power”) to bestow upon us the permission to be or be able to do X…”

“It was only once I hit a few dozen walls and failed to “publish” in the “way” I thought I “had” to publish, that I then — finally! — began to think more creatively around engaging with and owning my work and the space within which I was working.”

“…A certain kind of work, lifestyle, mode of living — in and of itself — is protest. That is, work that is curious and rigorous is implicitly an antipode to didactic, shallow bombastity. It is inherently an archetype against bullshit.”

— Craig Mod

I feel like Craig’s got a point here that syncs with my feelings about just going for self-publishing and trying to build my own thing. Where I have such strong feelings about work and worker’s rights and capitalism, it’s pushing me towards an older mode of work, a more creator-centric approach to trade.

Categories
Mental Health

Indulging in I Don’t Wanna

Quoted Honestly, to Hell With Self-Care Right Now by Jess Zimmerman (Slate)

“For an adult, the big, difficult feelings are expressed a little more quietly… Instead, we backslide on our smoking, spend too much money, eat potato chips even though they give us gas. We let the dishes pile up, stop washing our faces, cycle through the same three grungy outfits day after day. It’s not just laziness, or self-indulgence, or fatigue. It’s self-expression and protest: I will act miserable because I am miserable and I want to act the way I feel, and I don’t need to act like I feel better and you can’t make me. It’s a way of externalizing feelings that may be too big to communicate or contemplate on their own: maybe I can’t deal head on with the void of the future, but by god I can sit here refusing to get up until I need to pee REALLY bad. It is, in its own way, a kind of self-care.”

— Jess Zimmerman

I have had moments in my life which I don’t look back on kindly where I just balked hard and refused what was on offer.  But maybe I shouldn’t beat myself up for those moments of listening to myself and admitting I don’t wanna, even if they didn’t turn out well.

Related:

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/are-you-suffering-2020-election-burnout-you-re-not-alone-n1245586

“‘All my coping strategies are failing,’ one person told me recently. ‘I am coming undone.'”

“What’s changed is that our surge capacity — the body’s ability to process stress — was depleted months ago. We have so much grief and nowhere to put it. When you can’t process something, it builds up, like bile. And no matter how creatively or diligently you try to ignore it, it’s still there, slowly festering. At some point your body begins to betray your best compartmentalization strategies. Our dreams have become vivid and terrifying because sleep is one of the places we allow ourselves to confront our sadness and fear.

This sort of chronic instability, and the burnout and exhaustion that accompany it, fundamentally changes us.

— Anne Helen Petersen

Categories
Political Commentary

Power Over vs. Power With

Bookmarked Joy and power – The Aesthetics of Joy by Ingrid Fetell Le (The Aesthetics of Joy by Ingrid Fetell Lee)

On first impression, power and joy feel in tension. Yet a closer look reveals that the way we view power can have important consequences for how much joy we feel as individuals, and as a society.

I hadn’t given thought to the connection between joy and power. Interesting premise that exerting power over damages joy while power with and power together builds joy.

Categories
Cohousing

Financing Cohousing

Bookmarked Managing finances in a coliving house by Gillian Morris (Supernuclear)

Friendly advice from the daughter of an accountant

Separate ownership from living so people own different shares in the overall LLC but you could probably do a rent-to-own thing to build equity and make it work out fairly.

Categories
Cohousing

Chore Fairness

Bookmarked Fairness is overrated and bragging is underrated (Supernuclear)

Motivational systems for coliving (and beyond…)

Not sold on this idea. Studies consistently show women spending more time on chores than men in relationships. Women are socially conditioned to be caregivers. That magically changes in a larger group? (Or does it not apply in non-family groups?) Men step up and do their fair share, or women accept doing more work because they get to brag about it, and don’t get resentful?

Categories
Future Building

Trading Activism for Personal Action

Quoted Knitting at the end of the world – Austin Kleon (Austin Kleon)

George Orwell on the importance of hobbies in times of political turmoil.

“Only two ways of reacting to the current crisis of nature were offered. On the one hand, there was ‘fighting’. This fighting was to be aimed at the ‘elite’ that was destroying the planet – oil companies, politicians, corporate leaders, the rich. On the other hand, there was ‘giving up’. Giving up meant not fighting. It meant running away from a necessary battle. It meant being selfish. It meant ‘doing nothing’, and letting the planet go to hell.

 

All of this hinged on a narrow definition of what doing something involved, and what action meant. It seemed to suggest that action must be something grand and global and gestural. Small actions were not actions at all: if you couldn’t ‘change the world’ there seemed little point in changing anything.”

— Paul Kingsnorth, via Austin Kleon

This discussion and diminishment of personal, direct action arises often in the environmental field. We need systemic change but I still feel there is value in living in accordance with your values and being cognizant of the resources you personally use, even if the system makes it hard to reduce that and your individual contributions are a pittance compared to corporate impacts. But especially right now when we’re basically holding back the floodwaters and can’t make progress with a hostile government, there’s no sense in giving up entirely.

Or maybe this is appealing to me because I can do something and feel like I’ve accomplished something, which excuses me from fighting the big fight.

Categories
Art and Design

Watched Kissa by Kissa Design Q&A

Watched

Craig Mod’s writing and the career he’s built doing his own thing are super interesting and inspiring to me. Here he talks about his process of book design from type setting to cover production.

Categories
Cool Resources and Reference

How big is space, visually

Bookmarked Size of Space (neal.fun)

Relative size of objects in space, from astronauts to black holes to the observable universe.

Categories
Getting Shit Done

Books Unread

Quoted Building an antilibrary: the power of unread books (Ness Labs)

Unread books are as powerful as the ones we read. An antilibrary is a private collection of unread books capturing the vastness of the unknown.

“I feel increasingly comfortable buying books I may not be able to read for a while. All of these unread books remind me of endless opportunities for learning, and make me humble.”

— Anne-Laure LeCunff

I struggle with having books unread, which I feel weighing on my like a to-do list sometimes, and I itch with the urge to read it so I can cross it off my mental list. But, I also like to surround myself with interesting options and visual inspiration, so I can grab something when the desire strikes. I like LeCunff’s attitude here.

“A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Umberto Eco’s relationship with books

I’ve been trying to get more comfortable, also, with keeping around books that I have read so I can read them again. I don’t need to check them off my list and get rid of them right away 😉 I tend to purge my personal library hard every few years, donating piles of books to the library (including lots of indie and small press comics that are not replaceable so hopefully the library added them to their collection instead of selling them :/ ). I treat the public library as an extension of my personal library, with books cycling in and out constantly (aside from COVID times – the seven months since I last went to the library is probably the longest I haven’t been in more than five years) so I have tried to share back with the library as I can. But I also am working on building up my personal library these days, especially my art book collection.

Categories
Entrepreneurship

Listened to Being Boss Podcast “All About Value”

Listened It’s all about VALUE | Making a Business Podcast, a Being Boss Production from Being Boss

How to start a business based on your values, have a long-term business vision, & how to overcome the fraudy feelings for product-based business owners.

Liked the notion of thinking through what you want your day to look like as a way to design your business. Also like the idea of thinking longer term, like ten years out, about what you want your life and business to look like.