Tag: control

Categories
Future Building

Embracing authoritarianism to keep power and quash change

Liked 44 thoughts about the future by Ben WerdmullerBen Werdmuller (werd.io)

Two. I think the (re-)rise of authoritarianism and the increasing importance of the climate crisis are linked. It’s not an accident that Bolsonaro was in favor of felling the Amazon or that Trump had such a strong fossil fuels agenda. If a wealthy industry feels like it might be politically under threat, it’s going to do everything it can to change the politics and create a context where it is protected.

Eleven. In a world based on profiling, probabilistic prediction models, corpus-based decision-making, and near-ubiquitous surveillance, only people who don’t conform to the models anticipated by the people who built and designed the systems and therefore aren’t tracked as closely can really be free.

Emphasis mine.

Categories
House Lifestyle Mental Health

Home organization is often a quest for control

Liked Perfectionism and the Performance of Organizing by Virginia Sole-Smith (Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith)

Organizing is a complicated drug. It’s about instant gratification and control… But it’s also an illusion of control…

My husband calls it Nesting Mode when I get super into making the house better.

I’m not sure there is a more peak White Lady moment than texting your friends photos of your newly organized Tupperware drawer…

Lol I just reorganized my snack shelf this weekend and sent a photo to my mom and sister 😂

But lots of people, particularly straight women in cis het partnerships, play the role of the Noticer in their household, which tends to translate to also being the Organizer and resetting that balance requires the less organized partner to start valuing that there is now a place to put the permission slips and library books…

I’m working on letting go of more things / caring less — although I am extremely attuned to Noticing shit that “needs” to happen. I’m also trying to give my partner more opportunities to take ownership of how our house is organized, like having him help me figure out where to store our salad fixings after I removed them from the snack shelf where I’d been keeping them with the other nuts and dried fruit.

See also: The Mental Load

Categories
Getting Shit Done Lifestyle

Who do you give power over your time?

Bookmarked The Imperfectionist: Because the bell rings by Oliver Burkeman (ckarchive.com)

And so the risk is that a period with the potential to be absorbingly delightful…becomes something to “get through” instead – an obstacle one must get past before “real life” can resume, simply because it can’t be made to conform to how you think your days ought to go.

The more general… point here is that there’s often a deep tension between the desire many of us feel to exert control over our time – because we believe, if perhaps only subconsciously, that something will go very wrong if we don’t do so – and the possibility of actually being fully absorbed in that time. So it’s not really that the Christmas holiday gets in the way of real life. That would be absurd: Christmas is part of my real life, and a part I cherish. It’s my desire to control things that causes the real trouble.

Your family?

Your boss?

Your friends?

Your community?

Wanting to absolutely control our time conflicts with wanting to be part of community, and sharing experiences with others.

Burkeman discusses the conflict between community, efficiency and convenience in Four Thousand Weeks as well. Individualism puts our focus on ourselves and our personal productivity, but can lose us the experience of being part of a whole. When our own goals take precedence, it’s easy to distance ourselves through resentment of loss of control or treat activities as items on a checklist that must be done before we can get back to the real stuff.

(I say this also as someone who believes in setting boundaries with family and not doing things merely to placate others’ demands. So when you do agree to do something, it’s important to commit to the experience with intentionality.)