1. Do I have the time?

2. Do I have the mental space?

3. Is this project aligned with my values and the change I want to create in the world?

4. Will it energize me?

I posted these questions here for a quick reminder to my future self, but you should read the whole thing to get clarity around how to answer these questions.

Capitalism did not create clock time or vice versa, but the scientific and religious division of time into identical units established a useful infrastructure for capitalism to coordinate the exploitation and conversion of bodies, labor and goods into value.

Clock time, the British sociologist Barbara Adam has argued, connected time to money. “Time could become commodified, compressed and controlled,” she wrote in her book “Time.” “These economic practices could then be globalized and imposed as the norm the world over.”

One thing that often bothered me while working at JMG was our tendency to boil down what we do to basically selling other people’s time (developers, designers, and so forth).

I suppose that’s what capitalism actually is at the end of the day, but it doesn’t mean I feel real good about doing it.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

Why do we want a liberal education? Because everyone in the modern university is living in its opposite, and it sucks.

Oof, this was a great one. Makes me wonder what would make for a better collegiate experience. Perhaps not charging an insane amount for it, making it more accessible for a diverse set of students, allowing more people to participate in the free flow of idea exchange?

For example, I had avoided working for big companies. But if you'd asked why, I'd have said it was because they were bogus, or bureaucratic. Or just yuck. I never understood how much of my dislike of big companies was due to the fact that you win by hacking bad tests.

I've always considered curiosity to be my biggest asset, using it to really understand how things worked.

I never put two-and-two together, though, that the reason I wanted to understand how things worked was to "win" at it.

Paul Graham's theory here is just one revelation after another for me.

Here is another juicy nugget:

Instead of looking at all the different kinds of work people do and thinking of them vaguely as more or less appealing, you can now ask a very specific question that will sort them in an interesting way: to what extent do you win at this kind of work by hacking bad tests?

This is an article from nine months ago, but it’s still mind-blowing how much better the M1 chip is than anything else out there at the moment.

I can’t wait to get an M1 MacBook Pro and really stretch it.

Rule 2: Edit regularly

Cliche as it might be, clothes are a canvas upon which we project our identity and image we want to show the world. However, just like personal growth, our wardrobes aren’t stagnant and what we like and feel comfortable wearing evolves and changes – and I think there’s something beautiful about that. I love investing in timeless pieces that I wear for years but the reality is that clothes do eventually reach the end of their lifetime, we are sometimes gifted things or buy things that don’t quite work for us, or our bodies and everyday needs change.

I don’t feel that we should keep these pieces “just because”. For me when I edit out the pieces I don’t, for whatever reason, wear, I find it much easier to style and get more use out of the remaining pieces in my wardrobe. I also think that clothes that I don’t wear (if in good condition) are more likely to go to good homes if I re-purpose them earlier as opposed to years down the track.

I have been more curious about fashion in general lately (thanks to a Covid-induced binging of RuPaul’s Drag Race), so this whole article is really informative, but I felt like this rule was particularly good to hear.

The next time you’re falling short of a goal, look to high-achieving peers for answers. If you’d like to get more sleep, a well-rested friend with a similar lifestyle may be able to help. If you’d like to commute on public transit, don’t just look up the train schedules—talk to a neighbor who’s already abandoned her car. You’re likely to go further faster if you find the person who’s already achieving what you want to achieve and copy and paste their tactics than if you simply let social forces influence you through osmosis.

This is one of those posts where I think to myself, “I wish I had come up with this myself many, many years ago and saved myself a ton of needless hard work.”

I’ve been getting a chance to (unintentionally) put this into practice at my new job. We hired a Ruby on Rails developer who is just incredible at what he does, and I had the chance to work alongside him a couple days this past week.

Seeing him work Vim, for example, already makes me want to start exploring it. And that’s a piece of tech that has intimidated me for two decades now.

Being a beginner can be hard at any age, but it gets harder as you get older. Children’s brains and bodies are built for doing, failing, and doing again. We applaud virtually anything they do, because they are trying.

With adults, it’s more complicated. The phrase “adult beginner” has an air of gentle pity. It reeks of obligatory retraining seminars and uncomfortable chairs. It implies the learning of something that you should have perhaps already learned.

I’ve been trying to learn soldering, kung fu, and basic home repair this year. Learning kicks ass, and we should all stop being hard on each other for trying.

As a very competitive person who does not want to alienate those around me, trivia is a perfect outlet for this energy, since, as with chess, climbing, or running, you are really only competing against yourself. This is not true in a technical sense as regards to trivia (or, for that matter, chess), but if you get every question right (or always make the right move), nobody’s going to beat you.

Much like the author of this article, I’ve more or less had trivia as a staple in my life since college. I’ve strengthened my friendships by using these questions as a way to learn more about their lives.

Now that I host trivia, it’s honestly a privilege to enable others to have these same experiences. I love having regulars who come back with the same teams week after week, eager to be beaten up with a fresh set of irritatingly complex questions.

Whenever I mentioned to people that I was working on a story about friendship in midlife, questions about envy invariably followed. It’s an irresistible subject, this thing that Socrates called “the ulcer of the soul.” Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, told me that many years ago, he taught a seminar at Yale about the seven deadly sins. “Envy,” he said dryly, “was the one sin students never boasted about.”

He’s right. With the exception of envy, all of the deadly sins can be pleasurable in some way. Rage can be righteous; lust can be thrilling; greed gets you all the good toys. But nothing feels good about envy, nor is there any clear way to slake it. You can work out anger with boxing gloves, sate your gluttony by feasting on a cake, boast your way through cocktail hour, or sleep your way through lunch. But envy—what are you to do with that?

Die of it, as the expression goes. No one ever says they’re dying of pride or sloth.

This is one of those articles that is hard to pull one single quote from, because it’s just so damn good.

The whole piece hits me right in the chest, and I’m sure you, dear reader, have someone you should be reaching out to after reading this too.