road work

The season of the nap is upon us. It’s cold. It’s dark. It’s going to be cold and dark for the foreseeable future. Anyone reasonable knows in his or her bones that the proper course of action over any given afternoon for the next several months is to take a nap. And so late stage capitalism has, naturally, found a way to pose the question: What would you pay for one?

The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings.

The current state of rising inequality was not a technological inevitability. Rather the narrative of disruption duped us into thinking this was a new kind of capitalism. The authors argue that tech companies conquered the world not with software, but via the usual route to power: ducking regulation, squeezing workers, strangling competitors, consolidating power, raising rents, and riding the wave of an economic shift already well underway.

.. eroding the idea that the tech industry operates (and should be treated) differently.

Struggle porn has normalized sustained failure. [...] When you believe the normal state of affairs is to feel like you’re struggling to make progress, you’ll be less likely to quit something that isn’t going anywhere.

Instead of thinking “maybe my difficulty getting traction is a sign that I need to try something else,” the reaction is “this isn’t doing well yet, but if I keep struggling then eventually things will work out.”

In one particularly egregious case, someone had been building a company for four years, had no revenue or customers, and would sneak into his alma matter’s cafeteria to steal food to extend his runway. Last I checked he was still working on it. He’s also a big fan of GaryVee.

I’ve been searching for a quote or article from Austin Kleon (I think) that I read months ago about how saving away little quotes, lines, links, inspiration had become a stand in for actually digesting, ruminating, understanding, critiquing, and well, making any meaning out of them, I guess.

I can’t find the exact quote or article. And not being able to find it almost stopped me from just doing this thing that I’ve been meaning to do. Which is to stop saving away quotes and links and ‘inspiration’ in a hidden drafts folder nobody knows exists (257 drafts sit there today) and to actually expand on them. Expand on myself. Take the time to elaborate, to connect them with my current, daily, lived experiences. Build my own assets.

I want my attention back. I want that “sense of grounding, feeling rational, control of your emotions — a healthy mind.” And, I would add: a sense that the 34 gigabytes of information, ideas, and thoughts I take in every day can lead me somewhere. That they can at least speak to one another instead of existing as sparks, as spasms. Non-assets, as it were.

Another reason to do this, another mind/muscle metaphor: I’m shoving more into my brain than it can possibly hold, every day. So it’s okay if writing kills memories so long as it also preserves thought. “Memories get reinforced the more you recall them.” I recall them first by writing, then by re-reading.

These are good days to remember. And I’m privileged to have my backlog of saved links, saved thoughts, to work through and uncover. To remember and to connect to now. All 257 of them.

And finally: I want to feel the burn. (muscles, again. yes, brain, i get it. i should also get up and move at some point today.)

In every endeavor that isn’t already easy for you, progress requires you to move into certain uncomfortable feelings with regularity. So it makes sense, if you can, to interpret those feelings as good, rewarding, and reassuring—even though they aren’t, in and of themselves, pleasant. [...]

As the burn becomes more familiar, you start to find a certain second-level pleasure in it.  [...]

The burn intensifies every time I stride a little further than normal—when I decide, for example, to give an article another half hour beyond the point at which I was about to quit. The more I let myself feel that particular burn, the more it makes me feel capable and confident rather than annoyed or discouraged. It’s still uncomfortable, but it quickly becomes exhilarating too. When you make room for the burn, you realize that it’s not dangerous, just intense, and that intensity can energize the work once you stop seeing it as undesirable.

I’ve got to be okay with being bad at things (writing, marketing, drawing, speaking portuguese), as long as I am trying to get better.

My problem (to date) is that writing — and not just capital-w-Writing — has become performative. Instagram captions, fiction, long form, drafts. That has to stop. If only because truly, nobody cares. Nobody is reading. Why shouldn’t I develop my own thoughts and share the ones that motivate/provoke/excite/impress/enkindle* me side by side?

*any word but inspire. Maybe I’m not wise enough yet to accept ‘inspire’ as anything but cheesy. Maybe inspiration requires action. You can’t be inspired to do nothing. Or inspired *yet* still do nothing. For now, for me, these sources are still ‘things I want to learn from’ rather than ‘inspiration I apply.’

“In recent years, the Voice has been subject to the increasingly harsh economic realities facing those creating journalism and written media. Like many others in publishing, we were continually optimistic that relief was around the next corner. Where stability for our business is, we do not know yet. The only thing that is clear now is that we have not reached that destination.

The Village Voice was created to give speed to a cultural and social revolution, and its legacy and the voices that created that legacy are still relevant today. Perhaps more than ever. Its archives are an indispensable chronicle of history and social progress. Although the Voice will not continue publishing, we are dedicated to ensuring that its legacy will endure to inspire more generations of readers and writers to give even more speed to those same goals.

We have begun working to ensure that the enormous print archive of The Village Voice is made digitally accessible. I began my involvement with the Voice intending to ensure its future. While this is not the outcome I’d hoped for and worked towards, a fully digitized Voice archive will offer coming generations a chance to experience for themselves what is clearly one of this city’s and this country’s social and cultural treasures.

“Physicist Eunice Foote was first to show that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas & that high levels of it in the atmosphere would warm the planet but didn't get the credit because she was a woman“  (kottke)

“the model for personal development is antithetical to the model for professional success” (Austin Kleon)

“Samsara, in Buddhism is the beginning-less cycle of repeated birth, mundane existence and dying again.”

Mary Oliver, for example. A lesbian poet living in relative seclusion on Cape Cod, Oliver has, for the most part, elided personal subject matter in favor of the natural world. For decades, she has published poetry considering roses and grasshoppers and water and ripples. Her poetry reveals the analyst, the critic, the organizer and, yes, even the taskmaster in Virgo: the person who wanders the woods and takes note of the smallest bits and bobs, who notices how it all clicks into place, how it moves as one organism, how it fits together — often illuminating something about the human experience in the process. Oliver writes, “Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

This attention to detail reveals another superpower in Virgo that is not often considered, which can be found by considering Virgo’s opposing sign, Pisces. In its attentiveness, Virgo heals: Virgo brings insight that serves the greater good. Virgo notices the details that others miss — Virgo is the nurse who finds the missing piece, the parent who notices the misstep in their child’s pattern, and, yes, the poet who brings us to stillness in nature.

Virgo finds healing and beauty in the smallest detail. Virgo finds beauty and worth in the work, whatever that work is.

As Oliver also writes, “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.”