Walden . . . Underground

I know that my most loyal reader has dreamed before about a cabin in the woods, a place to draw nourishment off nature and solitude.

In that spirit, I did a post on my blog about sustainability about underground houses.

Get the Dao Where I Can

It is very safe to say that over the last 12 months I have been immensly influenced by Daoism.  It has been my way of dealing with the loss of my grandfather, and it will probably be how I deal with the loss of my dad.  It also made me want to take up Tai Chi and play Go.

Both are lovely activities, but neither are at this point my true path (pun intended).  I order my time with Daoism by the following hierarchy:

1) Time in nature, with the right silence, openness, and stillness of mind.  This is where perfect days should be spent.

2) Time with the Daodejing.  Last year I copied passages by hand.  This year I will memorize my favorite passages.  In the future, I might take up calligraphy and really make some beautiful copies.  Also, there is the possibility of copying it in Spanish, French, or other languages.

3) Tai Chi.  I plan to pick it up in the winters, when the land has lost most of its scents and bird song.  True story: I was doing quite a bit of Tai Chi in the winter and then one day I went out in February and I could just smell the spring.  After that, I have not learned any new moves.  I mostly just used it for stretches when we got out of the car during our vacation.  I think when nature speaks to me less, I will take up Tai Chi again.  It's a seasonal thing.

4) The game of Go.  So in the end, I am not going with Go.  A dozen games or so of Go forms the basis of some images that serve as metaphors for the Dao, but after that it just a game.  Granted, an absorbing game full of tactics.  Oh my, just in writing, I am getting an itch to play.  But that is nothing that losing a few games to a computer wont fix.

Go as a metaphor can help in my spiritual enlightenment, but the actual practice of Go does not get past being a game.  And as I get older, I find more satisfaction from getting things done in real life and progressing in useful skills.

I also find more purpose in spirituality.  And I want the time I spend in my life to reflect that.

On LESS

I have been getting into The Archdruid Report, a blog on the implications of living through the decline of the industrial age.  I got turned onto it through early retirement extreme.

In one of my favorite pieces the Archdruid writes: 

Any attempt to walk the talk that we’ve been discussing here, in other words, has to begin with the individual, and has to start with the acceptance of a very significantly lowered standard of living. To return to an acronym I’ve proposed here already, any response to the future that doesn’t involve using LESS—Less Energy, Stuff, and Stimulation—simply isn’t a serious response to the downside of the industrial age. The toolkit of the Seventies organic gardening and appropriate tech movements, which I’ve discussed here at some length, is among many other things a very effective way of responding to the need to use LESS in a humane and creative manner.

By growing a garden and raising chickens in your backyard instead of buying packaged and processed vegetables and eggs that are shipped halfway across the continent, conserving energy relentlessly and getting as much as you can from local renewable sources, and sharply downscaling the pursuit of material excess in favor of a life that’s rich in experiences, relationships, and meaning, it’s possible to get by very comfortably on a small fraction of the energy, stuff, and stimulation that most Americans think they need.

I couldn't say it better myself (which is of course why I quoted it).

I think I have less stuff down pretty well (though it is certainly arguable).  So that leaves me working on less energy (hence typing this in a house with the AC set at 78 degrees at night and 82-84 during the day (I foresee a time when it is possible that is not enough).

The last one is stimulation.  I think a good step is to make stimulation practically free.  In a big way that is the project of this blog

Next is clearing the mind with things like meditation, spirituality, and moving through nature (walks, hikes, and gardening).  These are many of my favorite things in life, it is important to keep them in the front of my mind.  But they are so quiet that they can easily get lost.

But at least I can say I am working on all of these dimensions of LESS and it will help me to be ahead of the curve in the future.  I urge you to consider doing the same.

So It's Summer

On the bucket-list, I will be moving toward lower body-fat, being able to read Spanish fluently (after finishing my million word challenge) make progress on 100 push ups, and turning my Roth IRA into equity in my home (getting us close to having the whole thing paid off).

Also, on Monday, I plan on making the cold-turkey switch-over to Dvorak typing.

Other than that, and working on cooking (especially after I build a rocket stove), my over-arching project will be working on meditation.  I need to elaborate on it more in the future, but to give a sketch here, I have 3 meditation projects: 1.) be able to mediate for a long time, as part of the goal of decreasing wants 2.) go through a protocol to be able to get "in the zone" instantly 3.) be able to mediate through noise.  All three are about taking where I am and gradually building up, or the in the case of the "zone protocol" working down the time it takes.

Another way of saying it is that I'm working on self mind-control.  And while that's the ultimate free hobby, I am really doing it to make the best life possible.

Dao Yourself a Favor

Read this translation of the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) of Laozi.

There are certain passages, including my core 5 favorite, that I like rendered better in other translations, but the scholarship of the one above is just fantastic.  Some of the passage that make no sense to me finally do through this translation.

Progress in a Time of Decline

This is an idea I'll probably need to expand on some other time, but I wanted to get it down. I believe that civilization is on the decline. I believe we are in a time of pretense where that truth is going to be pushed more and more out of the collective conversation. Americans are going to have to give up their absurd waste habit -- and they will go down kicking and screaming the entire way.  So be it.

I want to point out that a person can make progress in their health, spirituality and social life even in a time of political and economic decline.  In fact, on all three it is almost certainly easier.  Happiness and virtue remain paths that can be walked even as the mass production of stuff weakens. 

Also, realizing the truth of this decline -- reminded forcefully by reading the article linked to above (please read the 2nd to last paragraph) -- makes me want to spend a lot less time playing Diplomacy and more time working on my garden, and learning to cook with a rocket stove.

An Unspeakable Dream

As much I love the site Early Retirement Extreme, I have noticed that it really unsettles people when I talk about being retired at the age of 40.  My first instinct is to want to say, "hey, listen, Jacob at ERE was able to to retire at the age of 30.  I mean, come on,  I'm committing myself to working 10 years more that!"

But I have found that in communication -- especially when the stakes are highest -- your first instinct is usually wrong.

One trick I have found is to not talk about "retirement," but self-employment.  And while you, fair reader, could stretch the meaning of word "employment," in my case it is actually strictly speaking true. I want to plan on working on average 8 hours a week to get money to pay my expenses.  This will allow my money to compound in case an emergency comes up, and as insurance against infirmity.

I set the number at 8 hours on the theory I am probably half as smart as Jacob at ERE (article on his 4 hour work week), and hugely less cunning and self-promoting than life-hacker extraordinaire Tim Ferris (look up the 4 Hour Work Week for yourself; the dude has enough links).

Another way to speak of my dream is to speak of it as an unspeakable dream.  This has become the euphemism of choice around our household.

I am well on track for my unspeakable dream of bumming around with some causal work thrown in self-employment by 40.

The Abolition of Work

This is a piece by Bob Black.   Though I really don't find the politics or the life of Bob Black to be for me, I agree with 95% (or so) of this particular piece.   It is not under copyright, so I have copied it here:

==================

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of the same debased coin.

The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for "reality," the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously -- or maybe not -- all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.

You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn't have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn't triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I'd like life to be a game -- but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.

The alternative to work isn't just idleness. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, it's never more rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I promoting the managed time-disciplined safety-valve called "leisure"; far from it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is the time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacation so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation.

I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it's done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist or "Communist," work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.

Usually -- and this is even more true in "Communist" than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee -- work is employment, i. e., wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In the USSR or Cuba or Yugoslavia or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions -- Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey -- temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millenia, the payment of taxes (= ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.

But modern work has worse implications. People don't just work, they have "jobs." One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don't) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A "job" that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who -- by any rational-technical criteria -- should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control.

The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as "discipline." Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace -- surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching -in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn't have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.

Such is "work." Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the "suspension of consequences." This is unacceptable if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences. This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; that's why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is). Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens),define it as game-playing or following rules. I respect Huizinga's erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are rule-governed but there is much more to play than game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travel -- these practices aren't rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be played with at least as readily as anything else.

Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.

And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately deStalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. 

A worker is a part time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?

The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are "free" is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it.

We are so close to the world of work that we can't see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the "work ethic" would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labeled a cult. Be that as it may, we have only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed, the Calvinist cranks notwithstanding, until overthrown by industrialism -- but not before receiving the endorsement of its prophets.

Let's pretend for a moment that work doesn't turn people into stultified submissives. Let's pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And let's pretend that work isn't as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work would still make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time. Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do we keep looking at our watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't do that. But workers do. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, "Work is for saps!"

Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that "whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves." His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed "to regain the lost power and health." Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to "St. Monday" -- thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150-200 years before its legal consecration -- was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the ancient regime wrested substantial time back from their landlord's work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants' calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov's figures from villages in Czarist Russia -- hardly a progressive society -- likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants' days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.

To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes' compatriots had already encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of life -- in North America, particularly -- but already these were too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive. Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes or, captured in war, refused to return. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than Germans climb the Berlin Wall from the west.) The "survival of the fittest" version -- the Thomas Huxley version -- of Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution. (Kropotkin was a scientist -- a geographer -- who'd had ample involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about.) Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled "The Original Affluent Society." They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that "hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society." They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were "working" at all. Their "labor," as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schiller's definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full "play" to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. As he put it: "The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity." (A modern version -- dubiously developmental -- is Abraham Maslow's counterposition of "deficiency" and "growth" motivation.) Play and freedom are, as regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that "the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required." He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as what it is, the abolition of work -- it's rather anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work -- but we can.

The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work is evident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrial Europe, among them M. Dorothy George's England In Transition and Peter Burke's Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Also pertinent is Daniel Bell's essay, "Work and its Discontents," the first text, I believe, to refer to the "revolt against work" in so many words and, had it been understood, an important correction to the complacency ordinarily associated with the volume in which it was collected, The End of Ideology. Neither critics nor celebrants have noticed that Bell's end-of-ideology thesis signaled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology. It was Seymour Lipset (in Political Man), not Bell, who announced at the same time that "the fundamental problems of the Industrial Revolution have been solved," only a few years before the post- or meta-industrial discontents of college students drove Lipset from UC Berkeley to the relative (and temporary) tranquility of Harvard.

As Bell notes, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, for all his enthusiasm for the market and the division of labor, was more alert to (and more honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or any of Smith's modern epigones. As Smith observed: "The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized, unorganizable malaise of the 1970's and since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEW's report Work in America, the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. That problem is the revolt against work. It does not figure in any text by any laissez-faire economist -- Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner -- because, in their terms, as they used to say on Star Trek, "it does not compute."

If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are others which they cannot disregard. Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words. Between 14,000 and 25,000 workers are killed annually in this country on the job. Over two million are disabled. Twenty to twenty-five million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-related injury. Thus they don't count the half million cases of occupational disease every year. I looked at one medical textbook on occupational diseases which was 1,200 pages long. Even this barely scratches the surface. The available statistics count the obvious cases like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000 die every year, a much higher fatality rate than for AIDS, for instance, which gets so much media attention. This reflects the unvoiced assumption that AIDS afflicts perverts who could control their depravity whereas coal-mining is a sacrosanct activity beyond question. What the statistics don't show is that tens of millions of people have heir lifespans shortened by work -- which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their 50's. Consider all the other workaholics.

Even if you aren't killed or crippled while actually working, you very well might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget about work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who do them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims of auto-industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly, or indirectly, to work.

Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing -- or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.

Bad news for liberals: regulatory tinkering is useless in this life-and-death context. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration was designed to police the core part of the problem, workplace safety. Even before Reagan and the Supreme Court stifled it, OSHA was a farce. At previous and (by current standards) generous Carter-era funding levels, a workplace could expect a random visit from an OSHA inspector once every 46 years.

State control of the economy is no solution. Work is, if anything, more dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here. Thousands of Russian workers were killed or injured building the Moscow subway. Stories reverberate about covered-up Soviet nuclear disasters which make Times Beach and Three-Mile Island look like elementary-school air-raid drills. On the other hand, deregulation, currently fashionable, won't help and will probably hurt. From a health and safety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in the days when the economy most closely approximated laissez-faire.

Historians like Eugene Genovese have argued persuasively that -- as antebellum slavery apologists insisted -- factory wage-workers in the Northern American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats and businessmen seems to make much difference at the point of production. Serious enforcement of even the rather vague standards enforceable in theory by OSHA would probably bring the economy to a standstill. The enforcers apparently appreciate this, since they don't even try to crack down on most malefactors.

What I've said so far ought not to be controversial. Many workers are fed up with work. There are high and rising rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the job. There may be some movement toward a conscious and not just visceral rejection of work. And yet the prevalent feeling, universal among bosses and their agents and also widespread among workers themselves is that work itself is inevitable and necessary.

I disagree. It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes, except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that shouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.

I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing, and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkeys and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes.

Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the "tertiary sector," the service sector, is growing while the "secondary sector" (industry) stagnates and the "primary sector" (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That's why you can't go home just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn't the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the past fifty years?

Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant -- and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model-T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend on is out of the question. Already, without even trying, we've virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.

Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks around. I refer to housewives doing housework and child-rearing. By abolishing wage-labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor. The nuclear family as we know it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of labor imposed by modern wage-work. Like it or not, as things have been for the last century or two it is economically rational for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork to provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called "schools," primarily to keep them out of Mom's hair but still under control, but incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so necessary for workers. 

If you would be rid of patriarchy, get rid of the nuclear family whose unpaid "shadow work," as Ivan Illich says, makes possible the work-system that makes it necessary. Bound up with this no-nukes strategy is the abolition of childhood and the closing of the schools. There are more full-time students than full-time workers in this country. We need children as teachers, not students. They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because they're better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not identical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only play can bridge the generation gap.

I haven't as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence would have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly they'll find other projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps they'll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media communications systems or found space colonies. Perhaps. I myself am no gadget freak. I wouldn't care to live in a pushbutton paradise. I don't want robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is, I think, a place for labor-saving technology, but a modest place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging. When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination diminished. The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. Intelligent observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote that all the labor-saving inventions ever devised haven't saved a moment's labor. Karl Marx wrote that "it would be possible to write a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class." The enthusiastic technophiles -- Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B. F. Skinner -- have always been unabashed authoritarians also; which is to say, technocrats. We should be more than sceptical about the promises of the computer mystics. They work like dogs; chances are, if they have their way, so will the rest of us. But if they have any particularized contributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than the run of high tech, let's give them a hearing.

What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.

The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people to do the things they could enjoy it will be enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which afflict these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I don't want coerced students and I don't care to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure.

Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy baby-sitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their parents do. The parents meanwhile, profoundly appreciate the time to themselves that you free up for them, although they'd get fretful if parted from their progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when they're just fueling up human bodies for work.

Third -- other things being equal -- some things that are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed. This is probably true, to some extent, of all work. People deploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge-jobs as best they can. 

Activities that appeal to some people don't always appeal to all others, but everyone at least potentially has a variety of interests and an interest in variety. As the saying goes, "anything once." Fourier was the master at speculating how aberrant and perverse penchants could be put to use in post-civilized society, what he called Harmony. He thought the Emperor Nero would have turned out all right if as a child he could have indulged his taste for bloodshed by working in a slaughterhouse. Small children who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be organized in "Little Hordes" to clean toilets and empty the garbage, with medals awarded to the outstanding. I am not arguing for these precise examples but for the underlying principle, which I think makes perfect sense as one dimension of an overall revolutionary transformation. Bear in mind that we don't have to take today's work just as we find it and match it up with the proper people, some of whom would have to be perverse indeed. If technology has a role in all this it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation. To some extent we may want to return to handicrafts, which William Morris considered a probable and desirable upshot of communist revolution. Art would be taken back from the snobs and collectors, abolished as a specialized department catering to an elite audience, and its qualities of beauty and creation restored to integral life from which they were stolen by work. It's a sobering thought that the grecian urns we write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to store olive oil. I doubt our everyday artifacts will fare as well in the future, if there is one. The point is that there's no such thing as progress in the world of work; if anything it's just the opposite. We shouldn't hesitate to pilfer the past for what it has to offer, the ancients lose nothing yet we are enriched.

The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps. There is, it is true, more suggestive speculation than most people suspect. Besides Fourier and Morris -- and even a hint, here and there, in Marx -- there are the writings of Kropotkin, the syndicalists Pataud and Pouget, anarcho-communists old (Berkman) and new (Bookchin). The Goodman brothers' Communitas is exemplary for illustrating what forms follow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to be gleaned from the often hazy heralds of alternative/appropriate/intermediate/convivial technology, like Schumacher and especially Illich, once you disconnect their fog machines. The situationists -- as represented by Vaneigem's Revolution of Daily Life and in the Situationist International Anthology -- are so ruthlessly lucid as to be exhilarating, even if they never did quite square the endorsement of the rule of the worker's councils with the abolition of work. Better their incongruity, though than any extant version of leftism, whose devotees look to be the last champions of work, for if there were no work there would be no workers, and without workers, who would the left have to organize?

So the abolitionists would be largely on their own. No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. The tiresome debater's problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theological overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use-values is coextensive with the consumption of delightful play-activity.

Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not -- as it is now - -- a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play, The participants potentiate each other's pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.

No one should ever work. Workers of the world... relax!

For Happiness Sake, Measure by Months

Want to make yourself miserable and then lose money because of a bad decision? Own a diversified mutual fund, and check the returns every day.

Want to make yourself happy and able to make the right decision?  Own a diversified mutual fund, and check the returns once a month, or once a year.

This at least has been true over the course of the history of mutual funds, and the last hundred years of diversified holdings of stock.  It might not hold true over the course of the next 100 years, or even 40, but the principal behind this is very instructive and amusing.

So how do we understand the difference between checking daily and monthly?

The first thing to understand is that loss hurts more than an equal gain feels good.  This is something biologically hardwired into humans, and demonstrated in experiments.  After that, simply realize that, the longer the time frame you are looking at the "smoother" the pattern, with less fluctuations.   Let's say every day there is a 50/50 chance the stock will go up or down.  If you check daily, then the losses are going to hurt more, stick with you more, and probably lead you to bad decisions.  On, the other hand, lets say there is a 70% chance the market goes up month-over-month.  In this case, the success rate will be high enough that you can overcome your loss-aversion bias.

I believe that most goals are like this as well.  I cannot guarantee that each and every time I do a lift I will improve, but if I stick with a system, I have a really good shot of seeing improvement after a month.

The reality isn't any different, just I am just changing where I stop and compare results.  The difference in terms of happiness is tremendous.

Go into Nature

Last week I wrote about going into the silence.  It truly is the best place to invest your time, whether in quiet thought, meditation, or writing.  Today I want to write about my favorite kind of silence: going into nature.

This doesn't have to be elaborate, like going to some nature preserve.  Instead, you can go to a park, or even slowly walk through your neighborhood, stopping ever so often to just focus on some detail of landscaping and to just  . . . listen.  Or, you can do my favorite method, garden in a way that lets nature in.

The benefits of going into nature as your means of going into the silence have been demonstrated by research.  (As a side note, this leads to one of the great paradoxes our age has not yet grappled with entirely: what to do when science and data vindicate a practice that doesn't seem to follow the rigid or analytic patterns of science.  But that's the thing: analysis the is the tool the human uses to improve life.  When there is a conflict between the system and the human, just go ahead and value the human).

Check out the webMD article on Eco-therapy or this website that clearly enthusiastic on the subject.  If you share my intuition that a connection to nature is the right thing for humans, you might skip the articles.

The real trick, however, is spending the time in nature.  To do that you have to giving yourself permission to spend the time in this way.  To give yourself that permission, in the short run, you might need to get more done in less time.  If you're in that situation, look into my time management tricks.

Deliver At Least Twice

I thought the following as I was lying in bed:  Deliver at least twice and then let someone know what your "brand" is.  By brand, I mean here what adjectives you want them to apply to you.

I don't want to get into a debate with anyone, but the world the seems to need more of any kind of virtue I can name, ranging from cunning and intelligence to compassion and honesty.

The problem is there is no shortage of people who claim to have virtues.  And many people in the world at large seems to know this, and thus has filters up against people saying they have X virtue. Paradoxically, this can be seen big win for those who merely want to claim they have a virtue.  First, they get all the low-hanging fruit of the gullible people (how can such people still exist in times like this? Oh, the conditioning of consumer culture . . .)  Secondly, it would seem this kind of inflation of virtue-claiming makes the currency of saying you have a virtue so debased that no one can seem to have a virtue in the eyes of the discerning.

My experience as a teacher (and continued, passionate, life-long learner) tells me this: words are labels we use make concepts easier to "pull up" and organize.  Abstractions without connections to a underlying memory/image/other concept are worthless until correctly attached to something else.

That's not to say these labels aren't remarkably important.   Look at any multi-dollar brand, Coke being the most successful brand-as-brand-alone I can think of.

It's a delicate act, but you want to get the full power out of the good things you do.  So, I am saying to self-promote.  But the crucial difference is to self-promote only after you have delivered at least twice.

Your Work Can Become Your Mediation

This answers my musing that you can become your own machine.

Yesterday I put in a lot of work re-digging in a stone border for my two annual vegetable beds.  I can't say every second of it was tranquil work, but a good deal of it was.  The most important thing, I think, is breathing.  If you can stay oxygenated, you are far less of a fool.    If you can still your mind a bit, your mind opens to your surroundings.  After all, I was working on a great day with bird song around me.  I was working in a beautiful garden that I was only trying to make beautiful (okay, trying to make one of the ugly spots significantly less ugly)

To get the deep breathing, and a stillness of mind, I found it helpful to be more deliberate in my motions and focus on a flowing shifting of weight, like in Tai Chi.   And this is how, from time to time, I mediated in action.

I understand this thought is not original.  We know all about zen in the art of ____,  but sometimes everyone needs reminding from time to time.  This is my reminder.

You Become Your Own Machine

It has been said that "you must not lie to yourself . . . and you are the easier person to lie to".

Likewise, it is very easy to take a project and push yourself too far in its pursuit.  And this becomes especially dangerous when the project is self-selected.

I am taking a day off from physical work today because I felt I had to pull up all the perennial grass in a vegetable bed.  Secondly, I have been working toward my million word challenge in Spanish.  I wrote yesterday about finding an addictive way to go by reading lots of bits and pieces from Spanish wikipedia.  And that is how I became my own machine, spending a large chunk of my break serving my own made-up goal.

My biggest problem with me becoming my own machine isn't really the risk of pain or injury, however.  It is the way I become locked in and unsatisfied.  Let's look at both in turn.

Locked in.

I narrow in what I am doing in such a way that I am not receptive to the world.  A person can come in and try to talk to me, and I am not present for them.  Even my wife.  And while I see everyone around me prone to this same problem, that doesn't make it right, especially if I have the means to do better.  If instead of working on something "addictive," I spend that time on a pleasant stroll about the garden or gently reading a book, then I am not locked in, but instead open to others.  I am a better person in those moments I am not locked in.

Unsatisfied.

Having over 50,000 words toward a million word challenge doesn't make me feel more satisfied -- at least not until I consciously reflect on that.  Instead, it leads to head games where I somehow try to figure out how to do get the rest now.  And of course that is impossible, so my addict brain tries to make myself believe 100,000 will be fine, just get that. . .

Making the content super-interesting only increases the sense of feeling incomplete.  All the sudden, I have 20 tabs open.  When I was not reading, I feel like I should be.  Being a machine makes you feel jittery.

The Dao to the Rescue.

Instead of getting back on the treadmill today, I drank a cup of coffee and started walking through my garden.  It felt some pleasant, so aimless, so complete, that I came inside and felt cured of all my longings.  So instead I reread a bit of the Tao Te Ching I had hand copied.

I followed my own advise about going into the silence, and as usual, I did not regret it.

Go into the Silence

To manage time well, you have to move to quality, instead of a myopic focus on efficiency.   If you're efficient at doing the wrong things at least two problems can crop up: first, you can create more work for yourself (ie you did it wrong the first time), and secondly, if you work within an organization, you can typecast yourself as a workhorse or "savior", and then get more work assigned to you.  Thus, in a dynamic sense, it is very inefficient to be efficient.  Efficiency alone is static thinking that tries to make human beings fit a system.  It's not good for the human being. (It's actually not good for the system either, but systems are too driven by static calculations to see that).

The only ways I know of to get out of this trap are 1) frugality and 2) high-quality work.  First, frugality gives you the leverage to carve out freedom, and especially time wealth.  And the other great path is to do quality work.  Cal Newport has a book entitled So Good They Can't Ignore You, which is a title based on Steve Martin's advice to young comedians -- be so good they can't ignore you.

How do you become so good that they can't ignore you?  It's not really through hard work alone, as I have shown that efficiency alone is a trap.  To have the greatest breakthroughs in you life, whether in career, creative pursuit, or relationship, you need to go into the silence.

I first saw the phrase expressed this way in the book Energizing the 12 Powers of Your Mind by Howard E. Hill.  I mention this to give credit where it is due, rather than make a recommendation of the book.  It gets a little too new-agey, rah-rah, and self confident for my tastes.  But hey, if you ever find a copy, it make be worth a read for you.  It actually was for me.  I'm just also a skeptical jerk and an intellectual snob.

You can look through the biography of almost any great innovator, or even great leader (ie positively transformative -- not necessarily "popular") and there is almost always a strong streak of finding quiet time away from others, and this time is often consciously protected and seen as a key to creativity. Heck, even I had that with my "Walden Years."

Susan Cain in her powerful TED talk states, ". . . no wilderness, no revelations."  Herman Melville is even more direct, saying "God's one and only voice is silence."  Cal Newport, the author of the aforementioned book, has a blog that has shifted away from efficiency to a focus on deep thinking and deep work habits. Here is a representative post along that theme.

To think deeply, you have to remove distractions.  You have to cut yourself off, at least temporarily, from the day-to-day.  This is not an optional feature, based on preference.  This is a best practice, and probably the only way to get to quality work.

Another way to look at it: your subconscious is demonstrably better at epiphanies than your weak, headache prone, hold 7 items -- plus or minus 2-- consciousness.  When you go into the silence, your mind works things over at its true rhythm, and not doused in stress hormones.  The breakthroughs just bubble up to the surface when they are ready.  Trying to get the same result by consciously straining is the using the wrong tool for the job.

So I here is my updated plan for improving someone's time management:

1. Use efficiency tricks to get more done in the same time, so you can have time to invest.  Once you have finished your normal amount of work, stop, and DO NOT use that time to do more of the same crap (how will you even know if the additional work is crap? Well, go to step #2)
2. Go into the silence.  Only then can you reorient your thinking enough to know what the next, best moves are.  Even more importantly, you can stop being reactive and instead start figuring out what the next worst moves are, and avoiding those. Then . . .
3. Invest in other types of personal development, such as  exercise, reading, journaling, work skills, etc.

How to Have a Perfect Day (For Me)

Breaks, like the current Spring Break, allow me to see what a perfect day would be like. 

First, go outside when it is nice, stay outside as long as it is nice, with brief breaks going inside.

Once it stops feeling nice, finally go inside.  When inside, don't allow myself to sit so long that my body goes into a lethargic zombie mode.  I used to solve this with the pomodoro method, but my problem now with the pomodoro is that it relies on focused work during that 25 minute block.  Forcing yourself to do focused work on something that you aren't interested in enough to do anyway is really lame.  Sure, the pomodoro method, with its frequent breaks, is a more humane method of personal slave-driving, but that just makes me wonder why you can't work on what you want to when you want to and make sure you take breaks for health, mental sharpness, and to prevent your body from stiffening?  So that's now what I want to do with my indoor time.  (With outdoor time I find am so inclined to move and rest in the right balance, that I don't need to give myself any external help).

So, after I am pushed indoors, it is all about doing whatever I want in a natural blob of work-as-play and play-as-work.  I do this in 25 minute bits, and in that way basically organize my day by hours.  This isn't really the pomodoro method because I am not making myself focus on one thing; I allow my attention to drift as much or as little as I want during those 25 minutes.  On the first break of an hour, I make sure to get up and walk around the house at least a few steps.  If I have something physical to do -- such as soak dishes, or do the litter box -- then I'll do it on the first break.  Then I do 25 minutes more of worky-play.  After that, an hour has passed, so I work on whatever physical challenge I am on.  Right now, I am training to do a set of 100 push-ups using grease the groove.  During the summer I think I might go for 25 pull ups.

I keep this cycle going day and day and then year and after year, enjoying the process all along, and then every now and then I get to look back and seeing I have achieved cool things.

My Walden Years

Somewhere between the ages of 10 and 13, I remember imaging myself living in the house I grew up in (my parents rented it out for a year or two and it reasonable to talk of one day me owning it).  In that vision of a life I would inherit my father's landscaping business and own almost nothing.  I didn't picture owning furniture, just a rug where I would meditate.  I would work, come home and meditate.  I would not own a t.v.

This is my earliest memory of thinking I would not own a television, though I am sure reading Fahrenheit 451 and the profound impact it had on me played a big part.  Nonetheless, after years of telling them what I would do, my parents were shocked when I moved out of their house and I didn't take a television with me.  They hadn't listened to me, so my actions got to speak more loudly than my words.  I had begun my Walden years.

The first 6 months I didn't even have the internet.  I don't remember that as particularly productive time, but it was worth noting how peaceful it was.  I'm a fairly private person, so I didn't have as many "are you crazy" conversations as you might have thought, but I do remember one time explaining to a particularly dubious person that  I would listen to the radio to "create enough noise," but really never happened. I learned to work in silence.  I caught up on my sleep, and I listened myself think.

I also took up wine tasting to see if there was anything to all the fuss, and found that really wasn't.  But I still have a lovely memory of a beautiful spring day, laying on my couch, listening to the breeze, sipping a Merlot, and reading Nietzsche.  I read incredibly slowly, stopping to think often, and the birds sand their lovely songs.  It's hard to improve on a moment like that, even with a meditation mat (something which I didn't and do not own).

Though being unplugged from the world of instant information was an interesting and worthwhile experience, I got the internet and while I spent the last four and a half years which I lived on my own without a television, I had to find other ways to be unconventional. For example, I started watching a bunch of videos on YouTube, but they happened to mostly fall into three categories: 1)  gardening (useful and good idea)  2) YouTube polyglots (much more of an addiction -- one I find myself pulled into far too often). 3)  Videos on computer programming.  I learned how to program again (or really learn how to program the right way for the first time).

Thoreau's own time at Walden Pond ended after 2 years, and my time had to end as well.  Now that I am married, we have a television, but I'd like to believe that the gravitational pull of my unconventional ways is responsible for the fact that my wife and I only watch it around 2 hours a week, though my wife does watch movies on it in addition to that.

From Walden and some of Thoreau's other writings, I have completely lost my earlier notion, more of a prejudice, that Thoreau was a "phony."  Instead, I see his time at Walden as a stand he had to take, one that put him on a firm footing for the rest of his life.

I see my time when I lived alone the same way.

Procrastination Chronicles # 10: Reading Walden

On the path to greatness, there will be 100 overcomings.

I will chronicle my attempts to overcome procrastination.  My technique is to start small, really small.

My favorite post in the series is #3 Dealing with a Bunch of Crap.

==================

I think I now have a process for reading books I have been putting off: skip ahead and read various parts until something captures my attention.

This gets over one of the great principles of procrastination: the inertia of it; an object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion.  When I start at a book a few times, each time I don't get past the current page sets up more resistance to ever getting off that page.  It  emphatically does not help that I have good reasons to read the book.  Thoreau is to American Nature Writing as Socrates is to Western Philosophy; you may disagree, but you must answer to him.  It is embarrassing that I have not read Walden.  Embarrassing!  If that is not enough, one of the only people who actually reads this blog, the best man at my wedding, is a big fan of the book, so I should read it.  But still, each time you abandon a step of a project, even if it is the first step -- read page 1 -- you will encounter more psychic resistance the next time you try again.

I even know what my problem with the first page of Walden has always been: it just comes off sanctimonious.  When reading it, I kept having the intrusion of all the criticisms of Thoreau I have heard from people who may or may not have read him, but need to let people know he didn't rough it as much as he claimed.

So I skipped that page and ran into a charming mediation on heat, life and how much shelter and clothes we really need.  I fell in love with this passage and have no doubt I'll be able to enjoy Walden and make Thoreau a friend of mine.

I may be able to formulate this into an anti-procrastination principal for reading a classic: try skipping ahead.  A book is usually deemed a classic for a reason, so give it more than one chance to show you its value.

Also, remember if you are reading for yourself (and there is really no other good reason for someone past school to be reading) then feel free to skim portions, or skip portions, of books, yes, even classics.  So once you realize a book is worth your time, and you find something you like -- which in my case is the philosophical "digressions" -- skip things you are not interested in -- which in my case is most physical descriptions; I can see things in the real world, after all.

Update:

Thoreau in less than a year has grown to be one of my favorite authors.  I have plans to read everything he wrote, including looking into purchasing a copy of his journals.

This just goes to show that you, fair reader, you may very well be procrastinating on something that might turn out profoundly changing your life.  I clearly was.

Productivity to Leave Productivity

The reason you learn productivity tricks is not so you can then be productive during more and more of the stuff that you weren't happy with doing.

No, be super productive in small bursts so that you can then have the greatest luxury of human existence: entire days without a schedule.  This is productivity to leave productivity.

But more than that, the default life menu is not just bad for how to manage workflow, it is also bad for how you will entertain yourself in the free time you say you do not have.

I find that both television and the what is now a standard web-page leave you in either a) a torpor or b) a state of agitation -- neither of which feel right, or at least wouldn't feel right absent constant conditioning and social pressures.  I know it is hard to do, but if you fast for while from tv or the internet, you will easily see the absurdity.

So maybe this post should be called "bursts of productivity to leave agitation." But that seems a bit wordy.

I think these mediums, because of commercial pressures, are designed for this kind of agitation.  They must leave us consumers wanting to consume more.

I recently did a writing assessment with my students, and so I had two hours of free time on my hands, and I got sucked into the vortex of "web-surfing."  At the end I felt icky, drained, empty, "hungry."  Also, in using Memrise to work on some language learning projects, I found it quite addictive . . . and that's still not a good thing.  When my wife comes in from work and says something to me, I should look up and smile.  I shouldn't stare at a screen . .  just . . . to . . . get . . . one .  . . more  .. . word.  And for that reason, I am considering transferring over material from Memrise to flash cards.  It's really easy to put down flash cards when someone walks into the room.  (Update: never did that.  I now use Anki, but only in the morning and for a far lower volume.)

Productivity tricks are tools, and us modern humans live under a constant threat of being enslaved in our own tools and systems.  This is not an argument against either tools or systems; rather, it is an argument for first using the tools to optimize for some kind of good, but then to quit the tool (or take a break from it) when you have reached that good.  Go find another pursuit,  ideally highly meaningful, to fill the time.

Productivity to leave productivity.

Qigong Warm Up

As I grow to know whole routines, I hope Tai Chi can be grow to be more and more of a moving meditation.  Like most meditations in action, working toward precision has the important role of blocking out the outside world by giving something specific to focus on.  I don't have the skill for that at this point.

As of now, Tai Chi to me is all about having moves that feel good.  And that brings us to Qigong.  Apparently, Tai Chi is a branch of Taoist Qigong, making Qigong not only a larger universe in terms of Taoism, but also opening up other schools of Qigong, such as Buddhist and Confucian.

If all of that is too complicated,  just find some moves that feel good.  Here are some I like to do in the morning:

The Foundation: a Clean Space

Our house is now as clean as it has ever been since I've lived here.  We have a functioning office area.  The kitchen makes me happy, the coffee table -- for God's sake -- is clear!

We do have a spare room, that we call the "red room," which, along with the garage, are areas for us to sweep things under the rug, so to speak, but life is still so much better being able to walk through the house with out my eyes having to dart away from clutter here, clutter everywhere.

Investing time here should pay off during the school year.