Selfie spots!
The Champaign County Forest Preserves have started putting up signs declaring certain spots “selfie spots.” Being very suggestible, I immediately started taking selfies at those spots.
The Champaign County Forest Preserves have started putting up signs declaring certain spots “selfie spots.” Being very suggestible, I immediately started taking selfies at those spots.
A bunch of people in the AI industry have blithely suggested that it will be fine if huge numbers of people lose their jobs to AI, because we’ll create some sort of universal basic income (UBI) to support them.
I think that’s a great idea, and think we should put their money where their mouths are. Starting immediately, any firm with any significant business producing AI should be taxed 50% of their gross revenue, and all that money should be divided up equally among all Americans as a UBI. (Firms with a “significant” AI business that are also in other businesses as might want to spin off the AI part of the business, so that they don’t have to pay this special tax on the non-AI parts of their gross income.)
This wouldn’t immediately produce a big enough UBI to make it unnecessary for someone to work, but I figure about the time it became impossible for an ordinary person to find a job because they’d all been displaced by AI, the AI industry would be making enough money for half their revenues to fund an adequate UBI.
In a similar vein, every firm paying for AI, rather than paying for workers, should have to pay a tax on all that AI spending equal to what they’d pay in withholding taxes if they were paying that money to an employee.
I don’t think this would produce nearly enough to fund a UBI, but I think it might be enough to go a long way toward shoring up Social Security and Medicare.
Just a smidgen longer than my previous long run, but this time I added some intervals along about the midpoint, where I ran hard for one minute, and then spent two minutes recovering, and repeated for a total of 5 times. Probably not the smartest choice (embedding that in a long run), but I enjoyed it anyway.
My fitbit says I did 4.75 miles in 1:13:26.
Out on my run today, I happened upon this awesome lawn ornament.
Ashley and I had found our place in the sun, and I wanted to document the event with a two-guy selfie, and I was trying to get Ashley to look at the camera (to limited success).
I had decided to do a different, dog-free run, but then at the last minute, Ashley seemed to really want to come along, so I did this run instead, and it was great. Not as far or as fast as I’d have run by myself, but great.
It was way too cold to try to get a picture of Ashley in her jacket. But I did want to report that she was a Very Good dog, and did the needful when I took her out in the bitter, bitter cold.
Since I was wearing a silk base layer, a mock-T, and my heavy Dale of Norway sweater under my Alaska pipeline coat, I was warm enough to stay outside for an extra three minutes, and shovel our little sidewalk.
I didn’t bother salting after. And these temperatures, what’d be the point?
I made a shopping trip to Arthur, Illinois (a largely Amish community) last week. Among other things, I bought three pounds of chicken backs, which I roasted for an hour and then put in the Instant Pot with an onion and some celery tops and pressure cooked on the “broth” setting for 2 hours and 45 minutes. Then I strained the broth and put it in the fridge.
Today I spooned out about half a mug of (super gelatinous) broth, added 16 tsp of salt, and poured boiling water to top up the mug and behold: a nice mug of warm drinking broth. Delicious, warming, and very healthy!
Do you know what insurance is? Insurance is a mechanism to protect yourself from financial catastrophe caused by a very rare event (a house fire, let’s say).
Only when you restructure insurance, the way we have with medical insurance, to turn it into something like a pre-paid service plan, does something like a Health Savings Account start to make sense.
It’d be like fire insurance starting to cover fixing the plumbing, and then coming along with a “House Saving Account” that you could use to pay for sidewalk shoveling (but was also supposed to cover a new giant deductible when your house did burn down).
Health Saving Account, one of those movement-conservative notions based on the premise that everyone should have the “freedom” to be driven into bankruptcy by unforeseen circumstances.
Source: The Senate Only Just Realized That We’re in a Health-Care Crisis
If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you know I’m big on metrics. It’s why I own both an Oura Ring and a Pixel watch. I am similarly interested in the annual blood work I get from my doctor’s office. That last though is often not quite as much or as often as I want, so I was very interested when Superpower reached out to offer me an extensive panel of blood work, if I’d post a review of their service.
This offer came at a particularly opportune time, as I’d been thinking of trying to get at least one specific test run ahead of my next physical. (I’d gotten a result that was slightly out-of-range on my creatinine test. This is common if you’re taking creatine, which I had been, but I still wanted to verify that it wasn’t indicative of a kidney problem. So, I’d gone off creatine, and wanted to re-run the test and be sure that my values had returned to normal.)
Getting a physical scheduled these days takes a ridiculous lead time, so it was going to be months before I got that blood work done. As I said, this made me want some other path to getting that test.
Enter Superpower, which is a way to get a vast suite of blood work done, but it’s much more than that. They have an AI trained on all these tests, with access to your results, that can integrate them together and answer questions about them. The answers are probably very similar to what your doctor could provide, except your doctor isn’t likely to have a couple of hours to go through your results line-by-line, the way I did last night with the Superpower AI.
You could get a reasonable read on any one of these markers just by googling the test name, but the Superpower AI has all your other results at its fingertips as well, so it can relate one value to another. For example, one of the blood tests measured my cortisol levels, and Superpower had this to say:
“Your cortisol level of 11.1 mcg/dL sits comfortably in the optimal physiologic range (10–18 mcg/dL), which suggests your adrenal function and stress response are well balanced.”
That’s roughly what you could get just by doing a google search on cortisol test and looking at the reference range. (Superpower is slightly better, because you won’t have to slog through the high values, the low values, the normal values, or the difference between the reference range and the optimal value.) But Superpower can do even better, because it has all your other data. For example, for me it goes on to say
- This level indicates your hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis is functioning normally—not underactive (as in adrenal fatigue or insufficiency) and not overproducing cortisol (as with chronic stress, inflammation, or metabolic strain).
- Given your low hs‑CRP (0.9 mg/L), balanced glucose (A1c 5.4%), and strong energy habits, your body is managing everyday physiological stressors efficiently.
- You also show good DHEA‑S (88 mcg/dL), suggesting adrenal reserve is intact and age‑appropriate. The cortisol‑to‑DHEA‑S ratio is within the healthy range, a good sign of adaptive—not excessive—stress output.
I knew nothing about DHEA‑S, so reading what the Superpower AI said about it was instructive.
There were dozens of other tests (I think 160 in the basic panel), so the part of my brain that wants all the metrics was very happy indeed. If you’re like me, and just want the metrics, Superpower seems great: Lots of metrics and a very useful AI tool to tell you what they mean.
If you’re not like me, and you’re just interested in improving your health and performance, the value of Superpower isn’t quite as clear, but I think there is some value:
That last is a bit uncertain. The doctors I’ve talked to over the years are pretty down on the idea of taking every test and then worrying about every value that’s out of the reference range. There are a few values (blood sugar, LDL cholesterol), where it’s both a clear sign that there’s something wrong that’s likely to lead to specific harms and there are practical treatments available that can reduce those harms. But just because a number is out of range isn’t much of a reason to do anything, unless there’s some symptom that’s plausibly related.
You almost certainly know what you ought to be doing to optimize your health. Eat food. Move a lot. Sleep well. (If not, read my post I’ve spent too much time thinking about longevity, which gives you a very slightly longer version of that same overview.)
Given that you know those things already, what would paying Superpower to run a bunch of blood tests do for your health and performance? That is: who is Superpower for?
First of all, it’s for people like me: People who just like having a bunch of metrics.
Second, it’s for people like me: People with a specific question to ask, like my question about creatinine levels.
Third, it’s for people who have trouble getting their doctor to go through all their test results with them. Of course any doctor who won’t go over any out-of-range results with you needs to be replaced. But ordinary blood work won’t even mention which of your results are in the reference range but outside the optimal range, and even a good doctor isn’t going to have time to go through those results and help you figure out how to improve them. The Superpower AI is a great tool for going through the normal-but-not-optimal results and coming up with a plan for optimizing your health.
Fourth, it’s for people who like the reassurance of being able to say, “Okay, I’ve got that one covered,” when one of the metrics is optimal, while being able to say, “Ah, but this other one could use a little more effort,” when one of the metrics is a little off. And, of course, there’s always the possibility that it’ll clue you in to something serious that you ought to take to your doctor.
So, how did I use it? Well, my creatinine levels had come back normal, so I’ve restarted creatine. My blood lipids are still a little off, even though I started a drug for that, so I have another thing to talk to my doctor about. Other than that, pretty much everything is normal, and most values are optimal, so I’m in that comfortable zone of feeling like I don’t have much to worry about.
How about the future? I just got the basic suite of blood work, and there are several options if I want to pay more money, and some of them are attractive.
For example, I’d be very interested to know about my magnesium levels. (Magnesium is very important in many cellular processes.) It’s not impossible to get enough magnesium from your diet—lots of foods have some magnesium in them—but there’s no one or two foods where you can just say, “Eat a couple of servings of this or that,” and you can be confident that you’ve got that base covered.
As another example, there are several B vitamins that need to be methylated to be turned into their active form, and people have a diversity of enzymes to do that, some of which are better than others. There are genetic tests to see if you have the gene for one of the good enzymes or one of the bad ones, but there are also tests to see if the vitamins in your blood are properly methylated, offered in the Methylation Specialty Panel. That’s another one that appeals to me.
I’ll consider those. If I decide to spring for them, I’ll follow up here in the future.
In the meantime, I’m pretty pleased with what I got: Something just for me.
Jackie has an Old Fashioned, while I have a UofIPA, and we’re drinking them in front of the fireplace in the lobby of the iHotel. After we’ll head back to Houlihans for lunch.
Simply because they occur together in the winter, I tend to lump the cold in with the dark, as things I dislik about winter. But they are not really the same at all.
The dark is a trigger for my Seasonal Affective Disorder, a legitimate pathology—happily in remission this past decade or so.
By comparison, the cold is really no big deal at all. In fact, it’s not even that I particularly dislike the cold so much as that I like the heat. I’m rarely happier than when I’m out being active in the sun, wearing as little clothing as is socially acceptable.
As much by luck as by design, as the weather turned cold this year I thought to turn back to my blog posts tagged cold from the past few years. I vaguely remembered I’d had some thoughts on Getting my mind right with the cold, and I was right. And some of those thoughts were very useful as the weather turned cold the past few days. In particular, I was reminded that the body’s reactions to cold are all movements, and I’m all about getting in movement.
In the right doses, cold is a hormetic stressor, producing adaptation beyond whatever is necessary to recover from the stress itself. With that in mind, it is perhaps valuable to dress one level less warmly than the level for maximum comfort, and I try to do that sometimes. Other times, when I feel like I need maximum coziness, I don’t hesitate to put on precisely the right layers to achieve that.
Since I have to go out in the cold at least four times a day, just to walk the dog, I have many opportunities to get that right (or wrong). And having a bit of resilience as far as the cold goes is pretty handy.
And I do have a bit of resilience.
I’m okay with the cold.
Winston Churchill once said, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result,” but I think maybe Churchill had never had a dog pull hard on the leash while they were walking across an icy parking lot.
Ashley really wants to go for a long walk. But she doesn’t want to go for a walk in the outside that actually exists. She wants to go for a walk in some other outside—one where it’s not windy and snowing.
I have long had mixed feelings about gameification, where you use the structures that underlie games (like points, achievements, badges, etc.) to motivate yourself to do the things you already know you want to do. I’m dubious about it, but at the same time, I do find myself motivated by such structures, which makes it very tempting to use them. (For exercise in particular, but really everything.)
Just lately, I’ve started thinking about a modest alternative: storyfication, where you use the structures of fiction to motivate yourself to do whatever it is you want to do.
Essentially, you tell yourself a story about what you’re doing, rather than making a game out of it.
Plenty of people do related things. There are several popular YouTube fitness channels that are all about using anime stories and situations, or superhero stories and situations, as inspiration for working out. (See for example JaxBlade, The Bioneer, or Kevin Zhang.) Some of them are primarily about aiming for the aesthetics of anime characters, but some reach into the story lines of specific anime. And some—the most interesting ones—use the underlying structure of anime or comic-book type stories as workout inspiration.
I’ll rough up an example here. Any story structure might be worth trying, but I’m inclined to start with the Hero’s Journey story structure. I’m assuming that we’re talking about doing exercises to get fit, but the basic storyfication thing could work for anything where you need to engage in repeated actions to get better at something—learning to paint, say, or learning to play the violin.
You begin with the Call to Adventure. If we’re talking about exercise, it would be a desire to get fit. Of course, the hero always initially resists the call. (Getting fit is a lot of work that’s hard and sometimes uncomfortable.) But finally the hero (you) chooses to accept the call.
The bulk of what you’d be doing would be “traveling on the road of trials, gathering powers and allies.” (That is, consistently doing your workouts.)
Dividing things up into separate books or seasons makes good sense. It can be very useful to grind away on one or a few things (building strength, say, or building endurance, or explosiveness) for a few weeks or a few months, but you need to include occasional breaks. You might consider each week of workouts a chapter or an episode. Put six or eight or ten together, then take a break. And then, of course, return for the next volume or the next season, perhaps with a new focus.
In the Hero’s Journey structure, the next thing would be to confront evil and be defeated, leading to a dark night of the soul. I don’t see much value in writing this into your plan, but there may be value in keeping the idea in your pocket for when things go awry. And, of course, things will go awry. A major project at work or at home may take so much time you can’t fit in all your workouts. An injury or illness may derail your workouts for a time. Maybe you’ll just hit a plateau in your fitness journey.
When something like that happens, well, you can view it as confronting evil. Remember, after being defeated, you face the dark night of the soul. One thing you might do at this point is think deeply about what obstacle might be blocking your progress. In fitness there are many possibilities: insufficient volume of exercise, insufficient intensity, insufficient recovery, poor exercise selection, poor nutrition . . . . The possibilities are nearly endless, and it is often hard to know which is the real culprit.
For that reason, the next step in the hero’s journey is especially appropriate: You take a leap of faith. Even though you can’t know what’s the best choice, you make a choice anyway. Maybe you ease up on intensity and focus on recovery. Maybe you double-down on exercise volume. Maybe you focus on your diet.
Whatever you choose, you can think of it as confronting evil again. And in a proper hero’s journey, this time are victorious.
Go ahead and write this part into your plan.
The final stage of the Hero’s Journey is that the student becomes the master. Again, there’s no need to write that into your plan. But it is entirely possible that having some success with storyfication will make you feel like sharing your insights with others, which is really what being a master of something is.
I generally view both gameifcation and storyfication as essentially neutral—neither good nor bad, except to the extent that the thing being motivated is good or bad.
Perhaps related to this is a word I’ve just learned:
“hyperstition.” The term, coined by “accelerationist” writer Nick Land, describes the belief that one can manifest future realities by telling compelling stories, and that prophecies become self-fulfilling through repetition and virality.
— https://www.thenerdreich.com/silicon-valley-apocalypse-capitalism/
Telling yourself a compelling story can definitely help you put in the time and effort to achieve your goals, just like the structures that underlie games can do the same.
Is anybody else out there interested in using story structure to motivate themselves to exercise (or do something else)? Anybody already doing so, and able to provide some first-hand experience?
Let me know! (See my Contact page for many ways to contact me.)
On the Internet EVERYBODY knows Ashley is a dog.
Anybody who didn’t see this coming a decade ago hasn’t been paying attention.
“Payment systems are blocked for him, as US companies like American Express, Visa, and Mastercard have a virtual monopoly in Europe.”
https://www.heise.de/en/news/How-a-French-judge-was-digitally-cut-off-by-the-USA-11087561.html
Heavy-handed sanctions have mostly landed on people who deserve them, which has made them seem okay. But as I’ve been pointing out for years now, without proper rule-of-law, anybody can be crushed at the whim of a couple of people in the U.S. government.
This summer, while in Chicago for other reasons, we went to the Art Institute. I made a point of tracking down the room with the arms and armor, where I found, among many other things, a copy of Thibault’s Academie de l’Espée.
The picture above gives you and idea of the fabulous (and fabulously detailed) engravings, but look how big the book is! I mean, it’s half the length of a sword!
So, I was delighted to discover that HEMA Bookshelf has a plan to publish a book with these images, “the first time this art has been published at close to full size since 1668.”
Read about the project here: The Thibault Project. While you’re there, go ahead and pre-order a copy yourself. I mean, it’s only money. Oh, and way more bookshelf space than I have available. But I’ll fit it in somewhere.
I’m trying to ramp up to two runs a week—a “long” run (currently anything over 4 miles), and a “fast” run (sometimes hill sprints, sometimes an interval session, sometimes—as today—just a shorter run where I press the pace).
I don’t usually worry much about investment bubbles. There have been a lot of them over the past few hundred years, and most of them (railroads, telegraph, dotcom…) were expensive disasters largely only for the people who invested in them. Some though, such as the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–2009, were expensive disasters for lots of other people as well. So it’s worth thinking a bit about whether the current AI bubble is of the former sort or the latter—and how to protect your finances in either case.
One big difference between bubbles that are going to be wretched for everybody when they pop and those that’ll end up mostly okay except for the foolish investor’s portfolio, is whether the excess investment got spent on something of enduring value.
For example, railroad lines got enormously overbuilt in the 1840s in the UK and in the 1880s in the US, leading in both cases to a stock market bubble, followed by a stock market crash and a banking panic. But (and this is my point), the enormously overbuilt railroads were of some value. As the firms went bankrupt, the people who had over-invested lost a lot of money, but the railroad tracks, rights-of-way, and rolling stock all still existed. The new firms that got those assets, free of the excess debt, were often viable firms that went on to be successes—hiring workers, providing transportation, and eventually providing a return to the new investors. The people who got screwed were the old investors. (And not even all of them, as the original investors often saw the overbuilding happening early and sold out just as the clueless people who knew nothing about running a railroad, but just saw stocks soaring and wanted to get in on it, started piling in.)
Much the same was true of part of the dotcom bubble. A lot of money got spent on a lot of things. To the extent that it was spent on buying right-of-way and burying fiber, there was something of enduring value that ended up owned by somebody, making it one of the less-bad bubbles.
The key to avoiding catastrophe in bubbles of this sort is largely just a matter of not investing in the bubble yourself.
But some bubbles have produced horrible, wretched, prolonged difficulties for the whole economy. The other part of the dotcom bubble, besides the dark fiber build-out, was the bubble in companies with no profits and no prospect of ever having profits, whose stock prices went up 10x based on nothing but a story that sounded compelling until you thought about it for 10 seconds. As usual, that ended up being very bad for the people who invested in those companies, but it also was bad for the whole economy, because when those firms went bankrupt, they left behind nothing of enduring value.
The result was that the imagined wealth of those companies just vanished. The stock market went down, which was bad for (almost) everybody, and it produced a general economic malaise, because post-dotcom crash it became hard even for legit companies with real assets, a real profit, and a real business plan for growth, to raise money, which made actually producing that growth much harder.
There is, however a step beyond just pouring a bunch of money into a bubble that doesn’t actually produce anything of enduring value, like a fiber optic network or a railroad. That’s when the money is raised with leverage (i.e. debt).
The 1929 stock market crash was a rather drastic example. People invested in stocks not because there was an underlying business that was worth what the investors were paying for it, but purely because the stocks were going up. That might have been okay in other times, but stock brokers had recently started allowing ordinary people (as opposed to just rich people) to buy on margin—where you just put up a fraction of the price of the stock you want to buy, and the broker lends you the rest.
In the 1920s you could buy on 90% margin, where you only put down 10% of the price of the shares. That meant that, if the stock price went down by just 10% your whole investment was wiped out, and the broker would sell you out to raise money to pay off (most of) the loan. And of course, all those sales into a falling market produced more losses, leading to the crash.
Since the 1930s you could only buy stocks on 50% margin, making it much less likely that your broker will sell you out into the teeth of a general stock market crash—although it can still happen.
A great example of a bubble with leverage is the Great Financial Crises of 2007. (Most people date it from 2008, because that’s when Lehman Brothers collapsed. I date it from 2007 because that’s when my former employer closed the site where I worked and I ended up retiring rather earlier than I’d planned.)
That was a particularly bad bubble. A whole lot of money was raised, with leverage, to buy housing. But very little of the money ended up being spent to build more housing (which would have been something of enduring value that would have lasted through the subsequent collapse). Instead, the money was spent bidding up the prices of existing housing, which then fell in value after the bubble popped.
So we had two of the classic producers of bad bubbles: Nothing of enduring value created, and leverage. The whole things was made even worse by the structure of the leverage in question.
This is getting rather far from my main point, so I won’t go into much details, but to raise the large amount of money that was going into houses, the rules on housing market leverage were being eased over a period of time. It used to be that you had to put 20% down on a house. Then you still had to put 20% down, but only half of it had to be cash, with the other half being funded with a second mortgage on the property (at a higher interest rate). Then they started letting people put just 3% down. Then they started letting people with good credit put nothing down. Then they started letting people with no credit put nothing down. At the same time, “structured finance” obscured just how risky all those mortgages were, meaning that when the bubble went pop lots of “mortgage-backed securities” ended up being worth zero.
This brings us to the current AI bubble. A whole lot of money is pouring into building two things:
Each of those may have some enduring value.
Data centers will have some. They will probably have a lot less than a network of fiber optic cables, which can be buried and will have value for decades with minimal cost or maintenance. Since newer, faster chips are coming out all the time, a data center is well behind the cutting edge as soon as it’s finished. Plus, training or running an AI model runs those chips hard, meaning that they probably only last a couple of years (due to thermal damage on top of regular aging).
Large language models probably have even less enduring value, because so many people are training new ones all the time. People are always trying to make them bigger (trained on more data) while also making them smaller (so they can run without a giant data center). All that means that your two-year-old LLM probably isn’t worth what you paid to build it, and a four-year-old LLM probably isn’t worth anything.
That’s how things looked a year or so ago—a perfect example of a bubble that would burn the people who sank money into it, but leave the broader economy untouched.
Sadly, that’s been changing.
First, the structure of the leverage has been changing. It used to be rich people and rich companies were building data centers and hiring software engineers to build LLMs. But lately that’s been getting screwy. Those large companies are raising off balance-sheet money with Special Purpose Vehicles (small companies that big companies create and provide some capital to, that then borrow a bunch of money to make something, with the loans collateralized by the things they’re making—but importantly, not an obligation of the big company that created them). Any particular SPV can blow up, if it turns out that the things it built don’t earn enough to pay the interest on the money the borrowed to build them. And large numbers of SPVs can blow up if financial conditions change to make it harder for all the SPVs to roll over their debts as they constantly have to keep their data centers running.
Second, they’re also engaging in weird circular investing and spending arrangements, where company A buys stock in company B which then turns around and pays all that money back to company A to buy chips, letting company A treat it as both income and an investment, while company B can pretend it got its chips for free.
Finally, there’s all the non-financial obstacles that may well throw a wrench into the whole thing. The fact that LLMs are all built on copyright violations. The fact that running data centers requires huge amounts of power and water (that has to be produced and paid for). The fact that producing that water and power brings with it horrible environmental impacts.
So, if AI is a bubble, and its one of the bad sort that will produce a panic and a recession when it pops, what should you do?
There are a lot of little things you can do that will help. I wrote an article with suggestions at Wise Bread called Are your finances fragile? It talks about what financial moves you can take to put yourself in a better position if there’s a general financial crisis. (If you’re interested in my writing about this stuff more broadly, I wrote a overview of my perspectives on personal finance and frugality called What I’ve been trying to say, that includes a bunch of links to other of my posts at Wise Bread.)
Besides that general advice, there are also a few things to strictly avoid. In particular, strictly avoid thinking that you can find some very clever investment strategy that lets you make money off the popping of the bubble. Yes, after the fact there will be some investments that make a lot of money, but no amount of keen insight will let you find and make those investments, as opposed to the thousands of very reasonable-seeming investments that will blow up just like all the rest.
Along about the end of the Great Financial Crisis I wrote an article called Investing for Collapse, which explains why any such effort is pointless. It holds up pretty well, I think.
Short version? Avoid debt. Keep your fixed expenses as low as possible. Build a diversified investment portfolio that limits your exposure to the most obviously stupid investments, but doesn’t do anything too weird or wacky in an effort to get them to zero—it’s pointless, and will probably do more harm than good.
Good luck when the AI bubble pops!
I got in a nice run: 4.67 miles in 1h 5min 51s, for an average pace of 14:05. My Fitbit would have me believe that I spent 59 of those minutes with my heart rate in zone 5, which I’m sure is double-false. That is, I don’t think my HR reached the 200 bpm that the Fitbit recorded, nor do I think my maximum HR is nearly as low as 154, which is what the Fitbit estimates.
Still it was a great run. My fastest and longest in a long time, and I felt great the whole time.
Ashley is just back from a walk, just ate a bowl of food and had that bowl refilled, just drank from her water bowl, and had that bowl refreshed, just went out on the patio and returned, and just got a greenie as a treat.
So, I assume this posture means, “All is right with the world and I want for nothing.”
Yesterday was a serious-thinking day on my novel, rather than fingers-on-keyboard day. I got zero words, but I figured out who the antagonist is. (I’d thought I had one already, but I’d realized he wasn’t going to work. I needed someone further away, and someone more. . . not more formidable, because the guy I’d been thinking of is plenty formidable, but more. . . Dangerous.
Anyway, after yesterday’s thinking, I got a good bit of writing done today.
It’s nice to be here, because I think I can see several more days of cranking out prose based on what I’ve just figured out, whereas for a couple of days there I was just creeping along, making little tweaks around the edges, because I didn’t know where it was going to go next. Now I do.
“How’s my pupper? Are you puptastic? I bet you are! There’s no pupper puptasticker than you! You’re the puptastickest!”
My brother suggests that I had missed the point in my recent post, where I claimed that being depressed about work is nothing new, and that finding work worth doing was the solution.
I beg to differ.
I was not claiming that things are not way worse. Obviously, the way people are hired, managed, and required to do their tasks are way worse than they used to be. Nor am I claiming that finding “work worth doing” will solve the financial or economic problems—it won’t make it easier to pay the rent or put food on the table.
My claim is that it will help the mental health issues of dealing with late-stage capitalism.
Finding, and doing, work that’s worth doing will make everything else about your life better.
It’s why I was such a strong advocate for frugality and simplicity during those years writing at Wise Bread. Maybe you can find a way to earn more, and maybe you can’t, but anybody can find a way to spend less. And if you spend less, you can focus more on the work that’s worth doing, even if it doesn’t pay as much as the the wretched, soul-destroying work that’s ruining the lives of another generation of workers.