Keepers: What are we leaving behind?
Keepers No. 7
I recently signed up for Jordan Bates’s Refine the Mind newsletter. It came highly recommended from a trusted source, and I dig the idea behind it. In the initial confirmation email, Jordan linked to his ebook A Short Guide to Exiting the Rat Race and Living a Radically Free Life. It begins with a 50-sentence explanation of the many cultural shifts that have contributed (are contributing) to the rise of the freelance workforce.
The book may be worth the read, but I can’t report on that yet. What struck me was the opening, which is mostly a series of platitudes about living your dream by developing skills that can be done remotely, then living cheaply while traveling the world.
Reading this, my mind went back to the late aughts, when this new thing called “minimalism” was all the rage. I bought in. I still agree with the movements core tenets of reducing things to their essential nature, of owning things instead of letting things own us. But even ten years ago, it all felt a bit like a pyramid scheme.
I’m going to travel the world. I’ll write about it on the web. Then I’ll sell a book about it, telling other people how to travel the world, write about it upon the web, and sell books about it.
But here’s the thing: despite these clichés sounding hollow and worn-out, I still needed to read them. They reminded me to take a step back, inspect my own life, and take stock of the degree to which I’m living someone else’s idea of what I should be doing with my time.
And that simple act of observation can be transformational. Sometimes, the transformation comes like a storm, suddenly and violently. Sometimes, it’s more like a single drop of rain landing on the tip of your nose before the storm comes.
But regardless of how it comes, it should be a habit. The world we’ve built wasn’t built for reflection. It was built for efficiency. It’s efficient for all of us to wake up at roughly the same time, go to work at roughly the same time, get our food from the same place, send our kids to the same schools, watch the same TV on Friday nights.
It’s easy to skate through all that efficiency, moving through existence at a slow and steady pace, without ever stopping to ask ourselves what we really want to do with our one life.
Sometimes the reminder comes from a remarkable place. Sometimes it comes in clichés. But whatever the source, we’d all do well to listen.
My keepers
Once the kids know they’re being Gaggled, they’re being watched 24-7, they tend to be more proactive in watching what they do,” O’Malley said. He said he had heard students in the district using Gaggle, the surveillance company’s name, as a verb: “We can’t do that. We’re being Gaggled.”
There is so much to pick apart in this piece that I dare not go down that rabbit hole in this particular space. Just know that you should read it, because it speaks volumes about the world we’re building for our kids.
I work with a lot of people on their difficulties, and one of the biggest ones people have is some variation of, “I am falling short of my expectations (or others’ expectations and I feel guilty, shameful, inadequate.”
In fact, I would guess that most people feel that they’re letting themselves and others down a lot of the time.
This post from Leo Babauta hit me hard.
We have all this propaganda for freedom. The day before yesterday I had a meeting in the Freedom Tower in Manhattan; there’s no Equality Tower. There’s a Statue of Liberty but no Statue of Egalitarianism.
I recently started following the work of Astra Taylor, and I wish I’d discovered her long ago. Taylor is a filmmaker whose latest is titled What is Democracy?, and she also founded the Debt Collective. Most nonprofits struggle to make a dent in the world, but not this one. Their accomplishments—and their impact on legislative efforts—is truly impressive. In this conversation, Taylor explains with stunning clarity what we must do.
— Rob