reading clearout - may 2022

Hi folks, it's been a few days! Hope all is well. Here are some thoughts on my reading from May.

Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come by Jessica Pan

One of the reading highlights of the year was showing up late to a vacation with Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come in hand. Of course, this is one of those situations where the joke is in the title given how it belies the premise - Pan, a self-diagnosed introvert, chronicles a year spent living as an extrovert, which would include wanting to go on such things as a weekend trip. One fairly unsurprising lesson from this book is how poorly the introvert-extrovert binary describes the full range of human personalities. Being a somewhat hopeless introvert myself, I could relate to the impossible challenge of networking (or generally just connecting with strangers in a large group setting). But other things Pan described as Major Introvert Challenges, such as public speaking or traveling alone, feel completely natural to me. It may be more appropriate to use these labels in the sense of an adjective (introverted behavior) rather than as a noun (there is the introvert) to better capture the way most of us are a unique combination of introverted and extroverted characteristics.

Pan notes specific tactics for building connection that I'll summarize here. A conversation is successful when both parties share a willingness for self-disclosure, but specific behaviors such as interrupting, rambling, or partial listening will quickly submarine the initial interaction. Pan suggests that the occasional personal question is a helpful way to build connections, particularly if it can safely lead to sharing vulnerabilities or insecurities, due to how those disclosures can help people see echoes of themselves in each other. The best advice in this area may be a reminder prompted by two study results - one noted that people start to see each other as friends after six to eight meetings, while others cite a range of fifty to ninety hours. Maybe like most good things, building connection isn't about any of the above but rather about finding ways to make the necessary time investment.

A couple of other good reminders jumped out at me from my notes. For gatherings or parties involving large numbers of strangers, a good way to break into a smaller group is to wait at its edge then introduce yourself during a break in the conversation. Those who are working on their charisma should learn how to ask open-ended questions, then either ask meaningful follow-up questions or validate the other's feelings. Finally, those who are familiar with the improv mindset of approaching everything with a "yes, and" response should remember that the main obstacle to this mentality is arriving somewhere with a fully formed story in mind - this usually just leads to responses aimed at acting out the predetermined plan.

Alien Nation by Sofija Stefanovic

Stefanovic collects thirty-six personal stories which describe various immigrant experiences in America. Like with the The Moth collections I've previously highlighted on TOA, these stories were originally told on stage before being transcribed for this book (and like with The Moth, I suspect some stories came across better in the original audio format). Of the many stories I enjoyed from the work, I marked "C.R.I.S.I.S." for a reread.

There wasn't much I recalled about Alien Nation when I thought back to it for this summary. Some of the notes I took from the book read like potential themes - for example, that if you tell people they don't belong enough times then it begins to change how they see themselves, or that the majority often creates the impression that minorities must explain their own importance. It seems that a consistent accomplishment of each story was articulating the way certain everyday occurrences affect people of specific identities in ways unseen by the rest of us. If you like learning these lessons through personal anecdotes, then perhaps it's worth looking at this book or checking for the availability of the audio equivalent.

Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit

There's something unusual about an author like Rebecca Solnit writing a memoir. I've read much of her work over the past few years and I've never felt too far removed from the author in those reading experiences. Unlike some of the other authors I've read regularly, she isn't the type to remove herself from the writing to the extent that her perspective disappears in the final product. It raises a question that I hadn't considered until I started looking over my notes on Recollections of My Nonexistence - what was left for her to say about herself that I haven't already learned from her other work?

This book, which Solnit mostly sets against the early portion of her four-decade adulthood, states one of its objectives early on - naming the obstacles you've encountered is one way you help the next generation. I found numerous examples in my notes of how she names these encountered obstacles, each created and enabled by a misogynist culture (the way society does little about (or even ignores) the fact that some men wish to harm women, leaving women to deal with the psychological effect on their own; the lack of places named after women or the lack of statues built of women, rendering their accomplishments invisible and leaving girls without examples and role models). These examples echo the themes I've found in her other work, but I think the memoir format gave her a new way to reflect on her experiences through writing. Recollections of My Nonexistence was important for the way it enabled Solnit to add a complementary perspective to support the ideas that she has brought into existence through her prior work.

The Purpose of Power by Alicia Garza

Garza, perhaps most commonly known for being a co-creator of the BlackLivesMatter hashtag, shares the lessons learned from two decades of organizing movements in this 2020 work. The Purpose of Power also intertwines history into these lessons, with the history including elements of memoir as well as a recounting of the moments and events that influence her work to this day. Overall, I thought Garza brought all of this together into an excellent book. However, when I thought back to my reading I struggled to recall anything specific that I had retained from the experience. My review of my own notes as well as some reviews from other readers seemed to reinforce my initial suspicion that the book often took one extra step back from the details, dealing more in strategy instead of tactics or ideas instead of examples. I think there is the potential for her to someday write a "how-to" guide for organizing, but it's not something that came through in this book due to this lack of specific detail.

What did come through, despite having the "higher level" perspective, was useful in its own way. Garza notes that movements require organization, building on the momentum created by protests or hashtags, and that their bases must expand beyond the range of people who are initially in frequent contact with the base. As an organizer, it's vital to create support for change among those who may not have initially recognized its necessity, and one way to do so is by understanding issues unique to other communities and then expanding the viewpoint of the movement to encompass those issues into the movement's goals. A growing movement, by embracing a cycle of achieving common goals across differences, finds a way to refuel its own growth and continually build power. I felt Garza spoke indirectly to the points summarized above when she noted that progressive communities, generally lacking diverse representation (and specifically Black representation), may not always present progressive solutions due to the lack of diverse perspectives.

For most of us readers, the broader lessons of organizing movements lack immediate application to challenges in our own lives. I'll highlight a note that spoke to my regular experience - when confronting racism, remember that people won't believe an idea which contradicts what they see with their own eyes. In these moments, avoid engaging in debates and work instead on asking questions or creating context to help others reframe their experience with a more inclusive and tolerant perspective.

toa rewind, world cup edition - goooool

As I'm sure many readers have suspected, I've spent the past few weeks battling an unrelenting case of World Cup Fever. My temperature has come down a few degrees today, the first day without games since the start of the tournament. What better way to fill the void than with a repost from October 2020, where I briefly mused on the tradition of Spanish-speaking commentators yelling "GOL" after the ball finds its way into the back of the net?

My hunch is that this practice is related to how fans react to goals. I noticed early on in my viewing career that Spanish-speaking crowds sounded different after a goal relative to their English-speaking counterparts. (My best but likely unhelpful attempt to explain the difference is that the Spanish-speaking crowds sounded lower, not in volume but in pitch, than the English-speaking ones.) It took a few more years before I connected the dots - in the former, fans yell "GOAL" (or "GOOOL", I suppose) while in the latter fans tend to just make all kinds of otherwise unintelligible noise. What I'm not sure about is how this might fit into the commentator's tendency, leading to a sort of pollo and huevo conundrum - do announcers yell GOL because that's what the crowds do, or do crowds yell GOL because that's what the announcers do? And of course, all of the preceding speculation comes with the caveat that I might have misunderstood something along the way, which would wipe out all of this paragraph.

Let's focus instead, then, on what I do know. In this tournament I've watched games with commentary in both languages at a roughly even split. The experience has reinforced a feeling I explained in the 2020 post linked above - those who attempt to make some sort of insightful commentary in the moments after a goal are almost certainly doomed to failure. When a goal is scored, there is simply nothing to say. What words could resonate better than just taking in the explosion of joy, excitement, and hope that comes in the moments after a goal? What is better than just becoming part of the noise for a few seconds? I think the Spanish commentator's practice of yelling "GOOOOOL" until the celebrations start to wane reveals a deep-rooted wisdom about communication - if it's not the right time to say something, maintain the connection until it becomes appropriate to resume speaking.

leftovers - reading clearout, april 2022 (reciprocal vulnerability)

While reviewing my notes ahead of preparing the original post, a sentence I scribbled down from Maggie Nelson's On Freedom caught my eye - a lack of reciprocal vulnerability often threatens to undermine certain forms of discussion or advancement. It seems like an unusually wise point, though perhaps this may be lost on those who naturally understand the idea.

I'm remembering as I write this how I would often encounter examples of this thought in action through my hospice volunteering - nurses and staff, fellow volunteers, even certain visitors or residents would find ways to establish connection through reciprocal vulnerability. One advantage of the hospice setting to this idea is that a hospice is an environment defined by vulnerability. The need to take initiative, at least in the sense of emotional exposure, rarely seemed to fall to me. It also helped that with others often going first I could sense just how much exposure was appropriate to support or even advance the interaction - too little, like Nelson writes, and I would undermine the moment. However, it's worth noting that too much could create its own problem. One thing I learned over the years is that initiating didn't always mean a willingness to reciprocate, and my misreading of those signals sometimes led to a retreat whenever I my own vulnerability pushed the other a step beyond their comfort level with reciprocation.

All of this applies outside hospice situations, but being outside that specific environment means a lot of interactions happen with an unstated assumption that vulnerability remains in a quiet corner of the interaction. Therefore, my challenge these days is correctly reading situations to determine just how much I can share without making the other feeling that they would be better off retreating rather than reciprocating. It's not my intent to make this sound like a challenge that I have mastered, or that I am some sort of guru in all matters of difficult discussions. It's really more the opposite - I remain such a beginner that my small successes remain limited to areas where I've had the steps spelled out for me.

But shouldn't we share our successes? There was a moment a few months ago where, as a panelist leading a job interview, I sensed our candidate having a hard time answering certain questions. These questions were, by design, unusual in the context of a recruiting process, with the idea being that they would help us better understand our candidates in the context of our DEI goals. I recalled from my prep work how the candidate's cover letter shared their interest in the organization, telling a story that I could relate to from my own experience, so in a quiet moment I shared a couple of comments explaining why I initially wanted to join the team. It wasn't a magic moment by any means, but it did seem like the answers from that point were a little freer, our candidate perhaps benefiting from access to a wider range of available answers due to a sense that their inherent vulnerabilities would be reciprocated by an interviewer.

reading review - unsettled

Hi - one last book from my April 2022 reading list.

Unsettled by Steven Koonin

Technically speaking, I thought this was among the best books I've read so far in 2022. (Yes, I'll address the qualifier.) Unsettled promises to detail the shortcomings in the communication of climate science, and Koonin has a long list of credentials which qualify him for the task. On the whole, I think the book keeps its promise. Koonin makes his argument across a wide range of examples, pointing out common sense details (such as the way percentages can be manipulated based on reading temperature using C or F units) in addition to raising more nuanced questions that may escape the average reader (such as the replication challenge, where current climate models fail to "predict" the past using retroactive inputs). He returns time and again to the idea that science should inform rather than persuade which, by the end of Unsettled, turns out to be a quite compelling conclusion based on his recap of how the information has been presented to the public.

I was pleasantly surprised with Koonin's recommendations regarding the best courses of action. His observation that reducing emissions works best through conservation rather than efficiency, for example, or his conviction that addressing global poverty will alleviate some of the underlying pressures on climate change are the types of simple recommendations that I feel get lost whenever I hear commentary on this topic. The WHO (at the time of writing) points to indoor air pollution in poor countries as the most serious environmental issue in the world, but being distracted by the headlines I have no idea what rich countries are doing about it. I also have no idea how the forty percent of humanity without adequate access to energy will be involved in the solutions to the climate crisis, or if they would consider the solutions adopted by rich nations as adequate responses to their specific concerns. The idea that we need to preserve poverty to save the planet seems to me, for the lack of a better word, unsettling.

So, then, the qualifier. I think my experience predisposes me to see Koonin's point through a strictly technical perspective. I routinely interact with others in the context of informing with data, these colleagues or partners generally well-versed in the original analysis, but I rarely find that their summaries and conclusions maintain the same level of rigor that went into the analysis. The end result is something I'm sure Koonin would relate to - the quality of information that reaches the audience is often a step or two lower than the quality of the original analysis. But what is the point, so to speak, about this point, particularly in the context of a climate crisis? A crisis usually requires action, but in this specific example it's the lack of action that is becoming its own crisis - when so many in power have been unresponsive for so long, there is a growing case for persuasion rather than informing. In the context of climate change, Unsettled reads as an aside to determine whether the data meets a certain standard of scientific rigor, but to me an aside feels beside the point.

Is it necessary to rearrange the deck chairs when so many are panicking that the ship is sinking? It may not be the moment to get lost in the precision of exactly how the ship is taking on the rising sea. I am sympathetic to the importance of maintaining scientific rigor but I'm willing to deal with that issue after we get ashore safely. It seems to me that we know what we need to know about climate change, and by this I mean we know the big things which should set our direction, but despite knowing these things it still feels a bit directionless at the moment. Why wait for the Arctic to flood the Charles before we acknowledge that some things need to change? There are things big enough to work on regardless of the details in the science.

I am perhaps the least qualified person around to make such a point, but I don't feel unqualified when I say that a smokestack spewing black clouds into the air should be banned on the account of raw ugliness. Regardless of whether I thought Unsettled was well-written, I won't lose any sleep worrying about scientific standards when society remains tethered to a fossil fuel industry that enriches a small handful while nearly one-tenth of humanity remains in extreme poverty. I'll accept that the data is not always as conclusive as it has been presented, but this doesn't really change my main concern. My main concern remains that there are some major problems which need to be resolved, these problems requiring resolution whether they can be tied conclusively to the climate science or not, and books like Unsettled give certain people excuses, via technicalities, to dismiss the urgency of how these problems should be solved regardless of whether you think they have any relationship to the climate crisis or not.

reading clearout - april 2022

Trust me, reader, I meant it last month when I said this TOA thing was going to get restarted in the near future, just a moment, imminently. But then a day went by, and a week, now a month... I suppose it's time to acknowledge that maybe I was feeling a tad optimistic in that moment.

Still, I'm sure it's now only a matter of time before I return to some semblance of The Real Writing. I'm much more sure of this now than I was even at the time of my last post. There are some essays I would like to finish and a couple of lingering topics that I feel compelled to write about, but the strongest indicators are those instances over the past few weeks when I wrote something down as a potential writing topic. For me, having this steady stream of possibilities, even if I end up abandoning most of them before I start any serious work, is always the best signal that my interest in writing is returning to a healthy level.

I'm not quite at the point of full return but I think it would be wise to begin some basic preparations. Like an athlete emerging from the offseason, I have a few months of rust that have accumulated in the various soft spots of my craft. I think the best place to restart is always with the fundamentals, reflecting the importance of a back to the basics mentality, and on TOA the bread and butter has always been my commentary on reading experiences.

Let's start - restart - with my thoughts on the books I finished in April.

On Freedom by Maggie Nelson

I've posted enthusiastically about some of Nelson's other works - Bluets, The Argonauts - so I suppose the failure of On Freedom to elicit a similar reaction is a unique brand of TOA disapproval. This book, comprised of four long essays tied around a central premise to explore "freedom", was filled with plenty of interesting moments and remarks yet never quite reached the lofty expectations I had going into the reading. I think the best reflection of my feeling came through while reviewing my notes on the book, when I noticed a few of her comments about climate change - all of Nelson's thoughts were without question important or insightful about the situation, but they were also the same things I've managed to figure out on my own over the past couple of decades. Two references Nelson makes early on may end up being all I recall about the book in a few years - that Wittgenstein said the meaning of a word is its use, and that David Graeber defined revolutionary action as acting as if one is already free.

Her comment that artists must learn to stand up for (and perhaps alongside) their work was the most interesting discovery I made when I reviewed my notes about On Freedom. Nelson adds that without doing so, an artist risks allowing criticism to shut down the types of discussions that allow a work to move forward. I don't know many artists but I can vouch for how this idea applies more broadly to your average person. I notice quite regularly that potentially transformative conversations quickly disintegrate into a fact-checking contest, with the proceedings often marred by the appearance of opinion disguised as unquestioned truth. I think freedom of thought is partially enabled by the ability to stand by an idea long enough to learn from it, and a free thinker is someone who moves on to something better once they have learned enough. When people cling to their ideas and shut down the discussions that might challenge or question those ideas, I feel it locks them into a pattern of thinking that limits or even prevents them from realizing the full potential of the mind.

The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans

I didn't keep notes regarding my favorite of the few stories in this collection but my memory is that I enjoyed the work overall. If actions speak louder to you than words, then you will be pleased to know that I checked out another of Evans's works later in the year, which I hope clarifies that I recommend her books.

Like with my notes on most short story collections, The Office of Historical Corrections provided a few insightful yet out of context nuggets that I am now revisiting with a raised eyebrow. Yes, I can relate to the idea that when there are just a couple of minorities in a place then there is a certain pressure for them to have an opinion on each other, but I also know from experience that it's possible to be entirely unaware of this expectation. The thought that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man would be out of place was a nice turn on the expression, but aren't kings always a little out of place? And for that matter, where on the planet is a one-eyed man not a little out of place? I guess this all just highlights an important aspect of fiction, and especially short fiction - it gives us readers a chance to take an idea and see it from many perspectives, evaluating its strengths and weaknesses in various contexts to help us refine the way we understand the world.

Unsettled by Steven Koonin

I ended up writing more about this one than I anticipated so we'll get to it in a separate post.

Severance by Ling Ma

I actually already wrote about this one a few months ago - check the archives!

Whiter by Nikki Khanna

Khanna collects around thirty essays, each a first-hand account written by an Asian-American woman regarding their experiences with colorism (2). I believe Khanna notes in her introduction that the literature on this topic has tended to focus on intragroup bias, where lighter skin tone is privileged within the group, but there are intergroup examples as well that perhaps collections such as this one can bring to wider attention. Whiter in my mind was an important book, but with so many different writers featured in the collection I must share that my experience as a reader was a little uneven (I guess it comes with the territory of such works).

The observations I noted may have a certain shock value - for example, the research findings that suggest some associate lighter skin with intelligence, which has significant implications in areas such as education, the workplace, or politics. But I think for me there were more moments where the observations felt quite routine - that Caucasian women are employed to market skin whiteners to Asian audiences, or that women historically featured in "most beautiful" lists have rarely been people of color. I learned a few details in this book that made for a rewarding reading experience, but I am left wondering who will read this book and experience a full-blown revelation when so much of the material just seems obvious. As one of the essayists notes, a challenging aspect of sharing racist experiences with white people is knowing that one possible result is leaving someone horror-struck. I've been tempted in these moments to push the issue - is the horror because you truly learned something, or is it the realization that you've just had your eyes closed to something so obviously visible to everyone else?

How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon

I preceded this reading with Heavy, Laymon's memoir that I remember seeing on every other trip to the bookstore since it was released in 2018. Heavy was just about the best book I'd read in a long time, so I kept it simple and went back to explore more of Laymon's work (1).

This summary might benefit if I limited myself to two words - read it - but I did want to highlight a couple of my notes from the collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. There was a theme of symbolism that ran through the work, particularly in the way it offers an escape route for those who won't engage with the possibility of change. Solving structural problems is not just about changing symbols, but rather a commitment to living out certain values; change is enabled not by addressing the symbolism of an insult, but rather dealing with the ensuing violence or damage. Laymon also writes that the best way to help others is to demand greatness of them, remembering all the while that it requires forgiveness, truth, high expectations, and patience.

My last note is about the first note I took from the book. It appears to be a quote taken directly from the work, a rarity for my note-taking process. I believe Laymon describes the following as the hardest sentence he ever wrote - I am proud of myself for not giving up, for accepting help, for not drowning in the humiliations of yesterday and the inevitable terror of tomorrow. It's undoubtedly a reflection on his past, but it can just as much be a mission statement for the future. For now, I just think we are all better off that he wrote it, and that I'm better off for having read it.

Footnotes

1. I'm starting with April and moving forward, but we'll work backward too...

In case you were wondering - no, I haven't yet written about Heavy.

2. A recommended essay?

In my notes I marked "What Are You" for a reread.

we back... sort of (and a thought about breaks)

I didn't think my last post would usher in a three-month break but, well, here we are three months later. Does a post about my absence serve any purpose beyond acknowledging the absence of my posts? It occurred to me this morning that there might be some value in at least confirming everything still works, so I am partly here in the manner of someone brushing aside the cobwebs and turning the ignition key - so far so good, but the real test is when you put some gas through it.

If it interests you, dear reader, my writing break took on one key feature that defines a break - no writing. It wasn't planned that way but once I realized what was happening it was fairly straightforward to put everything TOA-related out of mind for a few weeks. I guess it remains to be seen whether this rest did me any good (again, the gas analogy, I'll push the pedal next week) but I have a good feeling that I've finally done a break correctly.

That said, I don't want to get anyone's hopes up today. I suspect The End (as it relates to this break) is somewhere around the corner, but I wouldn't anticipate a flood of new posts in the near future. This is more of a logistical comment because the complete break from writing means I don't have anything to post at the moment. It might require a few more weeks before TOA begins to look normal, which these days should mean a few posts a month. But since you did come here anticipating a post I suppose it would be unfair to leave you hanging, so let's wrap up with an extended thought about breaks.

I think most people understand the need to step away and recharge from time to time but I don't think most people understand much about putting this idea into action. In my mind, there are three components to a good break (which I present now with a prerequisite "WELL DUH" alert) - knowing when to break, knowing how long to break, and knowing when to come back from break. Yes, groundbreaking insights all around, but I did warn you.

So again, the strategy is obvious but most people can't execute the plan. What's the issue? I think most people deal OK with the first part - they take a break when they think they need one. It helps that society has certain structures in place to support this step - the concept of an eight-hour day or forty-hour week, weekends, the esteemed summer vacation, the holiday period at the end of the calendar year, and so on. These built-in considerations serve as a form of insurance for the type of person who can't adequately make this determination for themselves - even if you are the sort who won't take a break when you need it, once Thanksgiving rolls around society kind of forces you to do it (1). One way or the other, people end up getting a break whether or not they are proactive about taking one.

The second part is a bit subtler and perhaps the source of most challenges - the length of a break. As noted earlier, most 9-to-5 types are forced to take a two-day break each weekend, but perhaps this isn't long enough to provide adequate recovery in certain cases. I'm not saying it is or it isn't, I'm just saying we don't know. I think there is also a related question here of intensity, which is relatable through a host of needless analogies. Let's try the technological one - if you attempt to recharge your phone with an outdated charger, you might have it plugged into the wall for twice as long as you would with a current alternative. There is something like this at play with breaks - perhaps two days off is enough for someone who can put work completely out of mind throughout that time, but for the person who dwells on issues (or even compulsively checks emails on Saturday and Sunday) the mind is at least partially occupied during the break period. How long you need to take a break could be significantly impacted by your ability to fully rest during that break, but I think this is a possibility that eludes most people.

The final part is perhaps the most important, though this is somewhat influenced by the fact that I've learned a few things about it this year. Longtime TOA readers may recall that back in January I took a break from running, which improbably stretched until mid-February. In hindsight this seems a bit excessive, but my thought process is fresh enough in my memory that I can explain myself - it wasn't until I started feeling like running again that I considered running again. By this, I don't mean some stray thought that I turned into immediate action, but rather a slower process that involved accumulating little instances of a returning inclination - feeling a bit of restless energy, for example, or breaking into short jogs as I would cross the street. Eventually, it was clear that I was ready. I went through a similar process over the past couple of weeks - I would look over at my desk during some idle time and consider booting up TOA again, but then the impulse would pass and I'd go do something else. I understood the feeling was building, however, so I started thinking about what I would do when I came back - which patterns to revive and which to discard, whether I would try some new styles, if I should sack the Business Bro, and so on. Now that I'm back at the keyboard, it seems obvious that I'm more or less fully recharged (and ready to resume whatever I'm supposed to call this TOA project).

I think it's hard for people to develop this level of trust in their own instincts. Are you confident enough to wait until you know that you are rested? For most, it seems easier to align breaks against an external framework. How long should a summer vacation last? One workweek, but of course you would include portions of the bookend weekends to create almost ten continuous days off (the true creatives may even take the preceding Friday off). This approach also has the built-in component of forcing you back to the abandoned task, which might be necessary for the kind of work that you would never choose to do for its own reward (2, 2A). This may suggest that what I've described merely applies to the types of things you like to do - interest and hobbies, passions, perhaps the aspects of a career that energize you - because these tend to be the sort of activity that does not require an external pressure to return.

But whether it applies broadly or not, I think this ability to trust our own instincts about being recharged is a critical skill that eludes most people. Without it, there is a circular futility regarding taking breaks - you don't know if you need to take a break because you don't know the difference between being run down and being rested, which means you don't know how long to break because you can't tell if you are ready to come back. Is it any wonder that so many of the things we once loved to do seem so distant to ourselves today? As life changes, we naturally develop new interests in response to fresh circumstances, and of course in reverse this means we lose some of our interests as well. But I think in some cases we are merely suffering from making life more difficult for ourselves. Is it truly the case that we are tired of something, particularly those things we once loved to do, or is it possible that we have simply made ourselves tired of it? It may be wise to consider the possibility that we just might still love to do the things we once loved to do, if only we took more care in protecting the energy we need to do it.

Footnotes! Surely, this is evidence that TOA is back?

1. The burnout issue

Some may be tempted at this point to cite conditions such as burnout, with it serving as evidence that not everyone knowns when to stop, and I accept that perspective. However, I also think it's hard to say with certainty that burnout itself isn't simply another example of a signal that you need a break, and that it merely reflects a destiny embedded in the structure of particular tasks, responsibilities, or careers. In certain situations, I think it's hard to determine whether burnout represents going off-course or if it was the destination all along. If a particular job leads to constant burnout, then why is the default question about how to reduce burnout? It seems possible to me that a better question is to ask about the structural realities that require such a job to exist in the first place.

2. Not that I know anything at all about sleep, but...

The way we schedule breaks has certain similarities to the way we take in our most mundane form of rest, the nightly sleep. I know bedtime can be determined by a constructed schedule and that many wake up in the morning to a screaming alarm. It might not be realistic to simply sleep and wake in response to fatigue signals but this would surely be the way to maximize rest.

2A. What are you doing today? Digging out!

I suppose you would come back on Monday so you can participate in the hallowed ritual of "digging out from email" (or whatever the hot corporate buzzword is for essentially spending the first few hours after a vacation reading the equivalent of old newspapers). Do you know what I did when I reopened TOA today? I hit "new post". There might be some kind of BS metric I can cook up here - the degree to which you like doing something is inversely correlated to whether you feel compelled to do the equivalent of "dig out" upon returning from a long absence. (Alas, I contained this digression in a footnote, so it should be obvious what I concluded about this idea.)

the annual misremembering

I always have the same thought at the start of July - what am I going to post on July 12? The date is the anniversary of my mom's passing, and since I have this notion that TOA has commemorated the occasion each year I usually feel some kind of obligation to maintain the tradition. Of course, planning to write something doesn't help me come up with anything, so the next step is to kill time, which I accomplish by following a strict process - I dip back into the TOA archives, seek out the July 12 posts for inspiration, and then... I remember that my memory is, let's say, true on average (!). The reality is that if I score my July 12 work based on its memorial qualities, I'd have to say I return mixed results - 2016 and 2020 were direct hits, 2018 and 2019 were close yet too self-centered to serve as memorials, and 2017 evaded the moment (but partial credit for a structural tribute to the 2016 post). And what about 2021? Last year, I didn't post anything at all.

Based on feedback over the years from you, loyal reader, I suspect I'm not alone in this misremembering - the consensus in the TOA audience is that July 12 is reserved for just the one topic. The fact that we could all be wrong in this way demonstrates something I've learned about memory. The way I understand it, the brain's recall process subtly changes the memory each time we retrieve it, with some suggesting that over time we start remembering the memory rather than the original. The rough analogy coming to mind is a writer's revision - the published copy has the DNA of the first draft, but each edit moved the work incrementally until the final elements bear little resemblance to their initial counterparts. This wouldn't be an issue if we collectively dismissed the value of memory, but sadly it seems that a defining characteristic of the human existence is a reverence for the past. I feel this perspective suggests a preference for certainty, and perhaps also enables us to put off the necessity of facing the future, about which the only certainty is uncertainty. It also makes it harder to accept the premise that what we remember, what we remember without question, is more likely than not to be at least partially inaccurate. At the very least, it may be wise to think less of the past given that we may not know as much about it as we like to think.

And yet, there are good arguments for respecting the past, including its educational value - they say those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. This raises an urgent question - how can we learn anything from memory if it shifts everything around like high tide renovating a sand castle? One answer, I suppose, is to strengthen and support our memory, with primary sources being a reliable option. If your goal is to know what happened, then the best way is to find something that describes what happened as it happened. The July 12 TOA timestamps are a decent example in my context, but I actually think my running mileage log is an even better case study. Over the past few years I've treated July 12 as one of the Major Events in my running season, building up my mileage throughout the spring in order to enjoy a lively eight or ten mile session on the day. It's always served as a personal memorial of sorts because I used talk with my mom about running in a way that I haven't done with anyone else. The main obstacle with talking to others was about the primary reason they ran - for health and exercise, for a challenge, for a way to enjoy the outdoors, for vanity about appearance, for their identity, for a way to kill boredom, for whatever reason but mine, which mattered because I could never connect with people whose motivations were so incompatible with my own. What I used to find talking to my mom was how we both simply enjoyed running, would run all day if practical, so losing the only person I could honestly connect with about running became the most important of the least important July 12 losses.

So at this point I would reiterate that one priceless feature of the annual July 12 run was to honor and acknowledge this loss, but here again enters fact-checker, the memorial wrecker. When I referred back to my running log to see how much mileage I'd accumulated over these recent July 12's, I was in for a familiar story - in three of the past six years, I didn't run on July 12 at all. Some memorial! This is actually even worse than my performance with July 12 posts - at least I posted something, even if it wasn't strictly related to the day. In the running example it's much worse because I've made a story out of ninety minutes during which I actually did nothing, and the deception went so far that I even fooled myself. I suppose that the great memorial in my mind was, once again, misremembered.

Here we return to the same question about memory, and the instinct is to once more blame the limitations of the human brain, or perhaps I should say its gullibility, at least in terms of accepting whatever new detail the recalled memory invents to tweak the past. It's as if the memory, free to run all day, has demonstrated the problem with such a mentality - nothing outruns time. Just as time will eventually catch up to a runner, so too it will someday overtake the memory. The problem, of course, is the inevitability of it, the threat is relentless, the passage of time nonnegotiable, each unstoppable second bumping into one of the many precious details that balance above the abyss in the infinite mind.

******

The most embarrassing thing about these July 12 memory failures is that I knew at some level that this might happen way back on that first July 12. Or at least, I suspect so, as this would explain why I suddenly and briefly kept a journal during that time. The journal has the facts and figures, trivia really, from those few weeks that might otherwise disappear in some cobwebbed corner of my head. The journal can tell you the rough outline of what happened, and when, and who was involved; it can tell you how I felt about it all. Sometimes I flip through it, experiencing various emotions old and new as time stretches and collapses through my fingers, always marveling at some new discovery or forgotten detail. Every time, I close the notebook and resolve to get back in the journaling habit so that I can someday have the same experience looking back on this time, these days, to gift the present to my future. Of course, this resolve lasts just long enough to put up a losing battle against the next idea - a walk, a nap, a drink with friends - and I soon forget what made journaling such a nice idea. This isn't to say I reject the notion entirely, evidenced by the journal-type substances that have sporadically graced TOA, but it's clear to me by now that I won't do it in my daily life.

I'm not sure exactly why I won't journal again, especially considering my positive reaction to the previous effort as well as the accumulating evidence that I am prone to forgetting certain details. I suppose the best I can do is offer a theory, and it runs somewhat against the point made so far - the problem with the way our brains store memories may not be a problem at all, it may be that the problem is the way we value factual accuracy. To put it another way, maybe we just forget things and that's fine; I don't need to remember everything I've forgotten. This isn't to dismiss the importance of accuracy. There are undoubtedly situations where having the facts 100% correct is the most important consideration, and of course in most other situations it seems reckless or just silly to suggest that the facts aren't so important. But the default perception seems to be that a great memory is defined by its ability to recall correct information - who says that's right?

I think the truth is that sometimes having the facts doesn't help us remember. I'm talking about the times when memory isn't so much about the past but rather the future, which can happen in situations where memory locks us into a pattern that makes it difficult to move forward. What does it matter in the end if I missed a few years of posting or running on July 12? The reality is that working out the way I feel in writing was endlessly valuable over these past few days, so whether it has a place in a long annual tradition or not is quite frankly of little relevance to me; what matters now is what I do next. And to be honest, can I really say for sure that I remember connecting with my mom about running? July 12 was seven years ago, and most of these conversations would have happened even further in the past. I'm open to the idea that I have once again misremembered, though I might actually be completely off the mark - my mom ran marathons, which is about as goal-driven as it gets for runners, so maybe those shared motivations are just another paragraph I've rewritten in the prequel to my next run. But I do know from experience, even if just three times in the past six years, that having a good run on this day is a priceless gift.

Or maybe, I should say that I know these things - the value of writing, the reward of a run - from memory. The fact that I remember doing these things, even inconsistently, on certain July 12's feels like a signal that there is something else about memory. I am beginning to sense that the value of memory is not just the recall of precious facts or its ability to rewrite the stories we tell ourselves in order to move on, but the ability to remember the things we can't forget. Tools like the journal may imply a desire to support the memory as it leaks facts, but what it actually does is more in line with this idea - the journal reminds me that I once survived a difficult time through writing, and I can't forget this.

With running, my memory doesn't even need a prompt like the journal. When I reflect on why running has its place today, I recall a conversation in that final week when I asked my mom what she dreamed about, and she said running. I think we'll forget almost everything if it means retaining the few things we can't forget, these moments resurfacing in the redundant sea of memory to remind me of what I already knew - that every road ahead is uncertainty, that no one ever gives up on a dream, and that small traditions are there when we need them, to lend us the resolve we need for moving forward, on those days when we can't quite do it on our own.

who woke the business bro?

Sometimes I find myself in these conversations at work with a person I don't know very well who is explaining to me that, you know, George Floyd was murdered in 2020, it was an awakening, and they've been thinking about a lot of things. My response is always the same, and it's genuine - that's great, we should always be learning, progress is a team sport, and so on. Finding more people who are committed to these ideas is a rewarding part of the job, each one swelling our ranks one at a time, so despite the major setbacks represented by certain current events I remain convinced that we will win - we the people who see each other equally, who reject the bullshit that enables or excuses bigotry, who see the future as a place we will all share together. We will win.

There is something else I think about in these moments, however, and given that it's not an immediately helpful thought I mostly keep it to myself. If someone highlights 2020 as a turning point, then it means I have around a thirty year head start in terms of at least having some related topics in mind. Such a detail has no real meaning, of course, reflecting merely that I'm a two-time minority in his mid-thirties, but in a workplace context I suspect it means I have the equivalent of a few additional years of experience ahead of the class of 2020. For those who've endured far more serious forms of discrimination than me, the perspective they bring to the workplace is even greater than mine.

It might be necessary for me to work out a way to express this observation in a productive way. It always sounds good on paper to talk of "meeting people where they are", but what do you do when the variation within a workplace is as wide as the gap in math skills between a third-grader and a college graduate? I don't have the answer, but it surely isn't a few optional training sessions per year. I guess this is the age-old problem we are trying to solve - if you aren't among that privileged majority, then you either have to be twice as good at your job just to keep up with your peers or you can recite the company script while the advantage of your experience is eroded down to the corporate average.

leftovers - it's just not the time to not say (the final schedule)

I didn't reference the idea of "writing as thinking" in this post, but perhaps I should have. It's undoubtedly important to have something to say strictly in the context of responding to or analyzing a particular situation, but the extra element that separates writing in the TOA sense from writing in the journalistic sense is my willingness to work out what I think through the process of writing. One problem with examining the question solely through the lens of having something to say is how such an approach dismisses the possibility of discovering something to say - in many cases, the link between writing and thinking emerges after the pen hits the paper. If I rule out working on a certain subset of topics, what it means is that I am ruling out access to the thinking that is enabled by writing about those topics.

The flip side is that perhaps the recent trend reflects a change in what I'm willing to think about, whether in writing or not. The common problem in the early days of TOA was "which of these things should I write about?" but these days this consideration has given way to "what is there to write about?". Initially this change was somewhat alarming but I'm starting to realize that perhaps this merely reflects my state of mind in 2016 - back then, there was so much I simply had never thought deeply about, so diving in via writing was an enticing option. Now that we are well into year six (!) of TOA, I'm finding myself encountering two constraints with increasing regularity - first, that I have fewer obvious topics remaining to think about; second, that each remaining topic demands a far higher level of thinking relative to the 2016 standard. These considerations both lead to the same effect on the time commitment - I first need more time to select a topic, and then I need more time to write about it.

But I suppose in another way this doesn't really change anything. It's always been true that when it comes to this form of writing, the time to start is when I'm ready to think, and when I have nothing left to think about then it's time to stop. It's unavoidable that the process is going to look different from time to time, especially in terms of both the frequency and construction of the posts, but if I resist the temptation to overanalyze the main concept is the same as always. What that means for now is a change to the pattern or expectation for TOA, but that should be OK - it's why we have email notifications for new posts. There are some current features that I might retain in some capacity - for example, I'll likely continue holding the longer posts for Sundays - but I think for the most part things will go up on TOA when they are ready to go up. Ultimately, this feels like the reason why I said the worst thing for a blog is a schedule - when you put a frame around something, it quickly goes from supportive to restrictive, and when the goal is better thinking there is nothing as detrimental as a restriction.

it's just not the time to not say

It might seem like the point of slowing down is to take a moment for recharging the batteries, but it turns out that the change in pace can sometimes help restart stalled projects. This has been my experience in the TOA context, where I've used quiet periods to examine the backlog in my draft folder and find ways to move those posts closer to completion. You could also include in this category results like the esteemed "Reading Clearout" posts, which I generally finalize by determining that the fifth sentence in the draft is actually the final sentence, again a process that seems to come more naturally during a so-called break. When I started up around a year ago with the idea of organizing TOA around an informal "in-season/off-season" pattern, I think what I had in mind was a structure that would make the best of both worlds - a way to benefit from schedule-driven elements such as deadline urgency while also ensuring that I blocked some time to review anything I'd left half-finished. In hindsight I still think this was a good decision, the seasonal concept loosely mirroring one of my favorite podcasts, More or Less. This podcast has maintained its momentum for at least several years (and likely more), so in my mind it implies a format for sustainability and longevity.

Of course, TOA has some major differences from that podcast, the least of these being the fact that this isn't a job for me or anyone else (there is no "staff" at TOA), but perhaps more importantly that I don't have a large audience imposing certain expectations on my output. To put it another way, this only happens if I do it, and I don't have to do it. This line of thinking became an unanticipated feature of the slow periods within the seasonal structure, when I had so much downtime that I found myself wondering at certain odd moments whether it would make sense to shutdown TOA. Despite being unanticipated, I could hardly describe it as a surprise - I know all things end, even great things, and I've known this all along; I like to think I've tried my best to make TOA exceptional, but exceptional doesn't make it an exception.

The memory of these deliberations simmered under the surface of last week's post, which considered the endings of various favorite podcasts from over the years. I suspect the hosts of those shows went through something similar to what I just described before their respective decisions to end their shows. The post meandered to something resembling an original thought, or at least an original question - why stop the show when you could just reformat it? I suppose there is no way for me to know for certain, but I suspect I have a decent guess - they didn't feel like it. I think that's what will make TOA different than those examples, at least over the next few months, because I don't have any aversion at all from doing the equivalent of reducing an hour-long show into seven minutes. I think this has always been true to an extent for despite my struggles evading the various obstacles created by my self-imposed scheduling expectations, I've had no difficulty hitting "publish" on posts short enough to fit on a CVS receipt.

I suppose in the end it all comes down to a fairly straightforward consideration - do I have anything left to say? When I took a moment last week to scribble down "commitment to the Swiss cheese model" as a reminder for a future post, it seems clear that I still have at least one reason to keep moving along with TOA. Recent readers may also recall the Proper Labmin post, which listed out a few different ideas I'm kicking around in the draft folder. It seems that while there are some things I need to say, then it remains the time to say them. And of course, there is the other side of the argument - if I stop, then maybe it becomes harder to say certain things when I need to say them, and there is nothing worse than not saying something when it's time to say it. In fact, these days it seems like few things are more important than being able to say the things that need to be said when it's time to say them. But to be honest, despite all the good reasons I guess I just don't know regarding the long-term, so I suppose it remains to be seen - whether I will continue to generate writing ideas, whether I will feel up to the effort of working those ideas into a coherent final draft, and whether I will feel its worth the risk of hitting that post button so that I can say what needs to be said; regarding all that, now is just not the time to say.

scheduling the death rattle

I suspect the average person these days has a perception that podcasts took off relatively recently, maybe sometime in the last five years or so, and perhaps this is accurate. The saddest cases may be convinced that Serial was the first-ever podcast, and that debuted in 2014. I'm not the best person to ask, however, as I never really noticed when podcasts broke through to achieve mainstream popularity. This is likely because I've been listening to podcasts for well over a decade. For me, the ascent of podcasts was like the experience of napping on an empty beach only to wake up surrounded by sunburnt tourists. I get that it's a big deal, but no need to tell me about it - I've been here all along.

If memory serves correctly my first podcast could have been as early as fall 2006, my freshman year of college, when I had a job as the campus mailman. This required that I walk around campus a few hours each week delivering letters and magazines to various department buildings. I would pass the time on these mail routes by listening to an episode or two of a favorite show. I continued listening to podcasts after graduation, filling my ears while commuting, running errands, or completing household admin, and as I look back I could see why you might say podcasts have been an ever-present fixture throughout my adult life. A few of my favorite shows from the early days remain in my current lineup - notable examples include EconTalk (which debuted in 2006) and More Or Less (a show I likely picked up when Tim Harford began hosting in 2007). Bill Simmons, who entered the podcast world in 2007 with The BS Report, also remains a regular listen.

But over fifteen or so years there have been many more examples of shows that have come and gone. The ones that stick out in my memory are not the shows that I abandoned due to waning interest (Radiolab, The Moth, 99% Invisible, among many others) but rather those that stopped producing new episodes. The first one I can remember is Brainfood Dude, an hour-long podcast that reviewed other podcasts - each weekly episode featured a few highlight segments from various podcasts. The final episode aired almost exactly ten years ago today. I don't remember the exact details of this last show, just a vague recollection that the host, Michael J. Franz, cited how a new job (as a teacher?) made it impossible for him to put in the necessary work for creating the show. Brainfood Dude was an invaluable source of new shows for me - other than occasionally checking podcast rankings, I didn't have another way to discover new shows.

There is a chance that I learned about Common Sense from one of those episodes, another favorite podcast that joined Brainfood Dude in retirement a few years ago. Dan Carlin's decision in the fall of 2017 to end his monthly current events program remains the biggest loss in the history of my listening habit. In his "final" episode, Carlin shared that he no longer had the energy to produce regular shows, citing the present political climate as one challenge but also mentioning that he was just getting older. (I say "final" because Common Sense has returned one or two times each year since it "ended", these episodes seemingly going up whenever the mood strikes Carlin.) I eventually filled the void with Middle Theory, a show hosted by Micah Hanks, who maintained a weekly schedule until just a few weeks ago when he also announced a schedule reduction for his podcast. Hanks, like Franz and Carlin, cited the impossibility of maintaining the workload necessary to keep up with the schedule for the show. I anticipate Middle Theory will follow the Common Sense example of airing a few times a year whenever Hanks feels the need to record another episode.

The obvious connecting thread of these examples is the way each host reached a point where he could no longer meet the demands of producing his show. But this raises a question - what were the demands? My understanding is that each program operated on its own terms, with no contracts or outside obligations forcing the hosts to produce episodes. The specific answers would obviously vary by show, but there is a shared reality that at some level the hosts imposed their own demands onto themselves. You can see this if you consider how the breaking points are measurable not with a single metric but rather in a combination of metrics. Brainfood Dude, for example, ended not because Franz didn't have time for producing a podcast, but because he didn't have enough time each week to produce a weekly hour-long podcast. Common Sense and Middle Theory both opted to reduce schedules, implying that the issue was not just about energy level but more specifically the energy level available per month or week given a fixed length for each show. This leads me to a possible answer - the demands on the hosts were driven by the length of each show, which necessitated a certain amount of work in order to complete a show. What I don't understand is why each host felt obligated to show some loyalty to this detail. At some level we all know the initial decision about length was made by each host on his own, so as audience members we should agree that these hosts are well within their rights to change the length as they see fit. In these selected examples, the hosts opted instead to reduce the schedule, even driving it down to zero in Franz's case. 

This leaves open the question of whether it would have been a better decision to record shorter episodes. However, I don't think this is a natural way to think about such problems. The way people retire, for example, has a similar element - one week you work forty hours, the next week you are done. I don't know many examples of people who, starting at age sixty, work a little less per year until they gradually reach zero hours a decade or two later. It seems that when we reach these crossroads where energy levels are suddenly short of requirements, we lean toward making a culprit of the schedule rather than reducing the intensity within the schedule, as if the schedule itself is some kind of fixed universal law. It's almost like we constantly imagine ourselves on one kind of treadmill or the other, where the only options are to keep going or step off. I think of this as form of schedule tyranny - our minds lock into the idea of making changes to maintain the schedule such that we forget the fact of having a schedule is subject to change.

The tyranny of the schedule manifests in many other examples. For example, I always wonder how many aspiring marathoners land on the injured list after blindly churning out the mileage scribbled into their training plans, some of which offer little guidance to inexperienced runners in terms of how to listen to their bodies and notice signs of overtraining. I also suspect that many nutrition plans work within the framework of the three square meals - breakfast, lunch, and dinner - which rule out the possibility that the number of meals could be adjusted (in either direction) to the benefit of improved health. My own experience with TOA has exposed me to a version of this issue in the context of writing. When a friend started a blog a few months ago, my only advice was to resist the temptation for setting a schedule, with my exact words something like "the worst thing for a blog is a schedule". Again, the issue in my mind has something to do with the effect of a schedule on sustainability, burnout, and energy levels, all of which need the right attention whenever someone is embarking on a challenge.

I suppose my advice reveals my understanding of the decisions made by those podcasts. If I had a weekly or monthly show with thousands of listeners, I would feel the pressure to keep up with expectations. I know I've been guilty of it myself on TOA, sometimes wrapping up posts in the wee hours just to meet a self-imposed deadline of one sort or the other. The reason I advise others to avoid scheduling is because I've come to see it as the fastest route to consistent mediocrity. This may not be obvious right away - in fact, for many beginners the external framework helps them get going. The challenge is separating completed work from quality work, which I think is a skill too advanced for those in the early stages. I think back sometimes to nights at the college library where I would see a few classmates rushing to meet a deadline or cramming ahead of a big exam. We were taking advantage of a certain energy that comes with the urgency of an approaching deadline, but we never figured out a way to determine if our eventual output represented our best work. In a one-off setting such as a final exam, there were no future reference points to reveal whether we had met our potential or had fallen far short. Even with top grades, you wouldn't know if your study process had led to your best work. In my mind there is a possibility that these experiences reinforced the reward of finishing over the satisfaction of completing the highest quality work, and I think a similar problem confronts beginners in creative pursuits.

I believe everyone eventually reaches a point where the relationship between completing work and skill improvement begin to separate from each other. In this moment, it's no longer good enough to just write, baby - you have to develop an understanding of your deficiencies so that you can deliberately work on the necessary skills. This became obvious to me over the course of several years on TOA. Initially, the idea of posting on a certain schedule helped me get through specific challenges for beginners - writer's block, committing time to the craft, editing and proofreading, and so on. It's a fact that some of my best posts were wrapped up at midnight, or later, because my invented schedule had set the publication date for sunrise. But over the years enough mediocre examples accumulated in my finished work that it became clear how a schedule at times forced me to prioritize posting ahead of quality. This feeling should be familiar to any writer - just go back to something you finished and note the revisions you would make today. If you feel the whole thing could do with a renovation, you probably should have spent more time on it.

For me, the only reason I would have posted such work comes back to the ever-present influence of the schedule. It's kind of like that old adage about the importance of showing up - of course it's impossible to succeed unless you show up, but just showing up isn't sufficient for success. The way I see it, the structure of a schedule is only helpful if it makes you show up to your work, but after you arrive the schedule quickly loses its relevance. The most helpful thing for improving the quality of your work is to separate the process from the influence of a schedule, especially if a schedule forces you to rush or compromise for the sake of completion. I suppose another way to express all of this is that you can write without posting, but the problem is when you post without writing.

Ultimately I think this consideration underscored the decisions made by those three podcasters. The reasons they shared undoubtedly explain tangible factors related to stopping their shows, but I suspect at some level they knew their shows were dropping in quality (or were about to if they kept going). For them, the shows required a certain level of effort not solely from the perspective of finishing the episode but also to meet a personal quality standard. As a listener, I can attest to this fact - I believe Common Sense will be one of the very best podcasts I'll ever hear, and Middle Theory had its own moments of supreme quality. When you make great work, you know when you've made average work, and I think this is what it came down to - for those hosts it was the inability to meet a personal standard that made it necessary to walk away.

I guess this leaves me with one unanswered question - why not then find an output that would maintain the quality level? Could Brainfood Dude have worked as a monthly program? What about Common Sense episodes that were fifteen minutes long instead of an hour? These examples reflect personal decisions about which I can only speculate, and of course there is the possibility as noted earlier that this thought never crossed their minds. However, I think I can look once again at my own work for a possible explanation. The challenge I've struggled with at times on TOA is the confusion of the craft with the output. At some level what I am doing here is writing, but once you involve a medium it becomes something different - on TOA I'm not just writing, I'm writing essays. If you add a schedule to the equation then it changes again - I'm writing essays posted daily (in 2018) or writing longer essays that are posted on Sundays (in 2021). If start printing everything I wrote and placing those papers between two covers, then I'm writing books; if this led to some kind of contract, then I'm writing a book series. It's an inevitable problem in a way because any activity is inevitably altered by the setting, which means the setting always exerts some influence over the activity. You might say you are relaxing, but if you are relaxing on the couch then it's different from relaxing in a hammock. The problem with writing as an activity is that the activity of writing changes the writing, which changes the author's relationship with the writing. I suppose this forms my hypothesis about those podcasts ending rather than restructuring - at some point the structures of those shows became so intertwined with essence of the work that the podcasters could no longer envision the work happening outside the existing structure.

This conclusion may be fair enough, but I think it represents a sort of missed opportunity. Why not try a different structure, just to see what happens? The point is underscored by the fact that opting to step back was essentially a death rattle for these shows, which meant the end of the creativity inspired by the work. In my mind, this was brought about in the roundabout manner of scheduling tyranny, and it never felt necessary. At the heart of change is always the fear of the unknown, and as creators this fear lurks in the white space of a new page or the silence ahead of the next word. We are used to confronting this fear. But there is something different when we face the fear of a changing structure because the structure was our ally - we showed up on schedule until we could look the unknown in the eye, and the looming deadline forced us to bring our skills and gifts into the work. And yet, we never realized that the structure of the schedule subtly undermined the relationship with the work. Being able to make a change in such situations is critical because in some ways it's a matter of survival, just as it always is when we must change, and the only thing at stake is our loyalty to our own abilities.

This is why I can't work out if there was wisdom or folly at the heart of those podcast decisions. The demands the hosts placed on themselves meant it was wiser to stop rather than continue, for the path ahead made it impossible to create their best work. But could they have rediscovered themselves within a revised structure? Ultimately, they knew best for themselves, and because of this I think they chose best for themselves. We should all be so lucky to see such realities for ourselves, to know when loyalty to the self is more important than loyalty to the external; we should all hope that the courage necessary for stepping away does not fail us in the moment of need, and that we have the strength to step back in when we must go again.

reading clearout (june 2022, part three)

Hi reader, hope you are enjoying the longest days of the year! If not, here are some notes on recent reading to help pass the time.

Mud Sweeter than Honey by Margo Rejmer (March 2022)

In this oral history, Rejmer gives voice to the Albanians from all walks of life who lived and suffered under the communist rule of Enver Hoxha. If this specific chapter of recent European history is unknown to you (as it was to me before I read this book), then it may help to see my first note from Mud Sweeter than Honey - Stalin’s death marked the end of the cruelest form of communist regimes, but Albania was an exception. One thing that sticks out from this account was how ruthlessly the totalitarian regime treated those who were educated, sensitive, or outspoken, perhaps revealing what those in power considered the greatest threat to their absolute rule. I think Rejmer's work in a broader sense speaks to the necessity of artists to use their abilities to set the record straight, with writers obviously bearing a significant portion of this responsibility in the aftermath of a time when so many voices were lost, silenced, or erased by the forces of propaganda, coercion, and terror. This isn't the kind of work from which I feel compelled to recommend specific chapters, but I should note that "A Stone on the Border" was the most unforgettable of the many searing accounts.

Dialogues and Letters by Seneca (June 2019)

Seneca, also known as "Seneca the Younger" (I couldn't find any info on "Seneca the Older") was a Roman Stoic philosopher whose work influenced many important figures of future generations (including Dante, Montaigne, and this blog). This particular work collected a number of his better-known essays, including "On the Shortness of Life", alongside letters written to someone named Lucilius (who is best known for being the recipient of these letters). I don't have a strong recall of this read from three years ago but it seems like relying on a handful of collected notes is an appropriate idea - as this book itself suggests, it's crucial for readers to identify their own nuggets of relevant wisdom within written works. 

It seems that the aforementioned essay was the likely source for a handful of the most impressive notes. I've written down that life seems short only because we waste time, that we should not put off for later anything that might be ruined by a downturn in health, and that the best way to shorten life is to pursue another's preoccupations. I should also mention that despite his reputation it seems Seneca was not necessarily an original thinker but rather one who collected, formalized, and popularized Stoic philosophy. This suggests that a modern-day Seneca might make for an ideal Business Bro ("Business Bro the Younger") but some of his insights offer counter-evidence to my grim conclusion. For example, he notes that a strong performer is often merely stronger than the task, or that we should avoid tasks which generate more tasks, cannot be easily abandoned, or come with the potential of a shifting finish line; Business Bro or not, it seems clear that Seneca would at least share my distaste for admin.

leftovers - reading clearout, june 2022 (never split the difference - tactics)

Last week's summary about Chris Voss's Never Split the Difference omitted some of the specific tactics I thought could help anyone in a negotiation, so let's take a moment to examine those in this post.

Mislabeling

I mentioned this briefly in the original reading clearout but return today to clarify another aspect of the point. If you are having trouble engaging the other party in a discussion, a deliberate mislabel can help draw them back in by way of tempting them into a correction. You can also employ a similar move when someone is unresponsive - ask, have you given up on this project? If they intend to reengage with the project, they'll jump at this opportunity to say "no".

A positive approach to negativity

I took a couple of interesting notes about negativity within a negotiation. The general theme across those notes is that you are better off going straight at the negative, which is for a number of reasons - denying the obvious negatives in a situation adds credence to it; acknowledging and diffusing the negative helps build working relationships; open discussion of the negative helps create a safe zone for empathy. 

These remind me of an incident from a Business Bro Training I attended a couple of years ago, which had a portion about conflict. I don't think I've written about this yet, but as I plan to eventually I'll keep it short for now. The main idea in the session covered how to manage and resolve conflict, which I mostly agreed with in terms of being a valuable managerial skill, but toward the end I raised my hand and pointed out that conflict sometimes represented the best opportunity for a manager to collect information that would otherwise remain out of sight. In my mind, the best approach first manages the tension of the conflict until all the information is collected, then the focus can shift to resolving the conflict. As Voss himself notes, a skilled negotiator can take a similar approach and use conflict to energize collaboration and encourage problem-solving.

The logistical argument

One way to regain control in a discussion is to ask for the logistics. This is a good tactic for those moments when you feel like the other side's good ideas are overwhelming your interests. By asking for the logistical details (how can we do that?) you may be able to wear down your opponent before they can take advantage of the moment to push for more concessions.

Human nature

Speaking of concessions, you should remember that many people feel better when they receive a concession. It may be wise to determine your single fair offer, then work your way down to it in one or two steps. (It may also help to keep this in mind when someone makes the first offer, as you can probably negotiate it down a step or two if they are using this tactic against you.)

It's also human nature to have more confidence in a highly-specific number. Rather than using round digits, throw in a few random figures - instead of $100.00, use $101.77, and so on. If this feels silly or doesn't fit the specifics of your situation, use ranges instead of exact numbers because ranges have the power to make you seem less aggressive.

proper corona admin, vol 106 - individual responsibility

There was a point around a few months ago where it seemed that being vaccinated against COVID-19 was about to become a minimum requirement for holding a good job in America. I started writing a post about this idea, which analyzed it through the lens of various helmet football incidents at the time, but I eventually stepped away from my draft. In my mind, the key point was that being unvaccinated meant a given player was more likely to miss a game - to miss work, in other words - and surely this risk would have some effect when teams were making decisions about signing players. However, I soon concluded that the effect would be almost impossible to identify and essentially abandoned the post. It may have worked out to my benefit - rereading the draft now, I don't see anything in the four paragraphs that I wish I'd posted a year ago.

All that said, I still suspect my idea remains true to some extent. My perspective today is far more cynical than it was a year ago, when I was essentially trying to make a logical extension on current events - if Aaron Rodgers is going to miss one game per year due to COVID, would you prefer having him or a slightly worse quarterback whose vaccinations will rule out such a consideration? The way I see it now is that since America is a country that finds a way to discriminate against anyone for anything at anytime, why would this situation with the vaccines be any different? I suppose I should wait and see before jumping to any definite conclusions, especially given that unforeseen mutations could mean that sometime in the near future the fact of being vaccinated will have no bearing on your likelihood of becoming sick. But if the initial data regarding the benefits of vaccination prove durable over time, then I have no doubt vaccination status - essentially, a way for an employer to factor in someone's risk of missing work - will soon become just another way to silently discriminate against individuals.

I think at some level it's too bad that I feel compelled to write this post. To me, anyone who spends some time with either a healthcare professional or a reliable dataset will overwhelmingly conclude that getting vaccinated is the best decision available to an unvaccinated person. It's also the best decision for someone thinking communally, given the way it lowers the risk of transmission to those who either cannot be vaccinated or who remain at high risk despite getting booster doses. But today's society isn't at the point where everyone always does the best thing, for themselves or for others, so here we are having to accept the situation. I can understand why someone values this decision as a specific expression of freedom. As individuals, we have a responsibility to accept what others choose and we should be careful, very careful, before criticizing choice, or legislating against it.

I'm not interested in telling people what to do, but I think I can offer an idea about what will happen as a result of one choice or another. The way I see it, we're talking about a decision where someone freely chooses to make themselves worse off, not just in terms of health but also finances, and I can't quite understand it. Am I the only one who thinks that ten years from now vaccinated people will be far better off than those who turned down the shots? There are organizations, including mine, where being unvaccinated rules you out from employment, so such a choice eliminates the possibility of pursuing one of the many good careers available in our line of work. The industries that have standards based on commissions or work volume punish you for absence, though perhaps not in a life-changing way, but enough to create some strain if you have shaky finances. If you factor in consequences such as long COVID, then you might be healthy enough for work yet impacted in such a way that it lowers your performance quality, which will surely impact bonuses or promotions. The way I see it, the vaccinations are basically just free money, making you more likely to land a good job or be available for work, so why not just get one and stay on track for that picket fence? I don't feel that doing things just for the money is always a wise strategy, but it does pass for wisdom in this country.

reading clearout (june 2022, part two)

Hi reader, another look today at a couple of my recent reads.

The Damned Utd by David Peace (March 2022)

As we all know 2022 is a World Cup year, which means a few more soccer books than usual here in the TOA atmosphere. The Damned Utd covers legendary manager Brian Clough's sensational forty-four day tenure in 1974 as manager of defending champion Leeds United, written as a novel and reading like a journal while remaining fully loyal to real-life events and results. Interspersed into the main arc is the backstory of Clough's managerial career up to that point, which saw him lead Derby County to incredible heights while also establishing himself as one of the great personas in the soccer world. The book is a spectacular creative accomplishment in my mind, perhaps occasionally trying a little too hard to bring the reader into Clough's headspace, but nevertheless a read that I recommend to any fan of the sport. I thought the most interesting idea from the book was a leadership insight - the best leaders are the ones who, recognizing the innate need to feel admired or respected, find a way to help others feel fulfilled in this regard while also knowing how to motivate themselves through their own low points.

Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss (November 2021)

I was surprised to see summaries of this book reference the nine key principles Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator, uses to succeed in the world of highs-stakes negotiations - my recollection was that this book lacked such a rigid structure. I still thought this was a highly informative book, perhaps most useful for a reader with some personal experience in negotiations who could use Never Split the Difference to first evaluate their own process, then iterate using Voss's insights as guidelines or suggestions. For me, I found it to be an easy book with a number of helpful observations that I've carried with me since my reading, but I don't anticipate I will suddenly become the world's greatest negotiator for the sole fact of this read. One consistent emphasis in this book was on the use of labeling, which Voss sees as a surefire way to advance a conversation. A label usually forces the other side to say "I agree" or tempts them to correct you. For example, if you say "it seems like X is important to you" then the other side can either agree with X, which may help establish rapport in the negotiation, or it can disagree, which could lead them to reveal previously unknown information as they correct you.

This gets to a larger theme of the book - the main objective of the negotiation process is to acquire information. This links to some of the other notes I took from Never Split the Difference - listen as much as possible (since only the speaker can share information); avoid the temptation to fit new details into existing mental frameworks (since you may misidentify the relevance of novel information); remember to confirm the type of information contained in "yes" (because "yes" can mean commitment to action, but sometimes is used to either escape the discussion or buy time for an eventual "no"). As mentioned, I thought this book had quite a few helpful details (I may return to these in another post) but for most people just remembering to collect information will help them succeed in a negotiation. There is only so much wiggle room in these situations, so the sooner you know all the details the better positioned you are to find a solution that brings as much benefit as possible to all involved parties.

how to skip what you love

"I love doing that," I hear from my right.

Love doing what?

It takes a moment for me to realize that the comment was made for my benefit, this delay explained by my conviction that the Comm Ave Mall is for the people who ignore everything in it. By the time I turn my head, the woman had walked on, or I should say had kept walking, now alongside the squares, then past them, her indifference to my delayed acknowledgment leaving me no option but to speculate on what she meant by the comment. Love doing what? I can only assume it referred to my impulsive callback to kindergarten, jumping with both feet into a momentary recess from the grinding repetition of adult days.

The chalk outline had come up so fast that it almost took me by surprise, again, but on this run I'd noticed just in time. I had confirmed the path was clear, then angled sharply across the mall to align myself ahead of the diversion. I wasn't familiar with this game, I had never played it, but now there was no time to think so I did it - two feet if one square, one each if two squares, and a serious knee injury if three or more squares. Hopscotch bore some resemblance to the agility ladder I'd abandoned years ago, at the end of my playing days, so even in just a couple of seconds my feet had recalled the old rhythm and skipped themselves through to the final square. Like childhood, it was over in a flash. I stutter-stepped over the finish line, ready for the resigned mechanics of my daily jog, but then I'd heard the comment from the person who was now almost out of sight, each stride taking her further from the past.

Why would someone who had just claimed to love doing something immediately walk past an opportunity to do it? This logical question might not be entirely fair. It could be based on some personal ideal for consistency of both expression and action, which isn't a realistic expectation in practice. Who hasn't claimed some new inspiration, yet changed nothing about their creative work? Who hasn't seen the motivation from the morning disappear into another afternoon of inactivity? Maybe a physical limitation or fresh injury prevented her from fulfilling the scribbled prophecies of the pavement. I myself would never jump into a hopscotch game while walking, so maybe that's what the comment meant - like me, she would play if she were running, but being out for a walk was an entirely different matter.

I supposed it's possible I'm fixated on the wrong question. There certainly isn't any way to know, for sure, what was meant in the comment. But I also wonder why the comment was made at all, particularly as it bore some resemblance to a style of commentary that will be familiar to any city dweller - a guarded quip, fired over a shielded shoulder, all without breaking stride as the speaker retreats toward some meaningless appointment. There are so many moments in the city where I wonder for whose benefit such comments are made - the listener, or the speaker? In a situation like this one, I can't see why it helps me to know what a stranger loves doing, so I guess this is at least one example of the latter. I suspect there is something everyone carries around inside them, ignored and silenced and restrained for so long that they eventually forget it's even there, some shapeless remnant of a quality that sits for years in the shadows of the soul, then in a flash it's up and about and before they know it the sound is rising through their chest and picking up speed and it can't be stopped, it's out, at long last, for some much needed air... and wait, I love doing what?

I can't speak for anyone else, I just know that anything you skip for long enough will disappear from your life. I think there have been a few moments for me where, looking back, I unknowingly placed myself in great danger because I was trying to stifle my playfulness, which had always informed and advised my best instincts. I would look for a game to play and, if I couldn't find one, I would invent it; I would look for the humor in a situation and, if it didn't exist, I would create it. Playfulness is a quality that is so far removed from the adult's mind that I suspect most of us don't see it, particularly when we are complicit in leaving it behind somewhere like an assassin dumping a corpse. I remember recently thinking that a friend's new partner was a great match for him because they both shared this quality, but when I pointed this out to another friend it turned out the big revelation was my insight that playfulness was our mutual friend's best quality, or that it was a quality at all. I don't share this anecdote to highlight my powers of observation - it wasn't too long ago that I would have failed to notice this as well.

I don't find it difficult to imagine some explanations for this situation. The responsibilities of adult life leave no room for play - careers, caregiving, and of course that relentless admin, just to name a few, all suffer from too much playing around. I also think it matters that the biggest shift from childhood to adulthood is the way life becomes defined by perpetual competition, which of course is a systemic reality - the ruthless calculations of profit and loss mean any consideration of play is squeezed right out of the equation (perhaps we can add playfulness to capitalism's long list of collateral damages). I may lament the way many around me seem unable to grasp the loss of their own playfulness, but given the reality of modern life it's hardly a surprise.

That said, the most striking thing about it all is that if you look closely you see so many examples of people grasping for ways to bring their playfulness back into life. I think there is an element of this in the way people spend time around children or animals, and then there are the more obvious examples like recreational sports leagues, improv classes, or even drinking games that manufacture excuses for adults to play. I would even entertain the argument that something like TikTok thrives because it fills the void of playfulness that diminishes everyday life. And what is at the core of comedy standards such as standup, satire, or even a dad joke if not an injection of playfulness into the mundanity of daily life, current events, or common language? Somewhere at the bottom of this list, perhaps the very bottom, are the fleeting moments where we veer off-course for just a moment, just to mention that we'd like to play, because if we can't find a way to skip skipping it, and we don't know to just do the things we love to do, then at the very least we can keep acknowledging what's missing until we're ready to jump back in.

reading clearout (june 2022, part one)

Let's get June rolling with a few thoughts on a couple of recent reads.

Severance by Ling Ma (April 2022)

This novel follows a millennial (!) living in NYC as an epic pandemic (!!) slowly grinds modern society to a halt. Ling Ma's fictional world gripped by "Shen Fever" bears some resemblance to the reality we all know as COVID-19 (there are quite a few prescient moments in this 2018 release) but their version of The New Normal holds much more of a post-apocalyptic meaning relative to our own. For the most part I enjoyed reading Severance, though I would have preferred if the structure had placed greater emphasis on detailing the experience of living through the pandemic.

Some may suspect that I choose this book solely for the plot's resemblance to the post-2020 reality, which may be true but seems unlikely (I haven't sought out any other fiction set in a pandemic). Others might associate Severance to the otherwise unrelated television show of the same name, which I mention because I happen to know one of the show's stars, but I don't think this is why I read the book, either. (In fact, I have no idea how I ended up reading the book.) All that said, I did notice a shared feature of both book and show - despite enjoying the experience of consuming each, I didn't get the sense that my most urgent questions were always front of mind for the creators of these works. As mentioned, with the book I was left wondering about the pandemic itself; with the show my main question was why a company existed such that it required its employees to undergo the procedure. I don't bring these up as criticisms (or maybe I don't want to admit that I am being critical) but I do think both products would improve with a slight shift of emphasis in these directions. I think it's worth reinforcing a specific point as I speak of these examples - the hardest thing for a creator is understanding what makes their work interesting to someone else, and I suspect a lot of good work never reaches its full potential because the creator is either unwilling or unable to make the necessary concessions to acknowledge an audience's interest.

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li (February 2022)

Li collects a series of essays written during a period of her life when she battled suicidal depression, a struggle which included at least one hospitalization. There are some searing moments in Dear Friend, but there are also passages told from a certain distance, which left me with the impression that Li pulled this book together as a way to continue progressing on her journey. My notes are a mix of mundane observations seemingly unrelated to this book (such as how travelers always leave home hoping to return as a different person) and insights that hint at rough drafts of a thesis statement (such as her question of why we hide from the unanswerable like 'what makes us forget the good things in life?'). There is also plenty here that reflects on the meaning of writing, including an observation that one specific virtue of the craft is the way it necessarily challenges an author's tendency toward self-protection. What I will remember from this compelling read are all the brief moments where I felt like I had glimpsed a hint of a hard-earned wisdom - that a person who isn't living for others doesn't necessarily live for the self, since such a thing is a particular skill; that the understanding between people always threatens a break, for understanding enables the worst form of silence; that the moment we feel like we know a person is the moment we lose them, since we throw away our desire to learn more about another.