267 weeks. 61 months. 5 years. Those numbers all represent the same thing. How long it’s been since I last posted on this here blog thingy. That sure is a long time and begs the question — why now? That probably has to do with a string of things I’ve read recently.
- “Don’t like to write, but like having written. Hate the effort of driving pen from line to line” Frank Norris via kottke.org
- “Purpose is an essential element of you.“
Chadwick Boseman via brenebrown.com - “One little blog post is nothing on its own, but publish a thousand blog posts over a decade, and it turns into your life’s work.” Austin Kleon
- “There will always be too much to do – and this realisation is liberating.” Oliver Burkeman
- “I decided I needed to start writing things down.” kottke.org first post
Going further, the words that keep ringing in my ear — and I hope to exorcise through this little diatribe come from the following quote published fifty years ago.
“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
Richard Buckminster Fuller
“The New York Magazine Environmental Teach-In” by Elizabeth Barlow in New York Magazine (30 March 1970), p. 30
A human being had that thought in 1970. Here it is the year 2020 and so many still think a person is only worth their productivity. That value is only measured in what you can create or do for others. That your efforts must be quantified through currency or comfort or convenience. That life is a zero-sum game. That progress requires growth and positive year-over-year balance sheets.
Why can’t progress simply be zero? You replace all the things you extract in order to live. You erase your impacts so they don’t continually build up as debt to future generations. Hell, you quit externalizing costs and transferring them to living, breathing people currently on the other side of the planet or even right down the road. Accept that more isn’t always the answer because sometimes it’s the problem.
Consider this a warning that more word vomit similar to the above might come spewing out. Or it might not. I’m still swirling in the do less/do more conundrum of justifying my existence by doing things vs. simply being.