Greetings from Bali! I forgot to put in the link last week to the 175+ reads from 2018. Here it is.
#1 Reverse Career Ladder: Adam writes about his journey opting for less money as he progressed through his career:
All three jobs—at a firm, in a corporate law department, in a newsroom—were good jobs. But each one made me happier than the last. Each one was more satisfying than the last. Each one was I think more valuable than the last
#2 Philosophy & Equality: I found this profile of the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, who seems like a pretty intriguing person. She has thought deeply about freedom, inequality and values.
People now have the freedom to have crosscutting identities in different domains. At church, I’m one thing. At work, I’m something else. I’m something else at home, or with my friends. The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains?” She paused. “That is what it is to be free.
If you aren't convinced, here is a fun comment about her son:
I was in tears,” Anderson said. “I’m, like, ‘Art school? You’re an anarchist, and ninety-nine per cent of people there go into commercial art. Really?’
#3 Knowledge Workers: I highlighted over 100 things from the book Cubed, which offered a fascinating perspective on the history of work from the perspective of the office.
Drucker’s explanation for the rise of the knowledge worker in the 1950s and 1960s remains striking. Rather than work itself changing, he believed the increasing life span of workers was changing the labor supply, and therefore changing the kinds of jobs available. An individual could imagine him- or herself working longer—in which case, it no longer made sense to drop out of high school, or avoid college, in order to enter the labor force. One didn’t need a high school education to land a desk in the steno pool; neither precalculus nor the history of the War of 1812 would serve you in your work. A kind of educational inflation, however, soon made a high school degree a requirement, as, in our time, a college degree has become, for working virtually any kind of office job. The jobs had not gotten more complex; the individuals working in them had. In other words, “knowledge worker” was the name for an overeducated office worker—someone whose capabilities far exceeded his or her position. “They expect to be ‘intellectuals,’ ” Drucker writes. 'And they find that they are just ‘staff.
#4 Basketball & Friendship: A feel good story about professional basketball player Charles Barkley and his unlikely friendship with a random guy at a bar.
#5 Millennials: The thing that stood out from this longform piece on the millennial experience was how deeply the idea that you should always be achieving is ingrained in our existence (this is the issue 98% of people grapple with in conversations I have).
My new watchword was “Everything that’s good is bad, everything that’s bad is good”: Things that should’ve felt good (leisure, not working) felt bad because I felt guilty for not working; things that should’ve felt “bad” (working all the time) felt good because I was doing what I thought I should and needed to be doing in order to succeed.
and...
We put up with companies treating us poorly because we don’t see another option. We don’t quit. We internalize that we’re not striving hard enough. And we get a second gig.
I find this second point appear very often when I talk to people who are struggling with work - they often suggest that “perhaps I should start a side gig.” I usually suggest it might make sense to slow down first.
The final third of the essay is worth skipping and it generally doesn’t offer anything worthwhile, but her final sentence of her next steps provides some hint that she’s arrived at a central question worth pondering:
It’s a way of thinking about life, and what joy and meaning we can derive not just from optimizing it, but living it. Which is another way of saying: It’s life’s actual work
The question indeed...
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