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Greetings from Boston! Thank you to our newest Patron Tricia...thank you!.
#1 Bullshit Jobs: I am almost done with "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber and it is one of the best books I've read this year. I may be biased because of the topic, but his holistic look at how we ended up in such a weird state of affairs in our economy and working world is a delight. Funny, insightful, sad and deep. (also see his original longform post from 2013).
#2 Anticareerists: Andrew Taggart makes the compelling case for being an "anti-careerist" which complements Graeber's work. I've written about how pervasive the tendency to ask kids what they want to be and I love this suggestion for an alternative:
"We should stop asking our children what they want to be when they grow up. It’s a pernicious question. And we should want to live in a world where the pin-you-down question, “What do you do?,” is seen as so terribly vulgar that it’s not worthy of serious consideration. We should kill that question as well."
#3 North Korea: The detailed story of the strange imprisonment of Otto Warmbier and an exploration of the mystery of how he went from health prisoner to brain-damaged and being returned to America without explanation.
#4 Rest: Alex Pang's book titled "Rest" was a good read that dove into the different aspects of what helped some of the most "productive" people be successful such as taking walks, naps, sleep, working less and taking sabbaticals. Some of the chapters were a bit heavy on anecdote, but one of the central themes was about working less:
"Today’s workplace respects overwork, even though it’s counterproductive, and treats four-hour days as “contemptibly slack,” even though they produce superior results."
The book discussed some research from the 1950's that looked at the number of hours scientists spent on their work and talked about how the results produced an M-curve:
As you can see, this is the fundamental challenge of working less in today's climate as well. At 50+ hours, you are as productive as the person working twenty and it would seem absurd to suggest that the person should work less. Instead what happens (and I've seen this in the corporate world) is the person working much, much less lies about how much they work and pretends they are working much more than they are.
#5 Self-Employment: This article I wrote on the ten most surprising things self-employment seems to be getting some positive reaction and to me felt like an announcement of the retirement from my "career" as referenced in Andrew's above article.
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