Happy Sunday from Taipei! I've launched a Slack community focused on the unleashing the human side of work and making sense of how people can do work that matters in a time filled with busyness and anxiety. You can join the conversation here. You can also put pressure on me to keep this going by sponsoring it for $1 a month on Patreon.
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#1 Reunions: Reflections from a class of 1988 Harvard Grad at her 30th reunion: “at the end of the day, most of our conversations at the various parties and panel discussions throughout the weekend centered on a desire for love, comfort, intellectual stimulation, decent leaders, a sustainable environment, friendship, and stability.”
#2 Time & Kids: Titled, "Your Real Biological Clock Is You’re Going to Die," this reflection on time in our modern world was powerful. The author argues that we structure our lives "as if time were something a person accumulated" and among other things, this causes us to delay marriage and kids much longer:
If you intend to have children, but you don’t intend to have them just yet, you are not banking extra years as a person who is still too young to have children. You are subtracting years from the time you will share the world with your children.
...and how all of this is fine, as long as you are young and healthy:
“Our civilization is remarkably hostile to the needs of life, from the helplessness of babyhood to the frailty of old age. The system is set up for healthy, productive, independent individuals, and one absorbs the lesson that one should try to stay in this class as long and as securely as one can. “
#3 Gig Mania Over? Anecdotally I find tremendous fear in the US related to not being employed - even in cases where people have tremendous financial resources to take time off. The career is becoming the defining commitment in people’s lives. This HBR article had some interesting reflections on the over-hype of the gig economy (which I wrote about here). It offered this incredible data point:
the percentage of millennials with full-time careers is rising at a brisk clip from 45% in 2016 to 66% in 2018, according to the data we collected.
#4 Coddling, Discrimination & Tech: I have been a fan of Professor Scott Galloway's take on the tech industry as well as his ability to share vulnerability in public. He has a great weekly newsletter that ranges on a variety of topics, but I really enjoyed this week's one which covers internet trolls, the impact of tech on youth and story of codding his son at home and what he really needs.
#5 Idleness: From a book I recently finished, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer:
Seneca, in advising retirement, had also warned of dangers. In a dialogue called “On Tranquillity of Mind,” he wrote that idleness and isolation could bring to the fore all the consequences of having lived life in the wrong way, consequences that people usually avoided by keeping busy—that is, by continuing to live life in the wrong way.
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