Category: Lifestyle

Categories
Lifestyle Personal Growth

Re: 15 Books with the Most Impact

Replied to 15 Books with the Most Impact by Lou Plummer (Living Out Loud)

I think you can figure out a lot about a person if you know what books have had the most impact on them.

Lou asked about people’s most impactful books. There are so many ways I could take “impactful”: books that changed my mind? books that influenced how I live? formative books that somehow shaped me?

Picking one approach didn’t feel right, so I’ve broken my list up into a few sections. Some books used to be important to me but have lost their luster with time and age. Some were just the right book at the right time. This isn’t a list of the books I think are “most worth reading” by anyone else — it’s less recommendation and more personal history.

Formative books

Books that really struck me when I read them, that I vibed with.

  1. The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander 
  2. 1984 by George Orwell — long and boring, would not read again, but what I learned from it is invaluable — it anchored a year-long political satire project I did twenty years after I read it 
  3. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  4. Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach — I’m sure this one hasn’t aged well — but I love the concept of bioregionalism — this inspired my AIM username 😄
  5. The Doubtful Guest by Edward Gorey — I was Very Into the Gorey aesthetic

Perspective changing books

  1. A Friend of the Earth by T. Coraghessan Boyle — I read this in 2005 and still think about it regularly — I learned how to accept the prospect of failure in environmental work
  2. Real Self-Care by Pooja Lakshmin — made me rethink self-care
  3. How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell — I legit was so inspired by this book I ran a year-long political satire project — it felt like it was written for me
  4. Any Duchess Will Do by Tessa Dare — I realized that romance had a lot of emotional depth and I’d been judging the genre without giving it a try (see also: How has reading romance changed your reading approach?) — now I write romance 😂
  5. The Suffragette Scandal by Courtney Milan — I. Love. This. Book. 😍 — this changed the way I think about political progress from all or nothing despair to focusing on small wins rather than the “impossible” bigger task (see also: Genre fiction is political)
  6. Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman — this makes clear that there isn’t enough time for everything, but also that maximum efficiency and productivity aren’t the answer to a good life

Books that informed my life choices and lifestyle

To some extent the reason these books were impactful was because I nudged myself their direction — I was building that way through other media, and this book is what I can point to in tipping me over the edge in times I was stuck or solidified fomenting thoughts, but might not have landed the same without having read, say, a bunch of Get Rich Slowly first.

  1. Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin — calculating my “actual hourly wage” back in 2009 was a shock
  2. Choose Yourself by James Altucher — I didn’t think this was great but it did help convince me to take a new job that meant gambling on myself
  3. Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson — I started a zero waste wiki inspired by this (and her blog), later worked on a recycling team 
  4. The 100-Mile Diet by Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon — tried to eat like this for a while, it was way too hard, now I’ve found a mellower place of supporting local food systems where I can but not being too rigid

 

(I nominate Alex and Pablo to share their lists, should they wish to play along 😉)

 

See also: So Many Books

My Reading Philosophy in 17 Guidelines

How to read more books

Why I track my reading

Categories
Entrepreneurship Lifestyle Self Care Work

My current work-life “rules”

A lot of entrepreneurs go in for hustle culture, seemingly working 60-80-hour weeks, but I’ve been trying to create a sustainable practice. To help myself take time to rest and give myself a break from work, these are the guidelines I’ve developed for myself over the past year and a half.

  1. Check email once in the morning — after finishing breakfast — and once in the afternoon, on weekdays. On weekends, try to only look once. If I open email for 2FA or reference at night, try not to read anything, or at least not work-related messages.
  2. Never look at email in bed or at my reading nook; chiefly read it on desktop.
  3. Leave my desk and take a 30+ minute lunch break, by 2pm.
  4. Always stand up and leave my desk during the (3-5 minute) breaks in my co-working sessions.
  5. Do not respond to any work emails after 6pm.
  6. No consulting work after 6pm or on weekends.
  7. Close all work documents and software at the end of the day.
  8. Physically close my laptop at the end of the work day — even if I plan to use it for personal stuff later.
  9. Stop working on creative / personal projects by 10pm and get off the desktop.
  10. No fiction writing on the weekends, only blogging.
  11. Try to not think about work projects at night.
  12. Take all government holidays off work.

I’m pretty consistent about these except for stopping personal work at night on time 😉 I’m considering dropping the writing on weekends rule 🤔 I still haven’t figured out a good way to balance personal and paid work — I have a very hard time not putting paid work first — so I might add a rule there. I also haven’t figured out a system for taking longer breaks since they’re infrequent, but my minimum standard for myself is at least one full week off paid work a year, preferably two (the week around Christmas / New Year’s is usually dead, so planning another week in summer or early fall is ideal).

 

See also:

My Typical Day

Capitalism brain

Accepting the capacity gap

Categories
Getting Shit Done Lifestyle Self Care Writing

When is it time?

A couple years ago, when I left my job, I was severely burnt out and coming out of a period of depression. I needed rest, though I was scared to let myself take it. Over a month or two, my brain cleared up enough to think about what I wanted to do next.

I realized I didn’t want to work for someone else anymore, and I was just confident enough to try working for myself. Carefully, I built a new structure for myself that gives me autonomy over my work and time, and restricted the amount of time I worked. I banned doing either client or personal work on weekends, setting hard boundaries around time for rest. I stopped writing fiction in the evenings. I’ve practiced listening to my body and adjusting my day to suit my energy levels.

And… it’s worked. My care team told me to expect it to take 18 months to two years to fully recover, a number that at first horrified me but in retrospect sounds about right. Building a system around rest also helped with my recovery from surgery this spring.

But I think I’m ready to let myself push a little harder (with intention 😉). I feel like I’ve been holding myself back as a self-protective measure.

Continue reading “When is it time?”
Categories
Lifestyle Technology

Phonefree

Bookmarked Living Like It’s 99: No Social Media, No Smartphone (alvarez.io)

At the time of writing this article, I’ve been living without social media for 3 years and without a smartphone for 2 years. Everything started as an experiment motivated by my privacy concerns. I ended up living like that for an entire different reason: peace of mind.

Technology has given us instant access to everything. From internet with all of humanity’s knowledge, to food delivery at our door, or even cat videos, you have an app for it. But technology has also given everybody access to you, and that’s bad. Not everything requires an instant response, nobody will die if you answer a text message later today or even tomorrow.

This sounds appealing, and even maybe plausible… except that I was one of those weirdos who held out as long as possible on Windows Phone, and even though I thought it was a superior OS, still eventually gave in because of apps. (Do I hate going to the ATM enough to keep a smartphone I don’t want? Apparently.)

I didn’t used to keep my phone on me nearly all the time, then I started needing reminders to take medication a couple times a day. I’m testing out whether my Fitbit alarm could fill that role for me — if so, I could stop carrying it around.

I still have my old digital point and shoot from circa 2004 — I’m curious how teensy the photos are 😂

Another thing I use it for often is recipes… but I’ve been considering getting a new computer, so my laptop could become a floater and live downstairs for that purpose instead 🤔

The cheapest Garmin car GPS model on their website is under $200. Frankly, I don’t even need directions most of the time, it’s just helpful if I go somewhere horrible to drive like downtown Seattle.

The thing is, I do want to have a phone available when I drive somewhere in case I break down. But a bit of looking around made it sound like AT&T is a harder network than others to use some random cheapo dumb phone… and dumb phones that’ll work are actually not that cheap ($60+?). So probably I won’t do it 🤷‍♀️

 

See also: How to live without your phone by Sam Kriss

I stopped playing Fruit Ninja, eventually. But for nearly fourteen years afterwards, I stared at a smartphone every single day. Five thousand days, all in all. I can’t think of anything else I’ve done with the same level of commitment. There have been days where I’ve had nothing to eat or drink and there have been nights when I didn’t sleep. But until very recently, I never once went twenty-four hours without remembering to look at my phone.

After a while without my phone, I started to really notice how much everyone else was staring at theirs. On public transport in particular. Every adult is sitting there, pushing around coloured squares and popping coloured bubbles. They are playing with toys for babies. Now look at their faces. These people are not being entertained. They’re not having fun. They are turning their brains off while they wait.

Not using a phone taught me what a phone is really for. It’s not for communicating with other people, getting directions, reading articles, looking at pictures, shopping for products, or playing games. A phone is a device for muting the anxieties proper to being alive.

 

Related:

Read The Shallows

The value of friction

Categories
Lifestyle The Internet

Gulping information

Is it drugs? by Robin Sloan

Likewise, there are readers who jet along at a speed I can’t quite imagine. Their unit of recognition isn’t the phrase or the paragraph but something close to the page. They read in great gulps, like baleen whales devouring whole regions of ocean. I believe this kind of reader is most often found deep in genre, where a certain formalism reigns: “I see what you’re doing here. Yes. Okay. Yes.”

I have to be careful when I read fiction because I can get swept up into a race with eagerness to find out what happens next next next! I like to read fiction fast, but try not to read it too fast. Reading on an e-reader helps prevent me from scanning too much, because with my bad vision I can only fit a couple paragraphs on the screen at once, so if I jump ahead I barely miss anything 😄

+

Pay Per Scroll by Manu Moreale

Reflecting on books made me think about what the web would look like if it was some sort of pay-per-scroll platform. Not a place where virtually everything is free but a place where everything has to be purchased in order to be consumed.

This would probably make me more thoughtful about what I read, given my miserly ways… or I might just say fuck it and read anything I wanted because restraining myself would be too annoying 😂 Right now, where the internet’s mixed between pay and free, I almost exclusively read free, no login required content 🤷‍♀️

Continue reading “Gulping information”
Categories
House Lifestyle

Reframing home as a productive rather than consumptive space

Liked https://jabel.blog/2024/02/16/a-friend-and.html by Jeremy (jabel.blog)

I’ve been thinking about households as workshops. I am 90% sure I derived this from Wendell Berry’s various discussions of productive households, as opposed to households as sites of consumption.

Reframing my household as my workshop has helped rid me of the nagging feeling that I should be doing something else. That repairing the stove, for example, is an annoying distraction from my “real work.”

Categories
Lifestyle Mental Health

The ease of filling time

Liked Self Care by James GJames G (jamesg.blog)

I have been thinking a lot lately how easy it is to fill time.

I like to think about the next thing. What can I do next? How can I feel that feeling I get when I look back and say “today I did this!” That feeling really is delightful… I know, deep down, that feeling is unsustainable: one can’t be creative every day.

Categories
Entrepreneurship Lifestyle Society Work

Resistance through rest and relaxation

Replied to https://www.instagram.com/p/CjYGwLGNJf4/ by Nicola | The Relaxed Woman on Instagram (Instagram)

“I have the privilege of no longer having to burn myself out to pay the bills.And I’m learning that with this privilege comes the responsibility to no longer overwork when I have the choice not to.Because we’re all interconnected. And each time I work through lunch or trade sleep for productivity or reply to an email outside of work hours, I’m normalising these things. Each time I overwork, I’m contributing to societal expectations that other women do the same.We don’t all have freedom from having to work inhumanely long hours just to get by.But if we do, let’s use our freedom to try to create a society that truly honours the needs of our minds, bodies and souls.Let’s normalise generous, nourishing lunch breaks.Let’s normalise getting enough sleep.Let’s normalise ignoring our emails out of hours.Let’s normalise unfinished to-do lists.Let’s normalise average.Let’s normalise unproductive.Let’s normalise imperfect.Let’s normalise naps.Let’s normalise play.Let’s normalise rest.🌷”

If I have the privilege of not having to work to the point of burnout, I have the responsibility not to

If I have the freedom to rest and I choose not to, I'm contributing to the normalization of exhaustion

Continue reading “Resistance through rest and relaxation”
Categories
Learning Lifestyle

What’s on my bookshelf right now: October 2023

Rocking chair next to side table piled with books and crate of more books jammed full
My reading nook last winter
Replied to Books I’m Reading at the Moment by Pablo MoralesPablo Morales (lifeofpablo.com)

I’d like to invite a few people to share their thoughts and what they are reading or planning on reading.

I like to have a bunch of books going at once, and keep a rotating sampler of library books that I can dip into for variety. I prefer reading fiction on my Kindle where I can bump the type size up and read in dark mode before bed, but I’ve been gradually switching to hard copy for nonfiction. I’m totally an out of sight out of mind person so I forget about titles I have on my Kindle — having the physical book either by my bed or next to my hangout rocking chair is a visual cue reminding me to read it. I’ve also been buying more physical books so I can underline and take notes in them, and to support authors more directly.

Right now I’m trying to switch my before work reading time from screen to paper. I don’t usually like reading fiction in the morning so my current collection is trying to give myself a range of not too intense nonfiction that I can read in half hour chunks. It’s so easy to default to reading on my phone, but I want to be more intentional about what I’m reading. There’s a place for reading articles and staying in tune with culture, but I want to shift a greater amount of my reading time to long form works and digging deeper into topics.

Books I own and am actively reading

A stack of three hardbacks and a verso paperback

Here’s which books I own I’m currently reading and why I picked them:

  • The Care Manifesto by the Care Collective — I want to learn more about mutual aid and community building, and this is nice and short 😂
  • No Meat Required by Alicia Kennedy — love her email newsletter about decolonizing food — also I’m pescetarian, and was vegetarian for like ten years (and still think of myself mostly as a vegetarian who occasionally also eats fish), so I’m interested to hear a vegetarian food writer’s take on plant-based diets as well as the movement’s history in the US
  • The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul — I’ve seen this recommended tons in the commonplace book / digital garden realm — I’ve totally dug what I’ve read so far
  • Saving Time by Jenny Odell — I love love loved her previous book How to Do Nothing so this was an instabuy

I’m about 20-70 pages in on all of these. Also sitting out is Jimmy Chin’s coffee table book There and Back, which I assumed would just be awesome outdoor and climbing photos, but I’ve also been enjoying his tales of past adventures.

Continue reading “What’s on my bookshelf right now: October 2023”
Categories
Lifestyle

When settling for less is ok

Replied to Medical Leave Reflections plus Empathy Sphere Essay by Ada Palmer (exurbe.com)

The disability narrative most relevant in my recent situation, though, are the stories of ‘overcoming’ disability, where a person is either cured (through their own efforts or others’), or works hard and pushes through, so the disability becomes a problem of the past, that has been left behind. This often-repeated narrative (present in fiction and nonfiction) encourages the attitude of seeing disability’s disruptions to life as temporary and surpassable. It means that, when I get a new diagnosis, my first thoughts even this many years into having chronic illness, are always about how long it’ll be until I overcome it, what I need to do to get past it, the expectation that it’ll be normal by spring/ summer/ December/ whatever. This often leads me to delay by weeks or months or longer taking steps to, for example, adapt my home to be more comfortable (like getting a lap desk so I can work lying down), and other changes dependent on expecting the condition to be here to stay. I think, as a culture, we really hate telling stories about illnesses and disabilities that are here to stay.

I think in many ways no ending is scarier for us in narrative than accept a lower quality of life. It isn’t a one-time tragedy like death, we have good narrative tools to write tragedy, and to transition focus to the characters who live on, commemorate, remember. Accept a lower quality of life in a story means losing, giving up, surrendering, all the things we want our brave and plucky characters to never do, and then having to live with every day being that much worse forever. It’s neither a happy ending nor a tragic ending, it’s a discouraging ending, and we rarely tell those stories.

Although this narrative is rare, unless I’m missing the mark, I can think of several more examples in fiction.

In fantasy, Bitter Medicine by Mia Tsai shows this with the protag’s brother, who’s built himself a good life after losing his magic. Stephanie Burgis’ Snowspelled features a woman who lost her magic and must build a new life dramatically different than what she’d planned for herself. T. Kingfisher’s Saint of Steel series is about a handful of paladins who survive the death of their god and have to learn to live around that hollow. Seanan McGuire’s Doorway series explores loss, sometimes to a happy end but not always.

T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth does it for climate change rather than disability.

In romance, this often plays out that the disabled protag holds themselves back from happiness because they don’t want to subject someone else to their needs or don’t believe their needs are compatible with love or their partner’s life. In essence, they are subjecting themselves to a lower quality of life than they need — like the 5% lower versus 20% lower Palmer talks about here. Maybe these stories don’t count because they don’t have the same kind of depressing tone as Palmer seems to be looking for — perhaps even antithetical to her point of discouraging endings — but there’s certainly melancholy and pain in reaching acceptance of one’s limitations. Dearest Rogue by Elizabeth Hoyt focuses on a woman who’s lost her sight and is ok with it but her brother is not. An earlier book in the series, Thief of Shadows, features a woman who cannot have a baby and is distraught over it. Courtney Milan’s Unraveled centers on a man shaped by trauma. Cat Sebastian’s Two Rogues Make a Right, with a chronically ill protag, and A Delicate Deception, where the heroine has extreme social anxiety, might pull it off. Sometimes romance falls for the magical cure plot, but sometimes it finds another path through loss to something good.