Tag: lifestyle

Categories
Philosophy

The State of The Monsters

The Waiting Room

I was sat in a train station waiting room yesterday. Everything was cancelled because of a “severe engine failure,” and over the tannoy it was announced that “the wait for those travelling by train will be at least 90 minutes.”

Boo. Hiss. Yeah, yeah.

People complain about travel delays but secretly we all love it. It’s like winning a prize – The Prize Of Unexpected Free Time.

It was cold on the platform, no place for any sane person to stay for long. Almost everyone shuffled through a red door into a small, whitewashed waiting room. We each found a seat on the metal benches that lined the walls, drawn to them like animals to the ark. Except there were apparently 280 animals on the ark and only about 50 of us.

A young woman came in. She was talking about her art foundation degree on the phone. Everyone else in the room found something to quietly occupy themselves with  – from sitting, to listening to music, to tapping away on phones, to reading, to sleeping.

She walked into the nearly full waiting room, looked left and right, and then eyed one of the few empty seats, in between two gentlemen in their 70’s. They were both keeping themselves to themselves. It would be quite ridiculous to describe them as monsters.

“Uh, so is anyone sat there then?” she asked one of the men hastily so it wouldn’t interfere with her important call. The man looked up and shook his head, indicating the seat was available.

She sat down and sighed loudly into the handset.

Her phone conversation was loud enough to take over the room. You know how sometimes you can’t help but glance at a car accident when you drive past? Well you couldn’t help but hear her talk.

“Oh shut up! My coursework’s still not done and it’s fucking in tomorrow.”

“I told you, my train’s been terminated.”

“No way. Of course I’d prefer to be with you two instead of sitting in between these two monsters.”

It was that last line that did it.

I’ve been thinking about what monsters are ever since.

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Real Monsters

A couple of weeks ago I was in a coffee shop in Manchester as the Charlie Hebdo shooting started to be reported. The breaking news pings started to buzz on my phone. People on laptops began to look shocked. Someone (maybe he was a journalism student) even shouted “are you seeing this?” across the room to his friend at the counter as though he was an EP on CNN. One guy didn’t realise what was going on, until he got up quickly from his computer to go and call a friend who was in Paris.

Most days aren’t like this. Usually they blend into one. We wake up a week from now and nothing seems to have changed.

But every so often, something undeniably sudden and man-made happens. Our lives are hit by a big event, awful news, an attack, something which – even though we may not have been there – means we won’t be the same again.

Wars.
Terrorist attacks.
School and cinema shootings.
Journalists shot dead for satire.
Aid workers decapitated for helping people to eat.

It’s when these things happen in places that are unexpected that we are most effected. Because all of us are guilty of conveniently glossing over incidents in places where ‘it happens all the time.’

Sometimes shocking events happen when we’re young, and there are side-effects. Our worldview hardens, we develop a pessimism and a fear that was never there before. Gone go the days when Roald Dahl stories scare the kid. Their mythical monsters under the bed are replaced by actual monsters in the world.

It’s sad that each of us develop a list of terrible moments that we’ll always remember.

The towers on 9/11.
The bus and tubes on 7/7.
The 2011 Norwegian attack.
Sandy Hook.
Boston Marathon.
Charlie Hebdo.

You name it – the list goes on and we all have one.

What is a real monster? Monsters are responsible for moments like these.

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A Brown Leather Bag

Today is a time of 24/7 news. Whenever ‘something happens’, millions of our phones beep with a notification. It’s a sound so frequent that it would be easy to start believing that the world is full of monsters.

It’s not. It’s really not.

Back in the waiting room, the young woman started to rustle around in her rucksack. Her coursework wouldn’t finish itself. But something was missing.

She tapped on her phone, in panic, and lifted it to her ear.

“Mum, it’s me. Can you run upstairs and check my room? Have I left all my art stuff there?”

“All of my pencils?”

“Shit! I’m totally, totally screwed then.”

The man she was sat next to, the monster of moments ago, smiled. ‘That’ll teach her for calling me a monster,’ I imagined him thinking as I caught his gaze.

She hung up the phone, slumped into her uncomfortable metal chair, and looked genuinely distraught. Tears seemed imminent but there wasn’t a strong feeling of sympathy in the air of that small waiting room. She had got what was coming to her.

The man leaned over and reached down into his brown leather bag. He grasped hold of something. Maybe his lunch. Maybe a book.

He pulled out a square metal tin and opened it. It made a pop sound just before he passed it over to the person who’d called him a monster.

The tin was full of pencils. Every pencil a budding artist could ever need.

“Have them,” the monster said,  “I have a room full of them at home.”

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Mostly Passengers

Rarely do we hear about the good stuff in the world. Yet most of us see it happen time and time again with our own eyes.

It’s important then, in a world where the news seems consistently horrific, to remember our own experiences. Things which we’ve learned and seen and witnessed first hand. That’s the stuff we must hold on to. It’s these experiences which offer hope, even when we’re captured by the darkness that surrounds all the horrible shit on the planet.

There’s bad and evil in the world, but it’s by no means prominent.

Most people are passengers, not monsters.

Categories
Philosophy

If You’re Having A Bad Day

There’s a very valid time for quitting and walking away, and there’s a very valid time for sticking to your guns and ploughing on. I think more often than not, ploughing on is probably the best approach.

The right or wrong decision is something that is obvious when you look back and connect the dots, but it never seems as clear as that at the time. So when things go wrong, when mistakes are made, when everything falls through, when you don’t get as far as you wanted to get within the time you set – all this freakin’ messy collateral of mindache can be frustrating and upsetting and annoying, and it’s easy to fall into a trap of discouragement or wallowing or defeatism.

So if or when that happens, and if you’re having a bad day, read this:

“The slaves received the whip with more certainty and regularity than they received their food. It was the incentive to work and the guardian of discipline. But there was no ingenuity that fear or a depraved imagination could devise which was not employed to break their spirit and satisfy the lusts and resentment of their owners and guardians – irons on the hands and feet, blocks of wood that the slaves had to drag behind them wherever they went, the tin-plate mask designed to prevent the slaves eating the sugar-cane, the iron collar.

Whipping was interrupted in order to pass a piece of hot wood on the buttocks of the victim; salt, pepper, citron, cinders, aloes, and hot ashes were poured on the bleeding wounds. Mutilations were common, limbs, ears and sometimes the private parts, to deprive them of the pleasures which they could indulge in without expense. Their masters poured burning wax on their arms and hands and shoulders, emptied the boiling cane sugar over their heads, burned them alive, roasted them on slow fires, filled them with gunpowder and blew them up with a match; buried them up to the neck and smeared their heads with sugar that the flies might devour them; fastened them near to nests of ants or wasps; made them eat their excrement, drink their urine, and lick the saliva of other slaves. One colonist was known in moments of anger to throw himself on his slaves and stick his teeth into their flesh.”

[An extract from The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C.L.R. James]

Suddenly the little things don’t seem that important, and it’s certainly not worth allowing them to pull us down too far for too long. The chances are slim that someone’s gonna pour burning wax on our arms, or fill us with gunpowder and blow us up with a match. It’s all a game of perspective. Everything is a game of perspective.

Things could be worse. Tomorrow is a new day. We are lucky.

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Categories
Radicles

Good Reads aka Radicles #1

Radicles; rad articles

Here’s a curated list, split into Outdoors, and Career, Creativity & Lifestyle of some Radicles I’ve enjoyed recently. Hopefully one or more of them will fire you up and provide some value in terms of confidence / inspiration / entertainment.

“Stay rad – read a radicle.”

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Outdoory Goodness

Three friends from France team up and cycle around the world for three years, touching every continent. Amazing photos.

“I am a relatively introverted type of person, and I like my share of solitude in civilised life. With the team I sometimes felt suffocated. We had no private space, it was the team first, always. For instance, one issue was that the guys didn’t mind riding long hours in the dark when I would often feel tired and would have enjoyed our comfy tent earlier. But we listened to one another and soon learned to become flexible.”

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Phil Jones is an inspiring dude. Here’s a video by Team Sky about how Phil’s life was transformed by cycling.

“In 2012, Phil Jones sat down to watch the London 2012 opening ceremony. He was morbidly obese (at his peak he had been 27 stone) and had been told by his doctor that he was unlikely to live to his 50th birthday. But when he saw Sir Chris Hoy carrying the British flag around the stadium, everything changed.”

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  • [By Fair Means – by Philip Baues, Olaf Obsommer & Jens Klatt, on Sidetracked]

Three pals team up (is there a theme emerging?) to cycle around the Alps, pulling kayaks behind them, and then paddling down epic rivers. The photos are incredible.

“The first time I think about giving up is at the Col de la Cayolle, in the French Maritime Alps. I am stuck in the snow, hip-deep – one hand trying to push myself out, the other clutching the rope with which I drag my kayak behind me like a pulka. My bike is strapped on top, and every few meters the whole setup begins to totter. But for now nothing is moving – largely because I’m immobile. As I sink again into the powder, I’ve just about had enough. I scream every four-letter word I know, and even create a few new ones.”

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Tom recently put together a bike for a tenner from parts he found at scrapyards and on recycling websites, and cycled from Lands End to Edinburgh for £0.25 / $0.42. No typo.

“You don’t have to ‘be a cyclist’, or model your trip on anyone else’s experience. And anyone who tries to tell you that there’s a blueprint or some kind of standard formula for wandering the world on a bicycle is a liar and a fraud.”

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greenvillestars

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Career, Creativity & Lifestyle

Elle experiences anxiety, resentment, and doubt so decides to trade in pride and security for authenticity.

“About 6 months ago, I decided to quit my very good job at Google to explore a different way to live life. I had a loose plan of how I wanted to spend my time, but the main reason I left was that I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t put it into words at the time, but something inside of me was telling me I shouldn’t continue down the career path I was on. I felt strongly that it wasn’t getting me closer to where I wanted to be, though that destination was largely unknown, and I had to get off that road. Each month I stayed, I grew more anxious and, in turn, resentful.”

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There are few bloggers who are as honest as James, or as willing to regularly spill their guts in a post. This one riffs about how and why we’ve stopped laughing, and why we should start again.

“A kid laughs on average 300 times a day. An adult laughs on average….five times a day. What the…!? How did we go from 300 to 5? What the hell happened to us? That’s why we start to panic during the day! Did we cross some bridge of crap and tears and now here we are: drones that wake up, go to work, backstab each other in office politics, watch Breaking Bad, and then go to sleep and Die? Every single day? Did someone slip a pill into the Starbucks coffee we drink every day? A no-laughing pill? Laughter is really hard as an adult. It has to be. Else, how did we go from 300 to 5! That’s a HUGE gap. There is no arguing that something really bad and scary and sad happened to us between childhood and adulthood. And laughing is so critical.”

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Sara has been working for Automattic for 4 years and has learnt a lot about how to make remote work, erm, work. (Here’s a Vague Direction video with Automattic’s founder). In the next few years we’re going to see a lot more companies start to accept remote working as a viable (and sensible) option. Here, Sara explains about how important routine and prioritising health is.

“Meetings in the business world are often mistaken for “getting work done.” I know people who have had full-days of meetings to provide status updates a simple email would have sufficed for, and tales even of a team sitting on the phone together watching a single person work so they would be assured the project would be done on time. I had a phone call meeting recently that took a combined half hour of the participants’ time to find a good time for the meeting, and then the call lasted less than 5 minutes. And yes, we could have done it by email.”

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Tony is a busy dude, and finds out what happens when he increases the amount of sleep he gets.

“Too many of us continue to live by the durable myth that one less hour of sleep gives us one more hour of productivity. In reality, each hour less of sleep not only leaves us feeling more fatigued, but also takes a pernicious toll on our cognitive capacity. The more consecutive hours we are awake and the fewer we sleep at night, the less alert, focused and efficient we become…”

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Categories
Philosophy

Ambition & Choosing Something Sufficiently Epic.

There have been a few of moments on this trip of mental battles between having a goal versus being content in the present. Some research says that having goals means you’re more likely to be unhappy (thanks to Jim for pointing this out), whereas other research says goals encourage happiness.

A week or so ago I locked up the bike in a Winnipeg basement and was invited to Silicon Valley for a couple of days for the Evernote Conference, and there was a moment that came close to nailing one side of the goal/contentment dilemma on the head. A point that applied to something much wider than the technology context it was set within. It was about being driven by a grand, epic mission.

For reference, watch this recent video of Louis C.K. talking about emptiness. Louis talks about a moment when he realised he has a massive empty feeling inside. Forever empty – a moment of realisation that, really, we’re all alone and this life doesn’t really mean anything, because we’ll be gone soon. Louis is hilarious and it’s obviously lighthearted and comedy, but kind of gets to something heavy and depressing in parts too.

At the event, Evernote’s CEO Phil Libin talked about what his fuel is. What gets him out of bed in the morning and provides focus, motivation and drive. And it’s the polar opposite of Louis‘ thoughts. He expressed the view that there’s no reason to have that emptiness if you choose a mission that’s sufficiently epic. You never have to be forever empty if you’re confident that you’re on the path to making a sufficient dent.

His specific example of epic was the company motto – helping everyone “remember everything”. Of course an epic mission doesn’t have to mean a goal of ubiquity, but it’s impossible to argue that a hundred year plan that strives to reach everyone is anything short of epic.

An ambitious mission potentially keeps us hungry, humble, and improving, because it’s not going to be finished anytime soon, we’re always learning, and we have to get better to have any kind of chance.  For the above example, there’s 75 million people using the app. Sounds like a lot, but put it in context of the mission, and it’s really small – there’s 6.9 billion people who haven’t been reached. Suddenly it seems there’s a hell of a lot of work to do. And that’s awesome, because having such a huge goal can bring a team together, trickle and permeate through a culture, is a driver of progress and a provider of fire. There’s work to do, and it’s not going to be done for a long, long time.

Possibly most of us could learn from this kind of ambitious thinking if we experience Louis-type emptiness. Maybe we should stop putting off the epic things because they’re hard, and consider them because they’re hard.

Look at some notoriously difficult missions – from the D-Day Landings, to reaching product ubiquity, to walking on the moon. These kind of missions don’t always work, and there’s bound to be a lot of grand goals that failed which we never heard about, but the ambitious ones – the ones that appear nearly impossibly out of reach – are the same ones that do become meaningful. They’re the ones that make a dent and change how we do things.

Perhaps having an epic mission should be as much a personal driver as a company one. But one that isn’t a project but an overall outlook that takes time. Having no goals seems like a copout, but maybe total achievement of the goal isn’t actually the most important part – rather it’s what we get from working towards it. Either way, doesn’t it seem like something is broken if we stop being ambitious?