Friday, May 13, 2022

Wafer Thin

When I “stopped working” in 2014, I had ideas for projects I wanted to work on. What I meant by not working, was not working *for money*. 

I was just frustrated with what felt like a toxic environment. With answering the question “what do you do?” with what I do for work. With my default laid out, bar 20 odd days of leave a year. 

I still wanted to work on interesting problems, but with a different filter. Not all good ideas are good business ideas. There are a lot of things I wanted to do that I couldn’t justify. 

Another frustration was the amount of time I spent communicating what I was working on! Explaining myself. Communicating what needs to be done to people who aren’t doing it. When you get the sense that you are Sisyphus rolling a rock up a hill just to roll it up again. When you aren’t convinced of the incremental change. What the late David Graeber called “Bullsh1t Jobs”. Or fake deadlines where someone tells you to get something to them by the time your head hits the pillow... then they don’t look at it for two weeks. 

Much of my anxiety came from a sense of killing time. Time is the thing that is most valuable. That was what I wanted. Time free from price. I am also aware of path dependence. I did what I did because of the cumulative decisions that were presented to me, and that I made. Changing paths is hard when the path is relentlessly repeating. 

There can be wafer thin boundaries between what we do, and what we could be doing... but we simply don’t have the time to breathe and notice.



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