From “People systematically overlook subtractive changes,” published in Nature back in 2021:

Participants were less likely to identify advantageous subtractive changes when the task did not (versus did) cue them to consider subtraction, when they had only one opportunity (versus several) to recognize the shortcomings of an additive search strategy or when they were under a higher (versus lower) cognitive load. Defaulting to searches for additive changes may be one reason that people struggle to mitigate overburdened schedules, institutional red tape, and damaging effects on the planet.

In so many cases, the easiest, cheapest solution to a problem is to simplify. It’s just so hard to remember/realize/acknowledge that–especially at an organizational or regulatory level–without skin in the game.

Bill Watterson, who created the best comic strip of all time (Calvin and Hobbes), gave the commencement address at Kenyon College back in 1990, which he titled, “Some Thoughts on the Real Word by One Who Glimpsed It and Fled“:

It’s surprising how hard we’ll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I’ve learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it’s how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year. If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I’ve found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I’ve had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.

I love that line: “If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood.” Of course, Watterson had the constraints he placed on himself by his chosen medium. I don’t know if it’s easier or harder long term to do permutations pivoting around a central premise or to bounce from thing to thing as you tire and exhaust the low hanging fruit of its potential. I think they’re probably both really hard.

We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery-it recharges by running.You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and the demands of “just getting by” absorb your waking hours. You may be surprised matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other people’s expectations rather than issues. You may be surprised to find out how quickly reading a good book sounds like a luxury.

I was traveling for a talk the other day and this came up with someone in the audience. I make time for the writing and the projects and the teaching/mentoring and everything else because that’s the variety that makes the more routine, potentially tedious stuff tolerable.

Yes, time management is impossible, but it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t fill more precious time with garbage if I wasn’t trying to be deliberate.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.

To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.

Some passages on what makes a job “good” from The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt:

Psychologists have referred to this basic need as a need for competence, industry, or mastery. [Psychologist Robert] White called it the “effectance motive,” which he defined as the need or drive to develop competence through interacting with and controlling one’s environment. Effectance is almost as basic a need as food and water, yet it is not a deficit need, like hunger, that is satisfied and then disappears for a few hours. Rather, White said, effectance is a constant presence in our lives: Dealing with the environment means carrying on a continuing transaction which gradually changes one’s relation to the environment. Because there is no consummatory climax, satisfaction has to be seen as lying in a considerable series of transactions, in a trend of behavior rather than a goal that is achieved.

This reflects the importance of developing the craftsman mentality.

The effectance motive helps explain the progress principle: We get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them because, as Shakespeare said, “Joy’s soul lies in the doing.”

Believing the opposite was coined as “the arrival fallacy” by psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, who wrote the best-selling Happier. (As in: I’ll finally be happy when I finish that big exam or project. No, when I graduate! Or get that promotion! No, when I retire!)

Contrast the effectance motive with the many narrowly defined clock-in clock-out closely supervised jobs that limit personal choices:

In 1964, the sociologists Melvin Kohn and Carmi Schooler surveyed 3,100 American men about their jobs and found that the key to understanding which jobs were satisfying was what they called “occupational self direction.” Men who were closely supervised in jobs of low complexity and much routine showed the highest degree of alienation (feeling powerless, dissatisfied, and separated from the work). Men who had more latitude in deciding how they approached work that was varied and challenging tended to enjoy their work much more. When workers had occupational self-direction, their work was often satisfying.

My profession of radiology can easily fall into this trap in the wrong environment. You have to carve out ways to take ownership of both the process and product.

More fun from Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. In case you missed it, we started with happy nihilism through cosmic insignificance theory and acknowledging the trap of productivity.

More on that inescapable finitude:

And it means standing firm in the face of FOMO, the “fear of missing out,” because you come to realize that missing out on something—indeed, on almost everything—is basically guaranteed.

That cuts.

Time pressure comes largely from forces outside ourselves: from a cutthroat economy; from the loss of the social safety nets and family networks that used to help ease the burdens of work and childcare; and from the sexist expectation that women must excel in their careers while assuming most of the responsibilities at home. None of that will be solved by self-help alone; as the journalist Anne Helen Petersen writes in a widely shared essay on millennial burnout, you can’t fix such problems “with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or ‘anxiety baking,’ or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats.”

So long as you continue to respond to impossible demands on your time by trying to persuade yourself that you might one day find some way to do the impossible, you’re implicitly collaborating with those demands. Whereas once you deeply grasp that they are impossible, you’ll be newly empowered to resist them, and to focus instead on building the most meaningful life you can, in whatever situation you’re in.

I do like overnight oats though.

The more efficient you get, the more you become “a limitless reservoir for other people’s expectations,” in the words of the management expert Jim Benson.

“A limitless reservoir for other people’s expectations” is a great line.

As she recalls in her memoir The Iceberg, the British sculptor Marion Coutts was taking her two-year-old son to his first day with a new caregiver when her husband, the art critic Tom Lubbock, came to find her to tell her about the malignant brain tumor from which he was to die within three years:

Something has happened. A piece of news. We have had a diagnosis that has the status of an event. The news makes a rupture with what went before: clean, complete and total, save in one respect. It seems that after the event, the decision we make is to remain. Our [family] unit stands … We learn something. We are mortal. You might say you know this but you don’t. The news falls neatly between one moment and another. You would not think there was a gap for such a thing … It is as if a new physical law has been described for us bespoke: absolute as all the others are, yet terrifyingly casual. It is a law of perception. It says, You will lose everything that catches your eye.

Which is a devastating way to come to the realization.

And, finally, most importantly, JOMO:

The exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this truth about finitude has been called the “joy of missing out,” by way of a deliberate contrast with the idea of the “fear of missing out.” It is the thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, your choices couldn’t truly mean anything. In this state of mind, you can embrace the fact that you’re forgoing certain pleasures, or neglecting certain obligations, because whatever you’ve decided to do instead—earn money to support your family, write your novel, bathe the toddler, pause on a hiking trail to watch a pale winter sun sink below the horizon at dusk—is how you’ve chosen to spend a portion of time that you never had any right to expect.

From Paul Graham’s “The Right Kind of Stubborn:”

The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it.

Worse still, that means they’ll tend to be attached to their first ideas about how to solve a problem, even though these are the least informed by the experience of working on it. So the obstinate aren’t merely attached to details, but disproportionately likely to be attached to wrong ones.

I like this distinction.

In some ways, Graham’s distinction between persistence and obstinance feels analogous to experts and “experts” (or, perhaps more fairly, between continuous growth and brittle skill).

There are people for whom expertise is partially a mindset: they question assumptions, their approach, and their knowledge. They want to be challenged, and they want to learn, and they want to improve.

And then there are those for whom expertise is a status. Their identity is tied to having the answers, and they know the right way to do things.

It’s a bit of a false dichotomy. People can be both obstinate and persistent in different contexts.

But if you’re overly rigid in your work or competing approaches feel like threats, you’re probably being too precious. Your excuse for doing things a certain way in the face of better alternatives probably shouldn’t be “It’s the way I learned how to do it,” or “That’s the way I’ve always done it.”