I have a habit of listening to podcasts and jotting down reminders to check out stuff that the hosts recommend, and then never ultimately getting back to consume that content.

I stumbled upon this video today while spelunking through my reminders app, and I felt like it was fitting considering (a) an upcoming thing that I’m really excited to share soon, and (b) it helps tie together the two most recent posts on this blog.

The part that made me go “ah, damn” was when she mentioned that most people who go through this exercise end up with some form of communication as their climate action.

After completing the exercise, the two things I wrote down were:

1. Do the podcast idea, build your network of “doers” in various climate fields, leverage the network to institute policy change and inspire others into action.

2. Do the podcast idea, discover a company doing something cool in climate (terrible pun), join that company.

The other thing Ayana warns in this video is to not start with your solution in mind, but dang, that’s just not fair, is it?

Either way, going through this venn diagram exercise gave me a lot to think about, and I’m quite curious to hear what you think if you end up doing this as well.

Expectations are like a debt that must be repaid before you get any joy out of what you’re doing.

I spent 6 hours drawing Pokémon today and it never occurred to me for a second that anyone else might be better or worse.

Even if it had, I would’ve been excited for them, not sad for myself.

Damn, now this is the philosophy I want to have.

Under pressure, our free time – our entertainment time, our recovery time – tends to devolve into mindlessness. You know, scrolling social media. Re-watching the same show repeatedly. Numbing and zoning out. Nobody has the energy to learn how to play Axis & Allies after working for 12 hours.

Similarly, at work, people under pressure tend to simplify. We spend less time engaging socially, having fun, and experimenting. We crack down into Serious Business Mode.

While this can be a reasonable adaptation to get through a rough patch, it’s unsustainable. As we get burnt out, it gets even harder to play, reinforcing the cycle. All work and no play makes Jack something something.

Humans need play.

The history of American housework suggests that both sides have a point. Americans tend to use new productivity and technology to buy a better life rather than to enjoy more downtime in inferior conditions. And when material concerns are mostly met, Americans fixate on their status and class, and that of their children, and work tirelessly to preserve and grow it.

But most Americans don’t have the economic or political power to negotiate a better deal for themselves. Their working hours and income are shaped by higher powers, like bosses, federal laws, and societal expectations.

To solve the problems of overwork and time starvation, we have to recognize both that individuals have the agency to make small changes to improve their lives and that, without broader changes to our laws and norms and social expectations, no amount of overwork will ever be enough.

This is not meant to be a happy story about the need to get out of the bubble of like-minded coastal elites; I think it’s totally OK, recommended even, to stay far far away from people who think you are going to hell. But I guess I think it’s also OK to touch the hot stove occasionally if you want to, to pretend that this time you won’t let it hurt you.

I always get suckered in by these types of posts (certainly they’ve been sprinkled throughout the archives of this blog).

This one is exceptionally well done. There are simply too many to choose a pull quote from, but I’ll share the two reasons why I wanted to post about this article.

First, it’s heavy on the minimalism. It’s hard to participate in our society and not strive to be a maximalist. Capitalism is all about growth, after all, and if you aren’t expanding your footprint on this planet, what’s the point, right?

I’ve been working on being content lately. That contentment comes in several forms, like being content to spend time with my kids, being content to live in a smaller house than my neighbors, being content to drive an older car.

This post gives a lot of good snippets to keep in mind while maintaining the pursuit to think through what truly matters and what truly makes you happy.

Which leads me to my second reason: labeling my spiritual beliefs. This post contains a lot of axioms which seem to gel nicely with Buddhism.

I would not call myself a Buddhist. Frankly, I’m not sure what I’d call myself. But lately, the tenets of Buddhism have been appealing to me, and again, there are a lot of thoughts around how to deal with pain and suffering within this collection.

I grew up in a place, and a time, where hobbies — activities that had no place on your resume, no function in getting you into a better school — were still commonplace. Amongst the bourgeois American middle class, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Old Millennials were the last to experience this attitude towards activities and leisure. My partner spent his junior high and high school years at a competitive prep school on the Main Line in Philly, and has only recently come to realize that he had no hobbies, and no sense of what he actually liked to do, just what he needed to do in order to shape himself for school, then college, then work. Every hobby, for him, is an adult hobby — and thus all the more difficult to discover and adopt.

Hobbies are tough, especially hobbies that take up large chunks of a day (such as training for a marathon) or an actual entire day (such as getting season tickets to a sporting event).

I've got a few things that I'm thinking of getting into this year. First, tinkering with physical things. I am gonna try to restore some of my older broken tech that is laying dormant in my basement.

Second, flying. I want to get a discovery flight and possibly get my pilot's license.

Both of these things will take up "time", but frankly, after giving up most of my social media, I have a lot of free time in the evenings that gets eaten up with television. I'm ready to start trying some new things and being curious again.

“I think I still feel the same way about it that I did in the very beginning,” Whibley says. “The day that I get sick of playing a song that everyone knows and everyone goes crazy when we play it, and everyone starts jumping around and everyone sings it, I should just quit because I’m so fucking jaded. It’s the greatest feeling in the world. I’ve never understood that. I don’t get Radiohead, even though I love Radiohead, why they don’t play their big songs.”

I respect the hell out of that pull quote, it’s how more of us should feel about things that make other people happy.

It’s hard to express what this song meant to me back in 2001 as an impressionable sixth grader. I’m definitely not an edgy, punk skater kid (nor have I ever been), but this song is still in my regular rotation because it gives me so much life.

Instead of checking items off a list, the Buddha suggests shining a light on yourself and others. “Dwell as a lamp unto yourself,” he advised his disciple Ananda. He meant that happiness comes from the illumination of your greatest virtues, thus showing the way for other people, and making visible to yourself your true purpose.