The big news off the top: I am back to being employed and it is a huge weight off my shoulders. It’s mostly back to the corporate grind, though thankfully it’s a 32 hour grind rather than 40 since my company gives us Fridays off. It feels very good to draw a paycheck again and has already been an improvement to my mental health, with much less stress about future plans. But / and despite being able to contribute to the economy more consistently and without worry now, I’m still thinking a lot about new and alternative ways to be involved our political system. I am giving my time to the growth monster and have wages I can spend in sacrifice to it, but is that what I want? What we want?
Of course I’m not coming to all of these thoughts on my own. I finished Post Growth Living by Kate Soper and have continued listening to the Upstream and Tech Won’t Save Us podcasts. The podcasts are wonderful resources for uncovering some of the more structural or systemic issues with the economy as well as the tech industry more specifically, while Post Growth Living was phenomenal at considering how we might turn away from our current conception of “the good life” and towards an alternative version where we enjoy slower and smaller parts of life without embracing a wholly traditional lifestyle with all of its attendant issues.
The overall precarity of the work situation is something that continues to be on my mind even thugh I’m back working, with instincts to document all the projects I work on and worries that I need to remember all the details in case the experience turns into an interview worthy answer down the road. I wish there were clearer ways to fight back on the structural reasons behind it, but despite the connectedness of the world it isn’t easy to find real ways to work through this issue.
I’ve tried to learn more “practical” skills to fight back on a personal level and keep myself feeling good. I learned how to bake and my cooking has gotten much better over the last few years. I’ve gone through spurts of more exercise, though inevitably that falls to the wayside when we get busy. I’ve found it can be a good way to direct both good and bad emotions into action.
One of the best has been writing more often and in more ways. I’ve written a decent amount of code the last five years and have massively improved there, and continue to journal as a way to keep track of to-do lists, write down project ideas, and explore my thoughts. But as you can tell by the content and sporadic dates of posts on this blog, it hasn’t been consistent and is mostly nonfiction.
It’s to be determined if that changes, but I did attend a writing class in September lead by Monica Byrne, the author of The Actual Star (one of my favorite books of the last few years). I signed up on a bit of a whim and in an attempt to explore the world of fiction writing more. The theme was Past, Present, and Future worlds, with one session on each, and Byrne had exercises for us to write in different ways. It was super helpful to me, a relative novice in the world of writing, to focus my efforts on smaller bits of a world through constraints and scenarios instead of being overwhelmed by an entire world of possibility.
Some of the specific exercises included thinking of emotions and experiences that you associate with them before trying to write towards those emotions and imbue a scene with them, writing dossiers for your characters before using them in a simple situation including a constraint, and writing similar situations across time to see how they evolve. Byrne encouraged us to push the boundaries of our thought process in another exercise focusing on the most we want and least we need for different categories like water, food, community, joy, and more.
It really pushed me and I’m looking forward to applying some of the things I learned. Nearly all of my nonfiction writing has been flash fiction or, if it counts, poetry. I’ve had ideas for larger worlds but have never known how to connect things with an overarching theme. I think revisiting some of these exercises as I write flash fiction and work my up to longer pieces will be extremely helpful. Hopefully some of it will end up here!
Byrne also recently published a short story called Parasocial about a celebrity who is down on his luck before being approached about creating AI versions of himself that fans can engage with. It’s another example of Byrne being really creative with science fiction ideas, just as she was with The Actual Star and The Girl in the Road. I recommend reading it if you’re interested in exploring AI and some of the ways it can help and hurt our society. I think working through some of these scenarios is going to be extremely important with how quickly technology is progressing.
It’s also very cool how there is a response essay that thinks through how we are already experiencing some of these parasocial relationships today as well as connections to other sci-fi, in particular Star Trek.
Can you imagine a world with cafeterias where anyone can come in and get a nutritious meal or a coffee or simply hang out without worrying about monetarily paying for the time? It’s increasingly hard in our current world where everything seems financialized to an extreme degree, but something close to that did in fact exist.
British Restaurants were a way for all British people to get hot, complete, and cheap meals during and after World War 2 before being discontinued due to a lack of profit. Unfortunately the focus on the bottom line of the canteens themselves seems shortsighted considering many people were able to get meals and have a place to simply exist. From a capitalist point of view, that resulted in improved worker wellbeing via proper nutrition and rest which leads to better productivity at work.
How to do these now? In San Francisco at least, it seems like it would be a no brainer to take some of the same downtown real estate that’s been empty and convert it to a cafeteria. If you want to fix houselessness, providing people with spaces where they can have nourishing meals or simply hang out for some time without having any demands placed back on them seems like a good start. (It turns out there’s at least one nonprofit - City Hope - doing something like this in San Francisco. I would love to check out their cafe sometime to see how it works firsthand.)
It doesn’t fix everything and would require investing in not just the cooks but also staff to make sure it stays clean and safe, but patience is necessary. Reorienting to a more tolerant, just, and equitable society will require adjustment from many people, particularly those at the top of the wealth pyramid. But solving these sorts of crises will necessarily include funding programs to help bring people back into society, and that seems a much better solution than somehow ferrying them out of sight of the rich.
I was directed to Mandy Brown’s blog by Robin Sloan and have read a couple pieces I enjoyed. In particular, it was fascinating reading about the history of the word ‘gossip’. Words change their definition over time, both for better and worse, and it’s a good reminder of the power of reclaiming words. It can be tough with more obviously politically-charged words, but taking back the positive origins of ‘gossip’ seems like a potentially easy and worthwhile way to have language move in a better direction.
It reminded me of a bit of world-building from The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez. It is a sci-fi novel and was fantastic, but / and the piece that stuck with me the most is how language is rigidly standardized throughout the galaxy to prevent spacefarers from losing touch with culture as they travel through space and time moves differently for them than in the central hub of society. What a fascinating insight into how language drifts over time and how a sci-fi culture insists on moving forward with technology while culture stands still. I think there are some parallels to culture today and our insistence on logging everything.
I’ll finish with a quote from Rosa Luxemburg from this wonderful piece on her by Jenny Odell.
This day is a gift to you like a rose in full bloom, lying at your feet, waiting for you to pick it up and press it to your lips.
What a sentiment. Appreciate the day. Unwrap it and enjoy it!
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