After leaving my job in politics, I found that I had a whole lot of freedom to rethink things. My old views seemed to matter a whole lot less. Upton Sinclair had it right, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." When my salary became apolitical, my opinions stopped being sacrosanct.
It's Holy Week. So let's talk about the American Religion.
Over the past year or so, I've read a bit in the modern type of Zen Buddhism promulgated by Alan Watts. The books have been uniformly interesting and wildly diverse: from the delightfully titled meditation guide Don't Just Do Something, Sit There to the fairly dense The Way of Zen to the ur-text of white people going on Tibetan pilgrimages The Snow Leopard. I've also sprinkled in some of Watts's essays and other authors aiming for the same thing: explorations of meaning, spirituality, and mindfulness untethered from western religious tradition.
We're deep in ski season. March is usually the snowiest month and the snowpack usually lasts until early May. It's been a little iffy this year: too many days of melting temperatures and a lot of forecasted snow that fell as rain. But we're still skiing a lot of acreage at our home mountain.
There seems to be two opposing ideas in our approach to career. On the one hand, there's quiet quitting and balancing life with career, exemplified by Anne Helen Peterson's work over the last decade or so. You can find any number of mid-career columnists decrying the lazy, entitled youth's approach to the workplace. On the other hand, there's how we actually live, which may be more concerning. American culture places its highest value on social advancement, educational attainment, and successful careerism.
Why does Vanity Fair have the most readable review of Apple's new headset computer? Tech blogs aren't not known for the readability, but usually you can find at least one funny and more thoughtful piece. Ben Thompson had a good one, perhaps the best one I saw in the tech "press." He even asked the inevitable question about what happens to a society when everyone wears headsets and earphones all the time in an intelligent way. The rest of the tech press seemed wrapped around the axle: is Facebook's headset better? Why does Apple's have a separate battery pack? Will the videos be better than on your tv?
When I regularly read the news, while I tend to know what things are happening, I often lack any sense of why. The Wall Street Journal's coverage of the market peels back one layer from whatever the spot prices are, but seldom further than that. Politico has up-to-the-minute statuses and feelings from politicians and proposals of all sorts, but you get the feeling you're watching the waves but missing the tide.
A few months ago, I referenced the first of these weekly emails, Airspace #1, to introduce the essay in Monoculture #360. Both describes something true at a surface level: everything looks the same because our global culture can make it so; our culture tends to choose global and mono because it can. What's more interesting, and on the original "technopoly" focus of this weekly missive, is the mechanism by which the Airspace or Monoculture has emerged. How does airspace and monoculture happen?
We're at the stage of our home addition where the final invoice is about to be sent and it's about to wipe out our extra funds. Right at the time when I thought our usual spending was under enough control to build back up those funds, our van's shock absorbers gave out. It wasn't a giant setback financially, although it certainly is a noticeable expense. Was it preventable? I think it may've been: our city's streets are riddled with years-old potholes; the state highway up to the ski hill has been patched in a few places with gravel, which the snowplows regularly scrape away; when you drive on I-93 to New Hampshire, you can tell where state line is precisely: the road has two additional lanes and is perfectly smooth in the Granite State, while in the Bay State its narrower lanes are rough with grooves and holes and decrepitude. We pay the commonwealth twenty-seven cents per gallon of gas; we pay the feds eighteen: neither can keep the roads paved.