Month: October 2018

Happiness is may not be good for the economy but might be good for the planet

Neera

The above excerpt is from Matt Haig’s book “Reasons to Stay Alive,” and there is a lot of truth in it.

Business thrives and flourishes on one main human trait: dissatisfaction.

Not only we are living in a “competitive” world, but we are living in a world of “excess.”

Our wardrobes, our houses, and our garages are overflowing with “stuff” we have been collecting, which we wanted so much at the time of buying and now don’t even remember that it is collecting dust still in its original packaging.

If we could be contented with less, the economy might doom, but we will save the planet.

The imagination age

Neera

Do you have any idea which age we are in?

Last time I checked, we were in the information age.

Now, I am told; we are living in the Imagination Age.

The Imagination Age is a period beyond the Information Age, where creativity and imagination are the primary creators of economic value. This contrasts with the information age, where analysis and thinking were the main activities.

Charlie Magee, who first introduced the term in 1993 in an essay, “The Age of Imagination: Coming Soon the Civilization Near You,” proposes that the best way to assess the evolution of human civilization is through the lens of communication.

Throughout human history, the most successful groups, whether they are tribes, kingdoms, corporations, or nations, are the ones where a larger percentage of people have access to a higher quality of information, and a greater ability to transform that information into knowledge into action, and more freedom to communicate that new knowledge to the other members of their group.

The technologies like virtual reality, user-created content, and YouTube are changing the way we interact with each other and how we create economic and social structures.

The rise of immersive virtual reality, cyberspace, or the metaverse will further raise the value of the imagination work of designers, artists, video makers, and actors over rational thinking as a foundation of culture and economics.

Michael Cox Chief Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas argues that economic trends show a shift away from information sector employment and job growth towards creative jobs.

Jobs in publishing are declining, while jobs for designers, architects, actors & directors, software engineers, and photographers are all growing. This shift in job creation is a sign of the beginning of the Imagination Age.

Cox argues the skills can be viewed as a “hierarchy of human talents”, with raw physical effort as the lowest form of value creation, above this skilled labor and information entry to creative reasoning and emotional intelligence.

Each layer provides more value creation than the skills below it, and the outcome of globalization and automation is that labor is made available for higher-level skills that create more value.

Presently, these skills are around imagination and social and emotional intelligence.

Rita J. King, an artist, writer, and cultural philosopher, used the term in her November 2007 essay for the British Council, “The Emergence of a New Global Culture in the Imagination Age.”

King says,

“Rather than exist as an unwitting victim of circumstance, all too often unaware of the impact of having been born in a certain place at a certain time, to parents firmly nestled within particular values and socioeconomic brackets, millions of people are creating new virtual identities and meaningful relationships with others who would have remained strangers, each isolated within their respective realities.”

King further refined the development of her thinking in a 2008 essay entitled, “Our Vision for Sustainable Culture in the Imagination Age” in which she states,

“Active participants in the Imagination Age are becoming cultural ambassadors by introducing virtual strangers to unfamiliar customs, costumes, traditions, rituals, and beliefs, which humanizes foreign cultures, contributes to a sense of belonging to one’s own culture, and fosters an interdependent perspective on sharing the riches of all systems.”

She has become a crusader for expanding the Imagination Age concept through speeches at the O’Reilly Media, TED, Cusp, and Business Innovation Factory conferences.

Her blog “The Imagination Age” is worth checking.

A case for standing up while creating

Neera

Standing desks at workplaces are becoming increasingly prevalent. Despite complaints about aching legs and strain on spines, more and more people are choosing them. The pay-off is just not in health benefits but also in productivity.

An average person sits for approximately twelve hours a day. The doctors are warning that sitting is the new smoking.

In the most clicked article on standing desks, Cia Bernales writes that she used to have tight shoulders, lower back pains, and bad posture. Now she is not slouching, walks around the office more, and is more productive.

The advice to make sales calls while standing up has been around for a long time. Now there are calls for stand-up meetings and stand-up schools.

According to Andrew Knight, Professor at Olin Business School, groups are more creative and collaborative when they work standing up.

“The participants wore small sensors around their wrists to measure “physiological arousal” — the way people’s bodies react when they get excited. When a person’s arousal system becomes activated, sweat glands around the feet and hands release bursts of moisture. The sensors pass a small current of electricity through the skin to measure these moisture bursts.

Knight and Baer found that the teams who stood had greater physiological arousal and less idea territoriality than those in the seated arrangement. Members of the standing groups reported that their team members were less protective of their ideas; this reduced territoriality led to more information sharing and higher quality videos.” 

Science News: Standing up gets groups more fired up for teamwork

“Seeing that the physical space in which a group works can alter how people think about their work and how they relate with one another is very exciting.” — Andrew Knight. 

Many artists are known to express themselves better while standing up. Violinists, guitarists, and trumpeters all perform while standing up because you are holding your instrument upright when you’re standing. You are connected, expanded, tall, wide, round, inflated, supported, grounded, and free!

Ulrike Selleck, a classical singer, says standing is the best position to create beautiful, strong, and resonant sound because you are rooted in the earth through your legs. You stand like a tree, immovable throughout the storm, or the scales or coloratura or high notes or low notes, or interminably long phrasing, swooping melodies, or intricate lyrics.

Comedians perform standing up, and artists draw and paint standing up, then why don’t writers write standing up? 

Most of us struggle to stay up with new ideas when we sit in front of the computer after a day’s work. 

Our bodies in sedentary mode give the shut-down signal to our brains.

One way for writers to unlock creativity and break out of the too-tired-to-write routine could write standing up.

I will certainly test the theory next month, writing 1667 words a day (50,000 in a month) while participating in NaNoWriMo 2020.

Joys of mediocrity

Neera

At last, there are a few more people on this planet who have the same views as mine about ‘mediocrity.’

So much so that Tim Wu, the author of The Attention Merchants has written an opinion post in the New York Times In Praise of Mediocrity.

Tim has pointed out there is a slow disappearance of hobbies from our society.

A good old-fashioned hobby, a thing you do just for fun.

A hobby is something creative which you do for yourself and you alone.

You don’t need to be good at it. You don’t need to make money from it. You don’t need to get famous for it. You just need to do it because it makes you happy.

It appears that whatever free time people used to have to nurture a hobby is now taken up by screens.

“Lost here is the gentle pursuit of a modest competence, the doing of something just because you enjoy it, not because you are good at it. Hobbies, let me remind you, are supposed to be something different from work. But alien values like “the pursuit of excellence” have crept into and corrupted what was once the realm of leisure, leaving little room for the true amateur. The population of our country now seems divided between the semipro hobbyists (some as devoted as Olympic athletes) and those who retreat into the passive, screen leisure that is the signature of our technological moment.”

Tim goes on to say that our hobbies have become too serious, too demanding, and too much of an occasion to be anxious about whether we are really the person we claim to be.

“If you’re a jogger, it is no longer enough to cruise around the block; you’re training for the next marathon. If you’re a painter, you are no longer passing a pleasant afternoon, just you, your watercolors, and your water lilies; you are trying to land a gallery show or at least garner a respectable social media following. When your identity is linked to your hobby — you’re a yogi, a surfer, a rock climber — you’d better be good at it, or else who are you?”

For a long time, I have been giving myself permission not to strive for excellence in everything.

Some activities I do are meant to give me mere pleasure.

Singing is one of them. I have a loud voice, which sometimes is neither melodious nor pleasant. But singing gives me a lot of joy. Although singing in the shower or in the car is a safer option, it is no way near the joy I get in singing with others.

That means accepting my mediocrity and reaping the joy without feeling ashamed.

A better question

Neera

I am reading Mark Mason’s book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck where I got struck by an interesting point.

Mark writes when asked “What do you want out of life?” most people respond by saying something like, “I want to be happy, have a great family and a good job.” This response is so common and expected that it doesn’t really mean anything.

We all want these things. We all want to lead a carefree, happy and easy life, fall in love, have amazing relationships, look perfect, be admired and respected by everyone.

Everybody wants that because it is easy to want that.

But there is a better question. A question we never ask ourselves but turns out to be a much greater determinant of how our lives turn out to be.

That question is, “What pain do we want in our lives? What are we willing to struggle for?”

Asking about pleasure is easy. Pretty much all of us have a similar answer.

The more interesting question is about the pain. What pain do we want to sustain? That is a hard question. But it is a question that matters. A question that will actually get us somewhere. A question that can change a perspective, a life.

We can’t have pain-free lives. Our lives can’t be all roses and unicorns. We have to choose something.

The bad thing is our lives are full of struggles. The good thing is we can choose our struggles.

By choosing what we are willing to struggle with, we can decide which direction we want to take our lives.

Where the day has gone?

Neera

You are hoping for a solid day’s work.

Brainstorming and writing in the morning, editing and polishing in the afternoon, and reading at night.

Not too much to ask for, especially when you have the whole day to yourself.

Your day starts well. You mind-map three articles and write three pages before I take the first break to have breakfast.

But things start going downhill from there.

The kitchen needs your urgent attention. Ironing is sitting in one corner staring at you. There is no milk in the fridge. If that is not enough to derail you, the sheer guilt of skipping the gym for five days in a row does it. That is it, you decide, I am going to the gym today.

By the time you come back from the gym and do all the above, it is two pm.

You settle down in front of the computer thinking, I will not get up until I finish this morning’s writing and editing and polishing.

But as soon as you open your computer, you couldn’t stop the urge to check your emails. There are a few urgent ones; it will not take me long to respond to them, you think while you frantically punch keys.

Then, quite innocently, wooed by the tempting title, you open the email from another blogger and before you know it you are devouring her writing.

Without realizing you are on the net, surfing to find a fix for an annoying technical issue with your blog.

Before you know it, the day has gone.

Now compare this to a day in screenwriter and director Woody Allen’s life.

He wakes up in the morning, opens his German Olympia SM3 manual typewriter, starts punching its keys, and doesn’t stop until he has finished all he had planned for. He then leisurely walks to his fridge, gets himself a drink and something to eat, stares out from the window for a while to gather his thoughts, and then stations himself back in front of his typewriter and type till the next break.

Consider this, in the forty-four-year period between 1969 and 2013, he has written and directed forty-four films that received twenty-three Academy Award nominations—an absurd rate of artistic productivity.

Peter Higgs, a theoretical physicist who performs his work in such disconnected isolation, joins Allen in his rejection of computers that the journalists couldn’t find him after it was announced that he had won the Nobel Prize.

J.K. Rowling uses a computer but was famously absent from social media during the writing of her Harry Potter novels—even though this period coincided with the rise of technology and its popularity among media figures.

What the network tools seem to be doing is chipping away at our capacity for concentration and contemplation.

The idea that the network tools are pushing our work from the deep towards the shallow is not new.

The Shallows by Nicholas Carr was just the first in the series of recent books to examine the internet’s effect on our brain and work habits.

William Powers’s Hamlet’s BlackBerry, John Freeman’s The Tyranny of E-mail, and Alex Soojung-Kin Pang’s The Distraction Addiction – all of which agree, more or less, that network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.

Cal Newport in his book The Deep Work hypothesizes that the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time. It is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy.

As a result, the few who cultivate this skill and then make it the core of their working life will thrive.

To do deep and meaningful work, we need to organize our lives in such a way that we can get long, consecutive, uninterrupted time chunks.

For me, it could mean locking myself up in a room with no computer, just books, a notebook, a pen, a pencil, and a highlighter.