The Art of Manliness

Apr 13, 2023 ∞

The patchwork progress of maturity

This short post outlines in a pithy way how being an adult is so difficult: we mature in different aspects of our lives at different rates. In turn, this makes relationships difficult — especially as a parent.

AI art. Midjourny prompt: "calm, male parent consoling a crying child --aspect 16:9 --v 5 --no text words letters signatures"

We tend to think of immaturity and maturity as dichotomous, uniform states. Once you leave behind the former and enter the latter, you’re mature through and through.

Yet, in reality, maturation follows a patchwork pattern of progress.

[...]

Maybe you react to receiving criticism with stoic equilibrium, but respond to having your birthday forgotten with perturbed petulance.

Maybe you can give a presentation at work with perfect confidence, but can’t approach an attractive woman without sweat-inducing fear.

[...]

As the midcentury writers Harry and Bonaro Overstreet put it, “All through life we have to take turns, as it were, being ‘parents’ to one another — because we all take turns at being children.”

Source: Sunday Firesides: Parent the Immature in Others | The Art of Manliness

Image: Midjourney (prompt in alt text)

Oct 26, 2020 ∞

Everything intercepts us from ourselves

🤝 Medieval English people used to pay their rent in eels

🤺 The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League–Obsessed Parents

📜 Archaeologists unearth 'huge number' of sealed Egyptian sarcophagi

🌉 3D model of how the Charles bridge in Prague was constructed

💪 Every Man Should Be Able to Save His Own Life: 5 Fitness Benchmarks a Man Must Master

Quotation by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Image from top-linked post.

Sep 9, 2020 ∞

Inside your pain are the things you care about most deeply

I listened to this episode of The Art of Manliness podcast a while back on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and found it excellent. I've discussed ACT with my CBT therapist who says it can also be a useful approach.

My guest today says we need to free ourselves from these instincts and our default mental programming and learn to just sit with our thoughts, and even turn towards those which hurt the most. His name is Steven Hayes and he’s a professor of psychology, the founder of ACT — Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — and the author of over 40 books, including his latest 'A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters'. Steven and I spend the first part of our conversation in a very interesting discussion as to why traditional interventions for depression and anxiety — drugs and talk therapy — aren’t very effective in helping people get their minds right, and how ACT takes a different approach to achieving mental health. We then discuss the six skills of psychological flexibility that undergird ACT and how these skills can be used not only by those dealing with depression and anxiety but by anyone who wants to get out of their own way and show up and move forward in every area of their lives.

Something that Hayes says is that "if people don't know what their values are, they take their goals, the concrete things they can achieve, to be their values". This, he says, is why rich people can still be unfulfilled.

Well worth a listen.

Oct 4, 2019 ∞

Friday flexitarianism

Check these links out and tell me which one you like best:

The radical combination of degrowth and basic income (openDemocracy) — "One of the things you hear whenever you talk about degrowth is that, if the economy doesn't grow, people are going to be without jobs, people will go hungry, and no one wants that. Rich countries might be able to afford slowing down their economies, but not poorer ones. You hear this argument mostly in countries from the Global South, like my own. This misses the point. Degrowth is a critique of our dependency on work. This idea that people have to work to stay alive, and thus the economy needs to keep growing for the sake of keeping people working."
The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look (Aeon) — "It is not just that the ‘sane’ are irrational but that they lack scope and range, as though they’ve grown into the prisoners of their arbitrary lives, locked up in their own dark and narrow subjectivity. Unable to take leave of their selves, they hardly look around them, barely see beauty and possibility, rarely contemplate the bigger picture – and all, ultimately, for fear of losing their selves, of breaking down, of going mad, using one form of extreme subjectivity to defend against another, as life – mysterious, magical life – slips through their fingers."
"The Tragedy of the Commons": how ecofascism was smuggled into mainstream thought (BoingBoing) — "We are reaching a "peak indifference" tipping point in the climate debate, where it's no longer possible to deny the reality of the climate crisis. I think that many of us assumed that when that happened, we'd see a surge of support for climate justice, the diversion of resources from wealth extraction for the super-rich to climate remediation and defense centered on the public good. But that expectation overestimated the extent to which climate denial was motivated by mere greed."
What Would It Take to Shut Down the Entire Internet? (Gizmodo) "One imaginative stumbling block, in playing out the implications of [this] scenario, was how something like that could happen in the first place. And so—without advocating any of the methods described below, or strongly suggesting that hundreds or thousands of like-minded heroes band together to take this sucker down once and for all—...we’ve asked a number of cybersecurity experts how exactly one would go about shutting down the entire internet."
Earning, spending, saving: The currency of influence in open source (Opensource.com) — "Even though you can't buy it, influence behaves like a form of virtual currency in an open source community: a scarce resource, always needed, but also always in short supply. One must earn it through contributions to an open source project or community. In contrast to monetary currency, however, influence is not transferable. You must earn it for yourself. You can neither give nor receive it as a gift."
The Art of Topophilia: 7 Ways to Love the Place You Live (Art of Manliness) — "It’s not only possible to kindle this kind of topophilic love affair with “sexier” places chock full of well-hyped advantages, but also with so-called undesirable communities that aren’t on the cultural radar. Just as people who may initially appear lowly and unappealing, but have warm and welcoming personalities, come to seem more attractive the more we get to know them, so too can sleepier, less vaunted locales."
A Like Can’t Go Anywhere, But a Compliment Can Go a Long Way (Frank Chimero) — "Passive positivity isn’t enough; active positivity is needed to counterbalance whatever sort of collective conversations and attention we point at social media. Otherwise, we are left with the skewed, inaccurate, and dangerous nature of what’s been built: an environment where most positivity is small, vague, and immobile, and negativity is large, precise, and spreadable."
EU recognises "right to repair" in push to make appliances last longer (Dezeen) — "Not included in the EU right to repair rules are devices such as smart phones and laptops, whose irreplaceable batteries and performance-hampering software updates are most often accused of encouraging throwaway culture."
I'm a Psychotherapist Who Sets 30-Day Challenges Instead of Long-Term Goals. Here's Why (Inc.) — "Studies show our brains view time according to either "now deadlines" or "someday deadlines." And "now deadlines" often fall within this calendar month."

Image by Yung-sen Wu (via The Atlantic)

May 20, 2019 ∞

Idleness always produces fickle changes of mind

If you've never read Michel de Montaigne's Essays then you're missing a treat. He's thought of as the prototypical 'blogger' and most of what he's written has survived the vicissitudes of changes in opinion over the last 450 years. The quotation for today's article comes from him.

As Austin Kleon notes in the post that accompanies the image that also illustrates this post, idleness is not the same as laziness:

I’m... a practitioner of intentional idleness: blocking off time in which I can do absolutely nothing. (Like Terry Gilliam, I would like to be known as an “Arch Idler.”) “Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing,” I wrote in Steal Like An Artist. (See Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing, Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers, Tom Hodgkinson’s “The Idle Parent,” Tim Kreider’s “The ‘Busy’ Trap,” etc. )
Austin Kleon

There's a great post on The Art of Manliness by Brett and Kate McKay about practising productive procrastination, and how positive it can be. They break down the types of tasks that we perform on an average down into three groups:

Tier 1: tasks that are the most cognitively demanding — hard decisions, challenging writing, boring reading, tough analysis, etc.
Tier 2: tasks that take effort, but not as much — administrative work, making appointments, answering emails, etc.
Tier 3: tasks that still require a bit of effort, but in terms of cognitive load are nearly mindless — cleaning, organizing, filing, paying bills, etc.
Brett and Kate McKay

As I've said many times before, I can only really do four hours of really deep work (the 'Tier 1' tasks) per day. Of course, the demands of any job and most life admin, mostly form into Tier 2, with a bit of Tier 3 for good measure.

The thrust of their mantra to 'practise productive procrastination' is that, if you're not feeling up to a Tier 1 task, you should do a Tier 2 or Tier 3 task. Apparently, and I have to say I'm obviously not their target audience here, most people instead of doing a Tier 1 task instead do nothing useful and instead do things like checking Facebook, gossiping, and playing games.

The trouble is that with new workplace tools we can almost be encouraged into low-level tasks, as an article by Rani Molla for Recode explains:

On average, employees at large companies are each sending more than 200 Slack messages per week, according to Time Is Ltd., a productivity-analytics company that taps into workplace programs — including Slack, calendar apps, and the Office Suite — in order to give companies recommendations on how to be more productive. Power users sending out more than 1,000 messages per day are “not an exception.”
Keeping up with these conversations can seem like a full-time job. After a while, the software goes from helping you work to making it impossible to get work done.
Rani Molla

Constant interruptions aren't good for deep work, nor are open plan offices. However, I remember working in an office that had both. There was a self-policed time shortly after lunch (never officially sanctioned or promoted) where, for an hour or two, people really got 'in the zone'. It was great.

What we need, is a way to block out our calendars for unstructured, but deep work, and be trusted to do so. I actually think that most workplaces and most bosses would actually be OK with this. Perhaps we just need to get on with it?

Also check out:

How to tell when procrastinating is actually anxiety (Quartz) — "People anxious about a significant goal will often engage in unproductive behaviors (email, social media, trivial errands—anything other than getting down to business) to avoid that discomfort, only to feel more distressed as time passes and no progress on the goal has been made."
Why you shouldn’t blame willpower for your lack of self-control (Fast Company) — "Here’s the truth: The Feeling Brain is driving our Consciousness Car. Because, ultimately, our emotion drives action. That’s because action is emotion."
Why did I start Working Part-Time instead of Full-Time and the Benefits of a 4 Days Workweek (Give me the chills) — "Truth is: Having less time you automatically forces you to find new solutions and this has happened to me too."