Category: whatever

I am firmly Anti-Productivity.

Obsession with productivity and optimization is the antithesis of a life well-lived.

You will never be productive enough the leaders of the Cult of Productivity. “Productivity” as it is measured is higher than ever in history, and yet we still all slave away. The idea of Productivity is bullshit as are the methods of measuring it.

The so-called Protestant Work Ethic is simply a means of getting people to slave away for their whole lives. It’s a lie.

No matter how optimized you are, you will still eventually die. No matter how rich you are you will die just like everyone else. Beyond not smoking, killing your liver with booze, you have no control over anything. Fit people get cancer and die every – single – day.

This is just a reminder. For myself.

OK, maybe I don’t work in a sweat shop, but my 3-day weekend is drawing to a close.

Amazingly, after having 2 days off and having some fun and relaxation with no stress from rushing around, I had the energy today to clean our bedroom really well. I mean — like – really well. Going to really enjoy sleeping in there tonight on clean sheets, with a clean floor, the bathroom super clean, and all my clothing washed and folded/hung.

I’m not necessarily looking at a 4-day work week though. I have a library outreach event to do on Saturday, and some other stuff that will keep me busy a bit late one night this week. In the morning I’ll look at everything and see if I can work out a work-free Friday. That would be nice.

We are halfway through Memorial Day weekend.

If there is anything better than a three-day weekend, it can only be a four -day or more weekend, vacation, or simply being retired.

Yesterday I spent the morning skateboarding, then we chilled the rest of the day, listened to music, and just generally relaxed.

Today we got up, bought some coffee and took the pup for a walk at the nature preserve, came home and relaxed with more coffee. Then we drove out to Forever Young record store in Grand Prairie and did some record shopping, my wife procuring two excellent albums and I bought 1978’s All Mod Cons, by the Jam, one of my favorite bands. I need to delve into Paul Weller’s other material. Note to self. Genius is genius.

The more I look into it, the more I realize how much of my favorite music was created before 1980. I feel kind of dumb to have not realized this before, but that post-punk era was just so good!

It is, as I type these exact words right now, 6:29pm. With the lovely three-day weekend I have been able to relax, have fun, enjoy my family, and not feel rushed at all. I worked from home on Friday, so the Tyranny of Laundry is not currently oppressing me.

As the fateful hour of 8pm approaches, the usual feeling of Sunday night depression is not seeping into my psyche. As we walked our dog about 20 minutes ago I was thinking about this and coming to the realization of how much middle-class misery is caused by feeling like one must rush from one thing to another. Constant time pressure cooker. To some extent we do this to ourselves, but only to feel like we actually have a life outside of work. I am lucky I actually love what I do and have a great employer, something 99.999999999% of people can’t say, but still I’d like to work less.

Aside from buying these records today, my holiday consumerism included ordering a higher-quality cartridge for our turntable, the red Ortofon 2M. My friend Dale tells me this will make a noticeable difference from the stock cartridge that came on our turntable. Looking forward to checking out the new records with the new needle.

I suppose this goes without saying, but you will NEVER find a word on this blog written by AI. Nor will you find an AI-generated image or sound.

If you use AI to write you have given up and are making the world a worse place. Fuck you.

That is all.