I'm Cal Newport's and this is deep questions. Episode 2 14. If you're new, this is the show where I answer questions from my audience about both the theory and practice of living and working deeply. I'm joined here as always in my deep work HQ by my producer Jesse uh Jesse. I know if you noticed the restaurant that we are above or I should say we're above is out of business.

Republic

public

has shut down. What happened?

Look, I don't want to say it's our fault. I'm just looking at the timeline successful restaurant, we move in upstairs, restaurant closes. So I don't know, maybe it's something we're doing now. I think it was just pandemic. You know, they never really recovered.

It's a big place we went in there once. It kind of had an awkward layout.

Yeah it's a it's a weird space but I've been there for a long time, maybe 56 years. But they never came. I mean after the pandemic shut down for a while and then they came back, they never went all in. You see remember the weird hours, like they weren't doing lunches, they were closing at nine, they were closed on monday

and Tuesday. So it's hard to

get help. It's hard to get help. It's part of a restaurant group here in D. C. The black group and I think they only have so much capital and they're focusing it on other places.

That's too bad.

Yeah. But I was I was brainstorming. So like here's here's the thought experiment and get your thoughts. Imagine we had a show that was slightly bigger than ours, let's say a Huberman Friedman style show that would generate enough revenue that you could cover without breaking a sweat the least payment on that space. All right. So let's say we're in that situation like we this is the space below us. Is this big, nice space. We need to take it over. What would we do with that space? What would you do, jesse? What do you think we should do?

I'd probably start bartending and feeding you drinks. You would just be

bartending during the show. You are a really good bartender. That could be. So your recommendation. So jesse's recommendation and the people to come and park would appreciate this would be to turn that space into a private bar. They basically just served elaborate drinks to a single podcaster. Yeah, I don't know what to do with that space. I mean, hopefully another restaurant or bar comes

in I suppose. But uh

sad. I should say speaking to jesse, if you have not been checking out the Youtube channel that goes with this show, you should. He's been doing some really interesting things with the videos. So, if you look at videos of the full episodes now, there's a nice introductions. There's also a pardon? The interruption style ticker on the side of the screens, you can see what questions are coming up and where I am in the questions. I mean the question blocks. I think that's nice. Um somewhere editing is happening with the video clip. So if you're in an audio only listener, you might want to check out what this show looks like and you can see that at youtube dot com slash

import media.

Alright, so I'm looking at our, our show notes here, we've got two good blocks of questions, looks like later on. I'm also going to introduce a case study trying to do more of those. Actually hear about someone who has applied some of this advice that we talked about and what it looked like. As always, I encourage you to submit your own questions. There's links right in the show notes. You go to a survey, boom. Type it in, comes right to us. We appreciate any and all questions that you send in. Alright, so before we get going with those questions,

I want to start today, as I often do with a deep dive many of you have been sending me notes and messages and articles about the current workplace related internet trend de jure, which is quiet quitting. I then went relatively deep on this topic over the weekend for a writing project, something I was writing for a book, chapter for my slow productivity book. I went deep on this topic and did some research about where it started from and how it's being covered and what it's really all about. So I figured this was a good excuse today's episode to actually talk about quiet quitting. So if you haven't heard of this, this is the timeline I was able to excavate through my research. This trend starts on Tiktok, it starts in july. So there is a Tiktok user name at the time, Z. K. Chillin.

He has since changed his user name, but his name was E. K. Chilling. He posted a 17 2nd video on Tiktok that featured soft piano music playing over a montage of videos. There's one of its, it's him on the subway and then you see a downtown new york city street and then a residential street and then for some reason, a child's automated bubble machine. So it has this montage and you hear his voice and I wrote down what he says in that video. So he says, I recently heard about this idea of quiet quitting where you're not quitting your job, but quitting the idea of going above and beyond in your work. Um, then he goes on a little bit. I won't read the whole thing to reject hustle culture, to reject the idea that hustle culture demands,

which is that your work is your life. And he says the reality is that it's not your worth as a person is not defined by your labor. So that Tiktok video becomes popular. Other tiktok users start posting videos about quiet quitting in particular. Lots of profession specific videos. So there's a well known one. Now that's a teacher talking about the demands of teaching and etcetera. Right? So it becomes a Tiktok phenomenon. The mainstream media picks it up as far as I can tell, early, august they picked this up and it has now been covered extensively in the mainstream media and other types of media since then. So it jumped from Tiktok into mainstream discussion. So I'm looking up here on the screen. So for those of you who are watching this episode of segment on Youtube, you can actually see the article,

but I'll narrate for those who are just listening. There's this article from the Guardian On August six, which I believe as far as I can tell is one of the first actual old school media sources to tackle the topic. So that it was titled quiet quitting. Why doing the bare minimum at work has gone global. And it was written by James Tapper. I just want to point out a couple things from this article and then what I want to do is give you my thoughts and all of this. So, this article opens, I just want to point this out by saying Bartle Bee is back, although no doubt who prefer not to be this is a very british way to open an article like that. There is a book, Melville wrote a short story novella, short story I think is a short story, a novella called Bartleby the scrivener. It's actually one of the first,

as far as I can tell books about knowledge work on we So, check out that book if you haven't seen it. But it was very british. Uh the number of american tiktok users who would know that reference I assume is low. Alright, so let me jump ahead here. Here's another key quote. Ah Instead they are doing just enough in the office to keep up. So this is talking about the quote, unquote quiet quitters, then leaving work on time and meeting slack. The writer that adds kind of starkly than posting about it on social media. So here is the summary of quiet quitting that this Guardian article gave. They're doing just enough in the office to keep up. Then leaving work on time and muting slack. Now,

there's some good analysis in this piece trying to understand this trend. So, here's a quote from an expert. Since the pandemic People's relationship with work has been studied in many ways and the literature typically across professions would argue that yes, people's way of relating to their work has changed. We talked about that often on the show the impact of the pandemic on people stepping back and saying, wait a second, what's going on with my life, What's going with my work is a good time to regroup. Another quote from this expert. The search for meaning has become far more apparent. There's a sense of our own mortality during the pandemic. Something quite existential around people thinking what should work mean for me, what can I do in a role? Uh how can I do a role that's more aligned to my values? And finally,

we have another quote here from a Harvard business school professor who introduced this term, The great rethink as a better way of describing the current moment and knowledge worked in something like the great resignation. There's a lot of rethinking happening. Alright, so, I want to give uh let me get some thoughts here. First of all, I should go on to say this article, which was one of the first, it was one of the better articles on this topic. They defined what quite quitting was, and then gave this psychological context, what's going on in the workplace? Why might this trend have emerged since then, things have been going downhill. I do not necessarily suggest getting looking at the online coverage of this topic as I went into it for my the chapter I was writing in the months since this,

this idea first arose. I think online discussion and coverage has become a pylon of superficial criticality. The online commentators are seeing this issue mainly as a chance to prove their sophistication and bona fides by trying to one up whoever talked about it last by pointing out what they missed that you thought this is wrong, but you're the problem because you missed out on this problem and then someone else comes in and I find it to be completely non useful. So you have the original quiet quitters on Tiktok and then you get the reaction that's like kids are lazy. You know, this is just called having a job. What are you talking about? And then you have the crew that comes in and says, whoa, you both are wrong. Because what neither of you are doing is cataloging every single identity group and trying to argue which identity groups will have an easier time than worse. You have to have a huge appendix trying to rank order the ease with which different groups can do quiet quitting. And until you acknowledge that you're the problem that someone else comes in and says no. All of you guys are the problem because what you don't realize is that your your bougie stooges and the key here is to rebuild capitalism and replace it with something better. This discussion in general is just part of the superstructure superstructure that is upholding this economic exploitation.

Everyone trying to one up everyone else, everyone else trying to make everyone else seem dumber than them. Uh, it's a mess. It's a pile on ignore it. So let's push that aside. Let's get rid of the posture and get back to the the original issue here of quiet quitting and this context that I think the Guardian provided, which I think is quite good. So I think there is something important here. What we're seeing in that Tiktok discussion is a new generation. We'll call it this pandemic generation, a generation that had the pandemic disruptions hit early in their adulthood, discovering for lack of a better word, lifestyle design the idea that work is one of the factors that you can intentionally deploy as part of a larger plan to construct a life that is meaningful or deep. So it's an intentional approach to life in which you are designing your life to meet whatever criteria you have for meaning and depth. So it is good to see a new generation,

discovering this, the frustration is is there there starting from scratch? I mean quiet quitting is a, it's a simplistic and crude first step towards trying to understand, well, wait a second, what role does work have in my life? I'm working too much, I don't know why, probably because someone's being evil, I think I'm gonna like work last. It's a very simplistic first step towards a deeper, more necessary conversation, but this is a topic that has been covered every single generation. Going back quite a few generations go back to the 19th century, read Walden by the road,

jump forward to the 20th century, read the seven story mountain jump forward, another 20 years, read zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, jump forward to the 21st century, you can start with eat, pray love then go onwards to the four hour work week, which by the way was covering this exact issue the last time we went through this, which was the post 9 11 recession and my generation, the early millennials entering the working world and trying to find their way. We had tim Ferriss version of lifestyle design. It's also covered by us here on the show and in my writing extensively when we talk about the deep life and lifestyle centric career planning and career capital and into the method of intentionally trying to construct a life that is deep and how you have to be systematic and deployed lots of different angles at it. So it's, it's not a topic we're starting from scratch. The Tiktok crew kind of is. So I think this is the good news,

bad news, the good news is what a topic and I'm glad, I think it's a serious topic and I'm glad it's getting attention with this particular group. The bad news is look, if you start from scratch, I don't think you're gonna catch up to throw anytime soon. Like people have thought about this, so, uh, you should pull from what is already out there. So I think this is an important topic. I'm glad it's being looked at this pandemic generation probably has had the most impetus to look at this topic that we've seen since, I don't know, maybe the Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance sort of 1960s, early 70s, that's probably the last time we had A comparable disruption and culture evolution of culture that required a pretty serious re rethinking that eventually,

by the way led to the 1980s, we talked about this recently, early 1990s notion of passion and following your passion and the bastardization of Campbell's follow your bliss, which has been a mixed bag. And we're having another one of these evolutions. Now, the great rethink of induced by the pandemic is going on, we're trying to rethink these things. So I think quite quitting is reflecting a good trend, even if the details of these Tiktok videos are easy to dismiss, I would say, let's resist that urge. Yes, if you're gonna look at 23 year olds posting 17 2nd videos, we can make fun, we can make ourselves feel smarter than everyone else. But I think what we should do you see this as an opportunity to help a group, a large group of dissatisfied and earnestly searching people find their way so they don't have to do this all from scratch.

It seems like that would be a topic in both books that you're gonna work on. Yeah,

productivity, productivity,

right? That it seems like it would be even bigger product topic in your next book.

Yeah, I think the Deep Life book is is gonna be a big topic is gonna be a good match for this. I mean, it's all in the air right now, you know, uh and this happens every generation, you get to a place economically, things are going good. There's other concerns, you don't really think much about work. Uh and then and then once you get going um something happens and you're like well what role is work supposed to have in my life? What's going on here? And people

try to figure this out? So with slow productivity, how does it relate?

Well, I mean, I think slow productivity is maybe a little bit more narrow in its attack on this topic, but slow productivity is saying, what even are you going for when you say you want to be productive, like what is your definition of a a working life well executed? And the argument there is that we we have these, we don't think it through, we have these superficial definitions. I don't know, business is better than less hustling is better than not hustling. I want to feel like I'm earning my keep, but it's all very haphazard, and a lot of what we actually do when we're trying to get after it, quote unquote in our work is ironically counterproductive, makes us more miserable, It's not maximizing useful output.

And so slow productivity is saying, why don't we go back and rethink what we even mean by productivity, especially when it comes to knowledge work, to try to find something that's more sustainable that's going to make life more meaningful and it always gonna produce better stuff. So it's it's like a narrow first stab at the great rethink and then the deep life is much broader. The deep life is where you say, you know what we're going

to move to Kentucky,

quite quitting or quite quickly as a response to the same underlying impetus that my books are coming out of, which is people starting to to rethink work its role in their life and what they're trying to do with their life more generally. Alright, so we got a couple of blocks of questions here. First, I want to talk about a new sponsor to this show that I'm excited about and that is Hinson's shaving. This is the type of, this is the type of thing I like. Okay, so here's the here's the idea here. I'm gonna have a script but let me let me cut to the idea of what I'm really excited about here. This is a family run business that specialize in really high precision parts manufacturing for the aerospace industry. So they have manufactured pieces for the MArs rovers, they've manufactured pieces for the International Space Station. They used these high precision CNC routers that can build things to really precise specifications. So they had this idea, they were looking at the world of shaving.

What they figured out is the problem in the world of shaving is the way the razors are mounted, if the razors are loose or too much of it is exposed, it bends up and down, It's like a diving board, it moves up and down and that's what catches your skin, that's what causes irritation and knicks. And so they realized if you could build a really precise razor body. So the actual handle and thing at the end of the razor, they could hold a standard razor blade perfectly firmly with with just the right amount showing. Then the blades become the easy part. 10 cents. Standard blade is fine. All of the magic isn't getting the precisely built handle and that's what they did. They designed this beautiful precision generated metal Shaving handle that you use with just standard 10cent razor blades and get a incredible shave out of it. So the way they explained it to me is they built a great razor and a terrible razor business. So unlike the subscription services,

unlike the disposable razors where you know the whole business is, we're gonna keep selling you these high priced poorly made Raisers that blades that you use for a while and throw out here. You buy this one really nice handle. And then you know, for $10 you can have two years worth of blades. The blades are are no longer the easy part. So I like this idea of super-high quality, precisely made beautiful objects that do a job really well. You don't have to have all the plastic and all the waste. You have this nice piece of aluminum and you use just standard blades and you get a really good shape. Uh, their precision is .0013". That's how far their blades extend. That's less than the thickness of a human hair. You can't do that unless you know how to make super precise parts. So I am,

I was a fan of this of this company, I have my Hinson's uh shaver. Uh it's fantastic. You pay more for the thing up front but you're not buying the replacement blades, you're not doing the subscriptions, you're not doing the going to CVS and getting the things in the plastic box that they have to come and unlocked or whatever. You buy the thing once and you use it with Tencent's blades. You you will be winning in terms of how much you paid really soon. So I don't know. This is one of those things where I'm actually a big fan of the product. So here's the thing, it's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that will last you a lifetime visit, Henson shaving dot com slash cal to pick the razor for you. And then use the code cal and you will get two years worth of blades free with your razor. Now the key here is when you go to the site, you choose your razor,

add the two year supply of razors to your cart and then when you enter the code cow it'll just make them free. But you have to you have to add the razors to your cart and then enter the code cal when you check out and you'll get the two years worth of razors for free. That's 100 free blades when you head to H. E. N. S. O. N. S. H. A. V. I. N. G. Dot com slash cal.

And use that code cal So I was on the phone with him jesse right before earlier today and I knew I had to get over here and had to restrain myself because I wanted to well shave. But I had a lot of questions about the high precision CNC routers. Like does it start with uh a block of aluminum? Like how do these things work? It's it's you know because it's a cylindrical like precision made thing. I'm just really interested

in that technology. I

also thought it was cool that the thing that built my razor also built parts for the International Space station. So that's cool. I also want to talk about speaking of well made really interesting high tech products. I also want to talk about eight sleep. This is I think again, really cool technology at that. I like seeing really cool technologies. Um so the eight sleep pod is they call it the ultimate sleep machine. But what it does is a sleep technology that can control the temperature of your sleeping experience. You put the pod over your mattress and you have precise control over what temperature you then want that mattress uh cover to be at. So the way I use it, why I like this product. Like most people like this product is you can bring the temperature down, it's hard to get a good night's sleep if you're hot And if you bring the temperature down with your eight sleep pod to be just a little bit cooler, the quality of your sleep significantly improves. You can bring it down as cold as 55°. I was thinking about a sleep jesse the other day I was watching reruns of curb your enthusiasm and someone like the later seasons where he's arguing uh he's arguing with his girlfriend, forgot her name about the temperature they sleep in and she likes it warmer and and he likes it cooler.

But the premises like eventually um she gets sick and he's gonna have to care for her. And he was trying to break up with her before she got sick and he just missed it. But then the doctor is there and the doctors like and and and this is really important. Um You're gonna have to really keep the room warm. You know, I think it's really important for the really important for the healing process. You really, I think for sleeping need the room to be 80 85 degrees. You know, I thought that was funny. Uh The eight sleep. Eight sleep would be just what he needs their what Larry David needed because he could bring his side of the bed down. So there's data about this eight sleep users experience up to 19% increase in recovery. Of the 32% improvement in sleep quality, 34% more deep sleep. Their newest generation is called the pod three.

Which allows you to do tracking, you can track sleep, track health with these sensors. Health tracking, use these sensors that are in there. So it's getting pretty high tech. But mainly it really is a game changer to go to bed. And the thing you're on is not hot, pot is not magic, but it can feel like it. So go to sleep dot com slash deep. Start sleeping cool and save $150 on the pod. That's eight sleep spelled out. E I G H. T. Sleep dot com slash deep eight.

Sleep currently ships within the US Canada and the U. K. As well as select countries in the EU and Australia. All right, so let's get into some questions. Uh Jesse, what's our first question of the day?

Okay so our first question is from Esther she's a 48 year old physician in New York City. This is what she has to say. What did your parents do in your childhood in teen life to help motivate you to be as organized and efficient as you are. What lessons can I learn to motivate my teenagers to pursue excellence and all that. They do.

Well, it's an interesting question. So, if I go back and time to think about young cal Newport's and what he was exposed to growing up. I mean there is some interesting stuff to perhaps mine from back then. My mom is very organized. I mean she'll tell this story that uh she wasn't organized, we were very young, she was not as organized and we lived in Houston. It was kind of a hectic setup because she had the commute from North of Houston in the downtown, it was a very long commute. And then my dad had to go the other direction and we were always cobbling together child care and I think it's a little busy and then we moved to New Jersey and once we moved to New Jersey, we were old enough that she was staying at home at that point and I think it was very stressful and chaotic to try to organize the lives of four elementary school aged kids. But she had a friend she met, she had a friend who was mormon who really pushed the franklin covey system, right? Because covey is mormon.

So, so the franklin franklin covey system, which is based on part on Stephen coven, Stephen Covey's thinking was very popular among mormons before it expanded to be more popular generally. So my mom became a like a Diehard user of the franklin planner, like using it the way exactly following the rules and it transformed life. So it killed off that stress. It was a very organized household. So I was exposed to that. So subliminally, I might have taken in organization helps, but I was not a very organized structured kid. I was haphazard, I would leave things until the last minute. I was not a kind of type a let's get things lined up, tackle them one by one,

get things done at the highest level of quality. I was not like that until college. It really wasn't until college when I got serious about my academic career that I began to get more systematic about organization because at that point I cared, it was not really till then that I cared how well I did my options in life for whatever reason, I don't quite know why I had a chip on my shoulder, you know, I just had this sense of, I think I have some talent, I I think I'm a smart guy, but it's on me to make something of this. I don't know where that came from, but that sense did not emerge for me until college and then I got very organized and structured and develop the type of ideas I talked about here. So I don't know if I subliminally took in some things from my mom growing up that I then put into action once I was ready to put into action or if it was unrelated, But it certainly wasn't, I'm 12 and really good at planning things. So,

so from a parenting perspective what this, what this is telling me is, you probably cannot engineer a child into being more organized into being more driven. You can demonstrate it in your own life. You can demonstrate the benefits of a structured life, less stress, more control, more opportunity, more options, things in general are more interesting, less chaotic. I think kids do pick up, they appreciate the stability, They will pick up the stability. So that might be something that is actually imprinted. It's a sort of a show,

don't tell strategy. I do also think it's, it's important to talk with kids, you know, specifically about building intentionally, a life a deeper life. These things matter discipline is important for for this reason it's how you make the most of the uh talents you have the opportunities you have and make the most of your time here, knowing what's what you want in life is important. Engineering around that's important. Here's why we live here. Here's why we have these jobs. Here's why we left this. We really think about this. Here's why community is important. You know, I spend all this time volunteering over here is because I think it's important to serve other people.

Being really clear about the elements. What makes a life deep I think is again probably very important, not that they will then say yes dad, yes, mom, I can start doing this tomorrow, but they remember that lessons when they get to a place where they realize, oh I'm on my own. I gotta figure myself out. You got to figure out what to do and they can look back and say, here's an option to try what my parents did, what seemed to be working for them, what they explained to me and taught to me now I am ready, 1920, 21 years old. Now,

I'm ready to try this out. And so there might be this period of frustration where you're, you're demonstrating through your actions, you're just through conversation, you're explaining what you figured out over time as the Delta, about how to approach life and you're not seeing it reflected in their day to day action. You're like, man, if I was 17, I'd be doing this so much better. But it's still useful what you're doing because it's it's it's giving this option into their toolbox. So when they're ready to start pulling tools for the toolbox, which will be out of sight of you after they're out of the home, it'll be in there and it might be more likely to pick it up. The other thing I would recommend is, you have to resist,

you have to resist the the uh appeal of using your kids as a proxy for your own accomplishments. This is a big D. C. Area thing. I think this is true in other major cities as well. I would be interested from our international listeners how common this is. It's it's so easy if you're like a relatively accomplished a delt who has kids and you look at your kids and say, you know, the competitive structures where they exist, what's required to stand out man. That's not so hard from the perspective of an adult as compared to like trying to get partner at this law firm that I did. And so let me just push these kids into accomplishments that are visible and impressive and by proxy that will reflect well on me and you get a lot of this. Now parents are saying my kids and their accomplishments are going to reflect well on me and you know what, it's a lot easier to have them do the work that we have to do the work. It's a lot easier to say, no,

go back there and keep practicing the clarinet than it is to actually have to practice it yourself and you use the kids as a proxy for your own accomplishment. This I think is a problem. I used to study this in a lot more detail in my twenties when I was doing more work on students stress, high school students stress was an area that I used to give talks on and do a lot of writing on. And there's a real problem with this approach. What happens is is you can burn out the motivational drive of your kid. So they get turned off on this idea. This extrinsic motivation of like man, it's go, go go if you got to do everything at the highest level, why don't you have the highest grade? Your parents are getting a real kick out of, hey, you got to the most advanced, you know, you're in the most advanced reading group,

you're, you're on the best select team, you're the first chair and whatever and they're getting all this this, uh, whatever this energy out of it, They feel like it reflects well on them and you're burning out the kid's motivation drive and then they're gonna go through some sort of simplistic rebellion where when they're looking at their options, a sort of more intentional, careful discipline, which is really important to life. They're not gonna pull that option in their toolbox was like, I did the like discipline thing when I was 17 and it burned me out and now that I'm, you know, I made it to whatever Brown, uh, I'm gonna go the opposite direction and it's not great. I'm just gonna throw in that thing.

You want to demonstrate the intentional construction of a life that includes disciplined organization you want to talk about and why it's important. But don't, the kid has to pull it out of the toolbox themselves and they might not be ready to pull it out when they're 17 and if you force them too hard to do it, you might, and I don't want to stretch this metaphor, but you might end up breaking that tool early and then they won't have it when they need it later

on in life.

I mean you you coach a lot jesse, I don't

know what you see but

like sports culture around here, you work with some fantastic athletes. I mean I think it's a difference if it's your really gifted, you know athletically for example. So like let's let's foster that and like really make that a part of your life. But there's this whole second tier of of you know young people athletes where it's like you don't really need to be Away every weekend at these tournaments. You don't really need private coach. Like it's fine but you're not you're not

gonna play D one college.

So uh so why is your why are you spending so much time and other than you can get addicted as a parent to the like we're on this team and we got selected for that team and every time that happens you as the parent somehow it makes you feel like physically

stronger for sure. There's some it can be difficult for like the head coach too because they're always

do you have well I don't want you to talk out of school but just abstractly speaking, do parents parents interacting with head coaches is something that

is very common at the high school level at the college level. Like there's like college coaches that have to deal with some parents for sure.

That baffles me as someone who did a little bit of D1 college athletics, I couldn't imagine apparent

coming in definitely exists. Oh my goodness.

Yeah. Well hey look I had if this helps um I had none of that growing up, I think a lot of kids and it was busy, we had good structure and we had good routine and good role models in our parents. But like I we were we were never at least I wasn't, there was never this thing of this particular activity you're doing, why can't we be doing this at a higher level? You know? And it and it worked out okay for me, like Everyone is gonna have to look into their toolbox of how do I build my life at some point? And I'm just just my theory, make sure the right tools are in there and don't be frustrated that they're not ready to open the box at 15 and 16. Some kids are but some kids aren't. All right, what do we have next jesse?

Alright, next question is from Max, he's a 40 year old marketer from London and he says I've been asked to start writing regular articles for my company. I'm struggling with this assignment, I cannot find my voice when I write, I come across as very rigid and contrived, how do you write your articles?

That's a good question, how do you actually craft an article. It seems like it's a easy thing, they're not that long, It's not a book, but more than a few people like you max have faced the reality when it comes time to write. What needs to be a smart good article in this case representing your your company that it's hard to do. You don't know where to start. So, you know, I have some tips to share. Let me, let me just start with the preface of uh I have been writing professionally, you know, for over two decades. That's all I do. All I do is write,

I write every single day, like I showed you on the show last week. My keyboard has completely worn away after just a couple of years of use because of how much I write, I write academic articles, I write uh public consumption magazine articles. I write books, I write essays every week for my own newsletter. Um and so I've been working at this for a really long time. So I only say that just as a preface that don't don't let's say read one of my recent articles and say why doesn't my stuff just sound like this? What's wrong? There's 20 years of work that goes behind that. So it's a, it's a process. You get better and better with work. So I wanna start there so that you're not and forget, okay,

maybe don't use me as an example. I don't want you reading, you know, john Mcphee and saying, why don't I sound like that. He spent a lifetime honing that ability. Um I do have some specific advice that I wrote down a few things here about article writing. One, spend more time thinking through your idea, your thesis before you write preferably do this on foot. I think interesting articles, good writers spend a lot more time thinking about the point they want to make and the pieces that go into that point, they spend a lot more time thinking about that than you might realize. I think amateur writers get started too quickly and especially for an idea article, you're not gonna figure it out on the page, there might be passages you figure out on the page.

Like let me just go for this and then see if it's working or not, but you're not going to figure out here is my big point or the thesis and the four things to support it that has to be done on foot and it can take a long time to get there. You can try and not like what you have and you have to keep thinking before you start writing. Alright, number two, for this style of article you'll be writing and I can see from your elaboration, it's it's like a philosophical angle on ideas related to the product your company builds. So that type of philosophical idea, type article start with the standard structure at first, I think it's a good, good way to enter into professional article writing. So there's, you know, one of the standard structure is going to be, you know, you open on a illustrative example that leads to the nut graph.

This is where you're actually explaining here is the idea I'm gonna try to convince you of in this piece and now you suddenly understand what that example that you just read was about. So you create a little bit of narrative tension which you relieve partially with the revelation of your thesis. Then you go into elaboration. All right, let me work through this connection idea. Let me support it, give you the necessary caveats. Now they have a complete understanding of the idea the narrative tension has been fully released. And then your conclusion should pull back, have a callback To what you open with and then there's a sense of completion. So like that standard idea, writing 101, you build up narrative tension and then the release of the tension pulls the reader through the article towards the end and the callback gives them the sort of satisfying sense of completion to the, to the whole story. They just went through similar things happen if you study, you know,

Aristotle's poetics and uh Storytelling similar types of structures and goes back a long way three show. Don't tell one of the big differentiators in these type of articles between amateur and professional writing is the professional writings a lot denser. By which I mean it's points are established with quotes, citations of specific examples. So it's denser. There's a, there's a density of citation, I don't mean formal. You know, you're doing some sort of Ap style citation, but it's it's your showing don't telling Such and such said this such and such example went for 14 years. Does this car in 1950 at at on average this malice per gallon and now by 1990 it was this me mph show. Don't tell Related piece of advice. Number four. Be wary of the conversational voice. Alright.

It's a real temptation. I think when people are new to this type of article writing to ask rhetorical questions and have more colloquial asides of you would think this is the case, but it's not really what would you do if you were suddenly faced with $10 million? Maybe not? What you would think if you blah, blah, blah. The conversational tone reads amateur. Uh, it that's more, that's more acceptable. I think in a sort of personalized blogging world, but you want to avoid the conversational tone so that like colloquial idiomatic expressions really avoid rhetorical questions except for maybe occasionally and this is my bugaboo. I think rhetorical questions and idea writing is, is, you know,

it's my version of using cliches. It's I think it's a week writing don't ask rhetorical questions. Show, don't tell show, don't tell move it forward and then finally, don't write for the sake of writing. It really comes through an article writing as well as book chapter writing. You see this a lot when people are writing books that maybe they're not writers, it's a it's based on their expertise is you're like, man, I know that, you know how many words this chapter needs to be And you are trying to get to that word count that comes through really clearly. That's what I call writing for the sake of writing. Like there's no real reason for the last two paragraphs to be here other than you're trying to get to 2000 words. Professional writers look to pull the ripcord on whatever passage idea or paragraph they're working on as soon as possible, the sooner I can get out of this,

the more comfortable I am with this. So go back and read, you know, some new yorker articles and you'll see this, they they're they're out of their out of each argument as quickly as they can. Like what's the essence of what I'm trying to say here? The only site this is different than this. We also see it here ripcord. I'm out, next thing, you don't see this dragging out of like, you know, and maybe this and maybe that and let me a rhetorical question here and and uh let's go back and summarize and and so when you're writing record. I actually and the slow productivity book I'm writing now my the voice, I'm using that book is is uh it's I don't know the right way describe it, but I'm really trying to non over elaborate things,

I guess it's a little bit more enigmatic, but a little bit more declarative because it's it's it's supposed to have a sense of some timeless wisdom. I literally, on multiple occasions when I'm editing something, have written ripcord, ripcord, ripcord as a reminder to myself. Like, get out, get out, get the point, get out, get the point, get out the readers smart, they'll fill in the details, don't over explain.

Alright, so those are my tips. I guess I gave 12345 ideas here for making those articles. Uh really look a lot better and then my uh just to reiterate my my original point also you will get better with time. So don't compare yourself to your very favorite writers and say why am I not there yet? You want to be better than you were with the last article you wrote. And so hopefully these tips

will help. So with the example than the nut, what's

the note again? So that's where you actually lay out, like what the big idea is

going to be in the article.

Right? So so like imagine um something I was right, let me let me draw a quick example from writing, I've been doing this week. So, you know, I opened a section of a chapter, I'm talking about Georgia O'keeffe and I was talking about how busy her early career is, I think I talked about this on the show last week? This is the example though. So I'm telling this story about Georgia O'keeffe and how how many different jobs she had all over the country and she and in the summer she would come back east and go west and it's just this really busy life and she really was trying to study painting and that would have to take these long breaks and and she needed to really uncover potential is gonna need something more that that more came when she started getting involved with Alfred Stiglitz and their family owned this land by Lake George and and she started going up there with him and became unlocked the most prolific period of her career. So kind of hearing the story like this is interesting. Um The nut there is then uh pointing out in this particular section seasonality, this is what Georgia O'keeffe was demonstrating seasonality different times of the year. You're working on different things with different intensities is something that we uh we've sort of lost track of but it's actually really key to the human experience and something that we should try to get back. There we go. So you have this opening story like what's this,

why this is interesting but what's it all about that nut graph explains it, but you still have narrative tension because you want to say, well why is that true? You know why is seasonally important? Can we really get it back? What happened to it now? You want to have that be resolved. That's the rest of that chapter then resolves those questions. Um So that's an example there. The alternatively you can just come right in and say seasonality is very important. Here is the definition of seasonality. I will now get five reasons why and that's fine. But it it this is the difference between having narrative tension and not its textbook versus like okay I want to see what happens next. What do we got speaking of next? What we have is our next question.

Alright next question is from joe, he's a software engineer from Minneapolis. Do you use anything like a someday maybe list? And if so how do you manage it?

Alright so someday maybe for those who don't know that's a getting things done A G. T. D. Reference. So in his book getting things done, David Allen recommends keeping a someday maybe list. So it's projects that you're not actually actively working on now but you might, one day the point is in Allen's book is you don't want this rattling around in your head, you don't want this idea. You have or something you might want to do one day having to be maintained just in your brain because anything you have to maintain just in your brain can become a source of stress. It can become a source of anxiety. You want to in a written down somewhere where you trust it won't be forgotten. And so he says, just have this one list. I think it's a good idea. Something like that is a good idea. You need a place or places where potential ideas are captured that you trust.

They will not be forgotten. Now. I actually think this is a piece of my system, my personal system that I need to improve my someday maybe storage right now is distributed among multiple different role specific systems, which is probably not optimal. So for example, I have role specific Trela boards where I keep track of tasks related obligations. We've talked about this a lot of other episodes. Uh, each of those boards has a column labeled backburner. That's one place that certain things go. But these tend to be the things I put on a back burner list don't tend to be grandiose ideas. It's more, you know, we need to someday probably update our such and such software. I don't want to do this now.

That's something we should probably do. We should think about, you know, improving our setup for having calls on the podcast. Like something just I talked about that's like on the back burner list. I'm not working on it now maybe, but it's, it's on the back burner list. So those are their uh, then in my, my online note taking and right now I use Obsidian, which we have a question about coming up. There's places in there. So I I have a document there for my academic research and in particular my academic research on the impact of technology on society and digital ethics, something I'm just starting to do some more work on. There's a page in my online note taking for that for the podcast and media company.

There's another place where I keep track of visions for the future. That's too many places. So core idea one is, yes, alan is right. You need place or places you trust to keep ideas so they're not going around your head. two, I have a system right now that is to distributed. So I want to fix it. What am I probably thinking about doing? I'm thinking about having some sort of rooted someday maybe set up where there's a core route to where all these ideas are stored. Like that's all I have to remember is the route that this is my someday maybe document in my online note taking software or my someday maybe directory in my google drive. And then from there I can link out or spread out to hear stuff for this part of my life. Here's ideas for this part of my life. So I'm gonna do something like that and I'm gonna root my system. That's a good question because I think it's a it's an important piece of organizing and intellectual life that we haven't talked

much about. You have to put that on your someday maybe list.

It's a circular irony improve your someday maybe list. You put that on your I need to start a someday maybe list and I need to put that on my sunday maybe list. I think this is the productivity nerd version of if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it well enough of that nonsense. All right, What do we got? Let's keep rolling. See, I'm getting quicker now, jesse.

Okay, I'm picking up the pace. So next question is from Sam. He's a 28 year old PhD student And he says, I found the 500 words a day formula for slow productivity B to be a useful frame. However, as a PhD student in computer science, a lot of my work doesn't involve much writing. How would I adapt the 500 words a day target for my research.

So the context of the 500 words a day reference there from Sam is at some point, I don't know, maybe a few months ago we on the podcast, I talked about john Mcphee and I think I was probably talking about an essay I wrote for my newsletter. Whatever the point is I was emphasizing that john Mcphee is seen in the context of his entire career as being very productive. He's written all these books, he has the pulitzers, he has the national book award and a huge bibliography, but He doesn't actually work that much on any given day. In fact his target is he admits just to write 500 words a day. So this was a classic example of slow productivity. This working at this natural sustainable pace over time can produce great stuff. So if we expand the timeline at which we're evaluating productivity to be a career for the last 10 years, as opposed to having a narrow timeline of today or the last week, You get this much more sustainable rhythm of work, you don't have to be busy or killing yourself every day with work to produce stuff that you're proud of. Okay,

so Sam is saying what is the equivalent of 500 words a day if you're not a writer and I think that's a that's a good, good question. So we could, we could address this first of all just specifically in terms of Sam's particular context, which is a PhD student and you know, look, I see that I, I feel your pain there. Sam, I used to do a lot of appearances at bootcamps, graduate student dissertation boot camps. You see this at Georgetown. I would also do it at a nearby catholic university when I knew some professors over there, it's very common that you would do these once a year gatherings are called dissertation boot camps where grad students get together to hear talks and motivate each other to work on their dissertations and I was a broken record at these boot camps because all of the advice was always centered on write every day. Get your writing done. Don't forget to write because in a lot of disciplines writing is the actual primary activity that pushes a thesis forward.

Not the case of mathematics, not the case in computer science, you write papers eventually but research is not writing, it's solving math equations, trying to figure out theorems, running experiments. And so I used to come to these boot camps and I was a broken record. I would say stop saying writing as your generic verb for working for a lot of people. The court of their work has nothing to do with actually writing. So I feel your pain sam Uh writing is should not be seen as a universal verb for doing deep work in graduate school. But what I wanna do here is generalized out and answer this for people in general. I don't want to get to academia specific. So let's just be in general, how do we translate this general philosophy of 500 words a day? two other types of work. What I think is key here.

Um is this notion of slow and steady and timeline expansion. If you expand your timeline on which you are evaluating your productivity to something at the scale of years, then often a varied, slow and steady approach is going to work quite well. And when you're evaluating your production on what you really care about at that type of expanded timeline, you begin to see the futility or the performative on necessity of really hard days. You know, I'm just burning the midnight oil. I've been writing all day. I'm gonna write until midnight tonight and wake up really early to write. You could do that and maybe in the moment you'll be like, man, I know I'm being productive because look how hard I'm working. But when you're talking about, what do I produce over the next five years, that's not sustainable.

It also doesn't really matter working quality work again and again in the right setting, giving the work the respect and the support. It needs to be good, going up and down in intensity. You know what? I'm taking a week off. I didn't get there till I was sick today. I didn't write, who cares, We're talking about the end of this year, Did you produce something that you're proud of and that is gonna be best served by slow, steady quality. So I think that's how we generalize, John McPhee is 500 words a day is you don't have to be exhausted or frantic today to having ended up produced something great next year. You need to slowly accrete good quality work at a reasonable rate. And that also happens to be a much more sustainable way to live and work.

So that's what I would say slow, steady, don't not work, but don't be so proud of yourself for, you know, staying up real late. That just means you forgot a deadline and uh, you will guaranteed win a Pulitzer prize like john Mcphee. All right. What do we got?

Uh Next question is from will, he's an economist from Takoma Park. We won't be able to meet him at Republic, did you say? And he has to say, did you say you were using Obsidian now? Why the switch from Rome?

That's what Yeah. Well, first of all, maybe that's what we should do with the Republic spaces because I learned from Obsidian from another friend of mine in Takoma Park is a big booster. So shout out to scot. Um, so me and scott. And will, we could just create Republic into a a space where people gather to geek out in incredible detail about various Zettel cast inspired electronic note taking taking systems. Um Alright, well I did. I am using Obsidian now for nerdish reasons. And just to give the the really high level explanation. Rome. Well, I like room to actually Rome has uh Rome has, its,

its, its use as well. Rome is a nice interface. Obsidian is based off of text files. So when you're taking notes and Obsidian. Yeah, you have this interface for taking notes. You can link the notes together. But what you're doing is actually writing in what's known as Mark up. Just a generic uh, markup language in text files and what the Obsidian interface is doing is just reading these text files that sit in a directory on your computer where you pointed it and it's just reading those text files. And is that you can go in there and read them is just plain text with Markup markup symbols around it to indicate. This is bold, this is a list, this is a link. And let's see if this links to something else.

And you know just the other document is just there in the markup. And so when you go through your notes and Obsidian, it's a nice interface. You can click around and format and do these type of things but nothing lives in the cloud. There's not some proprietary format that's on a AWS instance somewhere. Its text files on your computer that you can go and read. You can open it up in text edit, you can change it and when you look at it with Obsidian it will be you will see those changes. So Obsidian is just an interface that allows you to edit text files on your computer and displays those text files in a nice way. So I like that. It's full control. So Obsidian could go away. I have all my notes. I could read them just directly with a text editor or get any other type of markup reader that exist and still read those notes. I mean I only need to use Obsidian because I might like its interface now I use Dropbox with sync back up. So like my Obsidian setup is in a directory.

That's auto sync to Dropbox. So all of these notes are automatically also updated and copied uh to Dropbox so everything's backed up. And so if I get a new computer, I just re sync to my Dropbox directory structure and I have those notes there. So the notes live in multiple places. I'm not gonna lose them anyways, that's why I like it. It feels like a sophisticated version of the my dependence on plain text files that I already used in other parts of my productivity. So that's a nerd reason. I think for a lot of people that doesn't really matter. So I would not use this reason as a as a general recommendation that everyone definitely needs to be on Obsidian, but if you're a CS nerd like me or presumably like will it is kind of cool. Alright, so I wanna try something somewhat new here. We're trying to do more case studies on this show. This is the feedback we got that people would like to hear more details about real people's experiences,

putting these ideas in the practice as I've mentioned, The medium term goal is uh called we want to have people call in live and actually interact with me. That's all complicated. Sounds complicated. Don't even get me started on that, but we're working on it in the meantime, I'm also soliciting you can send in text case studies in the same question survey that you can use to submit your questions. That link is in the show notes but I wanted to read one today From Josh. He was a network engineer who's in his 20s. Alright so here's what josh had to say and I'll just read this a world without email. Got my team and me through a crisis. I got a copy of it on preorder and it just after it arrived my wife and I went on vacation to Puerto rico. It was really lovely being able to just read about a better way to work while sitting on the beach. I'm returning home from vacation. My I. T.

I. T. Team suffered an unexpected crisis and I was thrown into a demanding management role. I'm the kind of person who likes to feel in control. And the one mission I could give myself to preserve some siblings of that feeling was to make sure that we didn't drop a single ball in response to this crisis. As a team. We had minimal shared documentation and we had no central work repository. So I didn't even know what engineering work was happening. My first thought was to collect all work items into a task board, just like a world without email lays out. But I didn't have the time to wait for corporate procurement to approve an enterprise Trela subscription and we didn't have a way to get the team onto any sort of task force. So I ended up creating a minimum viable product out of folders on a shared drive. We had a folder called active work Inside of that folder we had a new folder for each work item. The folder name was a short description of the task itself. Inside that folder was a notes dot txt file. That detailed the task.

Any emails pertaining to the task were copied and pasted into an emails dot txt file. Any working documents were also saved in that folder. So for example, we might have a folder named Design Data center core that would contain a notes dot txt file detailing all the design considerations and a working diagram and a spreadsheet. Also in that folder. If I were to take ownership of a task, I would modify the folder name to indicate that. So now it might say josh colon design data center core. That way, an alphabetical sort of the active work folder would isolate all of my work. As I finished the task, I would update the notes dot txt file with close out notes and change the folder name to completed colon, josh colon design data center core. We could focus exclusively on a task by opening that folder. We could share notes and feedback between team members by dropping a txt file in that folder. We could see work in progress at a glance,

we had a way to gather detailed information about a task without actually having to own the task and start working on it. We only use that system for a couple of months but it accomplished its goal. We didn't drop or forget even a single task. There were no external teams at my company that felt like they needed to escalate issues to my manager, were able to share the increased workload to the team even though I was primarily the one collecting information about work items from there, we were able to move to a real task board and 18 months later our little team is now seen as an agile transformation leader within our broader organization. It's a cool case study because two reasons one, it highlights something I say often on this show which is when it comes to organizing work, especially in teams start with the process first. What makes the most sense for us to organize our work and then to figure out what tools you need to implement that and that is exactly what josh did in that story because they couldn't procure the right tools fast enough, they said we can just use text files and folder names and it worked great what mattered was the process and then once they got approval to switch to a task force, so they switched to a passport. But it was that process that they switched to a task board and it didn't really matter if they were implementing it by changing the name of folders or if they're on a trailer board, it was the same process and so I think that's really cool to see and then too I just like that specific setup. That's a cool system. Right folders for each thing that we're actively working on.

All of the information relevant to that thing. Go into that folder including relevant emails, have a key, read me file in each folder that gives you the overview of exactly where everything lands. Put your name into the directory title. So we know who's working on what that's a great system and see what josh said there, josh said all of the incoming was directed at him. So this was a collaboration explained as an I. T. Team within a big organization so I. T. Teams get hammered with build us this fix this add this new feature, implement this system, it's all day long it all came to josh and yet he said he felt like all this work was very uh intelligently distributed to the whole team. Everyone was working on different things. Beautiful collaboration and because they built a process here that made sense. So anyways great example josh. I appreciate appreciate that those specifics and I appreciate that opportunity to talk about when you get specific about workflows as opposed to just saying look we're all in select let's rock and roll things can get a lot better.

I like how he says when he does the alphabetical shirt you can just show all his work

right there There's definitely an I. T. Flavor

to that system.

Yeah well if you put your name in the folder and you can alphabet alphabetized folders, alphabetized folders. But it is true like existing technology is great but that's not the problem. The problem is not that someone hasn't built a fancy web interface for what you're trying to do. The problem is you don't have a system that you're just on email. Like did you get my last message? Why don't you respond? So good for you josh. Alright um let me talk about sponsor real quick before we move on to our second block of questions. It's one of our longest standing sponsors, one of my favorite idea related companies. And that is blink

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That's a smart idea. Yeah. You listen to a podcast, you hear seven book recommendations. Do the blinks for all seven books, you'll have the main ideas of those seven books and maybe

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We're doing well. All right, so let's move on to our second block of questions. What we tried to do here is as we often do try to do is make the second block a little bit more deep life. Philosophical. First block we got into the weeds on some things. Second block will get a little more philosophical here. So what do we got jesse?

Uh, first question here, it's an anonymous question and it states, how do you think about long term career work issues in the face of seemingly growing exponential threats such as climate change, economic disparity in the world and new technologies such as Ai.

Um, I mean, I think the key there is stop using so much social media, stop reading so much online news. Let me, let me explain where I'm coming from with that answer First. Let's begin with the premise that there always has been and there will always be to varying degrees, up and down. A lot of distressing stuff happening in the world. There is nothing exceptional about our current moment. I think back in a circumstance like this, think about a question like this. I think back to the irish christian monastics of the early medieval period, the late dark ages. This was a very rough time. There was a lot of bad things happening. There were diseases that could kill 30,

of the population of a continent in just a couple of years. There was no political stability. These monasteries were often raided by, for example, Vikings where everyone would just be murdered. This was not a time where you're like, yeah, pretty peaceful, I'm pretty happy about things. But what were those irish monastics doing? They were very carefully preserving and copying over a lot of the intellectual fruits of the ancient period and you know what? We're glad they were were glad they worked in this terrible time because it was actually a lot of these monasteries that we maintained our only copies of some of the key ancient philosophical and mathematical text that then helped spur the renaissance. A couple 100 years later, there's actually a book about that I read called how the irish saved the world and guess what it's called. But I use that example to say in much worse circumstances, we are today,

people working on things that were important, ended up being really important for humanity. We are glad that our forebearers in much worse situations than today, That had to deal with the entire continent is half dead and will probably be murdered within a week. That is worse. That is a worse situation than we are unsure about what the average temperature increase is going to be over the next 100 years. They still worked on what they thought was important, they still pursued a deep life and we are all the better for it. So that's the example I wanted to give their, you know, Ezra Klein had, he wrote an article in the new york Times op ed about this a couple months ago, where he was hearing this about climate change in particular. He was hearing more and more people from his circle who were saying, well, why why would we even bother having kids?

How would we, why would we even bother trying to perpetuate humanity because of how bad climate change is going to be. And Israel is like, look, I'm very concerned about this topic. Obviously I'm very much you know, progressive on this topic, but my god, we had kids as a species and much worse times, with much worse things happening on the horizon, the much worse things happening at the moment, we still continue to perpetuate the species and we're glad we are, because we want to be here and all the all of the good and the art and the beauty and the love that has been formed and all those centuries past, all these other past hard times, we're glad that all existing, we're better for it.

So, um, so even as our client had to write something that says, guys ease up a little bit right, like we humanity faces tough stuff. Alright, so that's my, my generic answer to that question. The reason why I cited social media online news was just to emphasize that both of those things can make this reaction worse. I think we're getting this question in part because there's the online culture for various reasons, some intentional, some unintentional can give you this sense of immediate existential threat that is paralyzing in a way that let's say in a pre internet age one in half. And so I was being somewhat facetious when I said, my answer to your question is how do I do this? I don't use social media, I was being sort of facetious,

but I'm also being somewhat serious. There's a couple different effects going on here. Certainly there's the police blotter effect start reading the police blotter for your town and suddenly it will seem a lot more violent and crime ridden than you thought about it before. It's because you are seeing consolidated all the bad things that have happened over time in a relatively large area, concentrated in our mind is not used to that. It's used to gathering aggregating observations from our actual immediate vicinity. I saw a crime happen uh the last three days in a row. This is dangerous, right? Like that's the way we're supposed to see things. It doesn't, this warning system is not good at. Here's a list of all crimes from this million person city over the last six months. It can't put that in the statistical scale. The internet makes that even worse. So now you have a twitter,

cybernetic curation, distribute curation algorithms. So the effect of all these individuals making retweet, non retweet decisions, all pushing and pulsing through a power law, graph topology graph does a really good job of centering uh surfacing things that are interesting or engaging or will catch our attention and all these bad things that happen in the world. Course this network and all get brought to your attention and it's like the police blotter effect Magnified. Like man, it's just crime everywhere everything's falling apart or if it's political news. Democracy is days away, days away from from failing or climate change news, it's like, I'm surprised I even um I'm alive today. Like how is anyone alive? Because it is essentially the day after tomorrow style vortexes of arctic tornadoes destroying cities as far as I can tell because there's all these things I'm seeing because the volume, I see so many things in such a large volume of these things,

this must be a real problem. Our mind cannot do statistical model enough. Like Yeah, but this is over 350 million people in the country. I don't know. That's probably not that many. So social media can do that. You also have to be worried about sensationalism. There's this idea of like it, if it bleeds, it leads new sources of trying to get clicks. I think that's partially true, right? I mean, I mean, I think that is true.

So like being sensationalist and talking about how bad things are maybe is good business. Um there's also something else that's happening now. I mean, I read this interesting analysis from the Neiman center about sort of uh recent developments and and a lot of sort of mainstream media publications where there's, there's a few different things going on here, but like one of the things that's going on is there's definitely more, there's definitely more of a sense and this kind of comes out of the linguistic background of criticality and critical theories. But there's definitely more the sense that the role of reporting is in part trying to actually shape the world. So part of your job as a reporter is to try to push the world towards what is just so I think that the dominant academic theories right now, uh come out of french postmodernism, which has a real linguistic deconstructionist background. So it's very language focused and it's like you can't just be neutral as a writer according to these theories, you're gonna affect the world one way or the other. So you need to aim yourself towards uh what is the good and so you might see this and there's like obvious applications like sort of post donald trump election. You're going to see coverage philosophy that's like really what we're trying to do here is this is such an existential threat. Is like our reporting needs to help uh don't report something that could be positive,

for example, because the bigger issue if we need this person in office would not be certified that I think some of that has bled over into other types of issues. I think we're seeing a little bit of that with climate change. So, a serious issue to be addressed. But there's also a sense in the reporting of trying to challenge the people who are not worried about it. So typically this would be on the other political tribe. Well, I dare you not to be worried about it now. Well, what if we ratchet up now, I dare you. Well, here here, uh you're gonna be dead all your here's the headline, all of your Children will be dead by sunday because of climate change.

Now, I dare you to say you don't care. There's this sort of one upsmanship that you've seen in the coverage of climate change, even where the the on the ground information hasn't changed much, there's still the same concerns and whatever is you see this one upsmanship of well, what about this threat or that threat? We're gonna put on the page more and we're gonna try to ratchet it up. And and again, that that comes out of this new philosophy perhaps of uh journalism is trying to advance towards the Justin away from the non just you get more of that too. There's some of that early in the pandemic as well. Where, okay, what's the pandemic policy that we think is going to be the best? How do we then in a report and be careful to support that? Don't talk about this. This would see doubt really push this.

Oh look, there's a there's some popularity going around this idea that doesn't affect young people. Let's quickly get on our front page. Uh opera opera pro of nothing in an article about a 30 year old who died because we need to push back on that. So once you see coverage, trying to shape how people uh trying to shape how people understand things are trying to push things towards the just on alarming issues like climate change or the pandemic you're gonna get also increasingly alarming coverage because that in theory would serve the purpose of getting people to care more, but it has a side effect of getting people who say why

should I even work?

Alright, that's a bunch of words. Um but honestly get more local, serve your community, serve your friends, care about the people around you, move more of your attention landscape to the, to the locality that your brain evolved to expect. Which is these are people in my town and people in my organizations spend more time immersed in that world. You're scaling the concerns to concerns your brain can deal with and concerns where you can actually make a difference. I do not subscribe to this idea that you are somehow not being a good global citizen. If you're not marinating yourself in story after story about negative things that you can't do anything about, I guarantee you you will still know about climate change, even if you're not uh surfing every day, 10 or 15, climate change, damage porn,

type articles, you'll still know about it instead of surfing those 15 articles, how about we want to fix the playground? That's down the road because it's a good place, these kids after school, they need it if they don't have it here, how do we get that change? That's the scale at which our minds supposed to work. So let's spend more time more time there. Alright. What time we got here? I think we've got time for one more question jesse.

Okay so we got a question from Michael. He's a 41 41 year old engineer from the U. K. This is what he has to say. I have worked hard to clarify ideas outside of my work that feel important to me. However, I still struggle for example, creating a garden is something I've always envisioned my life for a long time but now I'm doing it. It feels like endless drudgery, labor and effort. However, I've sunk so much effort and expense into getting here. I cannot just reset and walk away. Is it normal to find conflict between one's cultivation of a deep life on paper and how it actually happens in the real world.

That's an interesting question. Let me give you a short answer and a long answer, Michael. The short answer is stop gardening. I won't tell anyone, Jesse won't tell anyone you don't like it. And I get it like here in D. C. Here's what I've learned. It's often the season in which you would be maintaining a garden or a yard. It's often terrible outside and it's not that fun because the humidity is roughly uh whatever it is. I don't know how to measure humidity dew point. The humidity is terrible. You're gonna swamp. It's hot. There's bugs and there's mosquitoes and you know this is why God invented air conditioning. So I'm stop guarding.

You don't like it long answer. And we talked about this last week too. Be wary about a mental conception of the deep life that is too heavily focused on hobbies. That is not going to be a successful recipe. If all you think about is what do I do outside of work in terms of my leisure time, what's going to be like interesting and fulfilling? To me? It's too self focused. That stuff matters, but it cannot be central to your conception of the deep life if you go back and think about the deep life bucket. So we're talking about craft community, constitution, Contemplation and celebration. What you talk about is hobbies is maybe just in celebration. I mean, I don't know if you acted the constitution,

maybe like there's some exercise you do that could be hobbyist sometimes in craft there could be something like you're really into an instrument. You might put that on the craft. But most of the deep life is more about uh keeping your body in shape, serving your community, engage in your brain in the world of ideas and philosophy and theology so that you can be a moral intellectual being so that you can follow Aristotle's theory that it is in deep thought that humans reach their deepest potential. It's craft. Okay, I'm spending my 80,000 hours in my life in a job like what am I doing? Am I producing things of value in my, my leader to other people in my a useful member of the community? A lot of that is not what's gonna make me, you know, entertain me, what's going to be something that's kind of fun to do And so if you really go through those buckets one by one, the reason why this works is that the human brain is not so happy if all it thinks about is how do I make myself happy, you know,

how do I be happy in the moment? Like that's important in moderation. But basically the history of ideas tells us that just the hedonic pursuit of what's going to be fun doesn't work as an organizing principle for life. So when celebration is just this one part like having things you really enjoy doing then it's the stakes are lower. You're doing other things that sacrifice and service and important and you're gonna be a lot more confident and fulfilled And when it comes to that, let's say celebration bucket where it's like appreciating the things that makes life cool, having gratitude, then I'm just gonna suggest have a more experimental approach, don't dive in fully into something that you hope will be something you really like because you might not. So Guardian, I don't know, let me get a garden box and see if I like that minimal impact. If I really like it expand out with that bucket larger and larger people who have these big all consuming hobbies usually work their way incrementally you have to discover what's the right fit for you. So just don't go into it, don't just say like I want to be a cinephile, I think that'd be cool.

I'm gonna sign up for this film course and start watching all these movies. You might not actually like movies that much, you're right, but instead I feel like I've always liked movies and I started to study them a little more and I'm enjoying that. So now let me ratchet up to like go watch this series at the local theater. Now I'm gonna sign up for this film classic when when things ratchet up in terms of self directed, autonomous, non instrumental hobbies, that's how you figure out what you really like. Okay, so stop gardening, you don't like that experiment with other things. But remember that it's just one small piece out of many on what goes into making a deep life and most of what makes a deep life deep is much less about what is gonna make me happy tomorrow and more about what's going to make my life feel more grounded, what's gonna make my life feel more centered and meaningful and important and that's very different than enjoying pruning your roses. Let's see here. Uh we had a couple of questions but I think this is probably a good,

probably good place to wrap it up. Sounds good. Alright everyone. Uh Thank you for submitting your questions. If you want to submit your own questions, look at the link in the show notes and I'll show you exactly how to do that. You can watch a video of this episode and clips at Youtube dot com slash counterpart media. We'll be back next week with a new episode and until then as always, stay deep.