Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #72

From wellbeing capacity to working at a natural pace, real change feeling weird, the library economy, and the impossible freelancer

THIS WEEK → 📊 Wellbeing Capacity ⏳ Working At A Natural Pace 🤔 Real Change Feels Weird, Unfamiliar, And Wrong ➕ A Library Economy 🚿 The Impossible Freelancer

Rabbit Holes 🕳️

How can we build a better world? As always, here are three perspective-shifting ideas to rewild your mind and help you create a better world, plus some extras below. Enjoy!

#1 📊 Wellbeing Capacity

Moreism has pervaded our concept of wellbeing and, subsequently, self-care by commercializing it and thereby weaving it into this silly narrative of “more = better.” So when we feel anxious or stressed out, the self-care industry tells us to do this (e.g. wellness retreat) and that (e.g. meditation app)…to, well, basically do more. When actually, it should maybe be about doing less.

“Maybe we all got wellbeing wrong?

It’s not about what we do for ourselves, but rather what we allow ourselves to NOT do.

Maybe, it’s in fact […] a matter of adjusting the tap to make sure the tank never goes empty. To make sure that there’s always capacity left to wake up in the morning.

[…] I didn’t realize until yesterday that it was the ebb and flow of CAPACITY that caused my different states of wellbeing. Even more so the recognition of how much was available at various times.

From now on I’ll always keep a mental note to ask myself about my capacity level when facing a decision.

“Do I have capacity to do this right now?”

Some seasons will be full of yes’s others marked by big NOs and both are ok in the name of wellbeing. In fact, both are probably necessary to make up a balanced life.”

»

Follow your gut

| What if we all got the idea of wellbeing wrong? by

Elin Petronella

---

#2 ⏳ Working At A Natural Pace

The following was such a great little insight in a podcast with Cal Newport (author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and now a new book called Slow Productivity) and Mark Manson (author of The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck). In this snippet (minute 45), Cal shares a very brief but clear framing of the “pace problem” and, thereby, the dehumanization problem of today’s way of working.

“[Mark Manson:] Principle number two is ‘work at a natural pace’. What the fuck is a natural pace?

[Cal Newport:] Not like you're in the Ford factory. Okay. Not, full intensity, nine to five, five days a week, 50 weeks a year. No variation in intensity. Work is: ‘Turn it on, you should be working really hard till it's over.’

That was not how humans worked through all of our history until we invented mills and factories. And then when we tried to put people into that type of work, and it was so unnatural and so terrible that we had to invent labor unions and giant regulatory frameworks just to try to make this type of artificial work somewhat tolerable.

And then knowledge work comes along, and what do we do? We're like, how do we organize this? We're like, oh, let's do what the factory does. Yeah, show up nine to five, let's go.

So a natural pace is inherently variable. So there's like sprints, periodic bursts. At different timescales too. Within the day, within the week, within the month, within the year. Like the summer is slower than the fall. This day is more intense than that day. The morning's more intense than early in the afternoon.

[Mark Manson:] Or within a career, I assume. [Cal Newport:] Yeah, you could go that wide as well, yeah.”

---

#3 🤔 Real Change Feels Weird, Unfamiliar, And Wrong

I an older Rabbit Hole, I once shared the advice: “Do the weirdest thing that feels right.” This one is similar but also has implications for change-making on a societal level. If you are currently working on a change process within an organization, a specific field, or for your own personal life, and it feels good and right, then you’re probably not in a change process after all (🤪). Real change needs to feel unfamiliar and weird but in a good way.

“We do have the capacity to step out of past conditioning, but as anyone who has consciously attempted it can attest, it’s a difficult project. One of the reasons for this is that doing something truly new—actually moving off those habitual tracks—feels like some combination of weird, unfamiliar and wrong.

What we do all the time comes to feel familiar, and what is familiar comes to feel right, natural and the way things are simply supposed to be. The problem is that it’s easy to use that internal sense of what feels right to guide behaviour. There’s a kind of safety in the familiar: it’s known, mapped territory from which it feels like chaos has been expelled. It’s the comforting sense of being at home, even if home also happens to be a chaotic mess. Better the devil you know, and all that. […]

If I use that internal feeling of familiarity and rightness as a compass, I will, almost by definition, keep orienting towards my habitual patterns of thought and behaviour. Doing anything in a non-habitual way, like tying your shoelaces with a new technique, just feels somehow wrong, at least until it becomes familiar, at which point it starts to feel right again.

The trick is to learn to stay with the experience of unfamiliarity even in the face of the internal pressure to return ‘home’ to familiarity; to notice that urge to resolve the tension and instead stay with the dissonance of the new. The fact that something is unfamiliar is a good sign that it’s new, because it hasn’t already been mapped as a thing you do all the time. […]

For as long as this dynamic goes under-recognised, it makes the job of effecting meaningful change, whether personally or collectively, much more challenging than it otherwise needs to be.”

» Thinking Out Loud | Why real change feels weird, unfamiliar and wrong by

Michael Ashcroft

---

➕ Extras

“The library has been a long-standing institution in our society, but what if we applied its philosophy more broadly? Let's imagine what it would mean to realise the possibilities of this proto-socialist concept and reintroduce free access to the commons through a library economy.”
We Need A Library Economy by Andrewism

“Many commentators have drawn attention to the environmental need to limit economic growth and instead prioritize sustainability and well-being. Here we argue that tackling inequality is the foremost task of that transformation. Greater equality will reduce unhealthy and excess consumption, and will increase the solidarity and cohesion that are needed to make societies more adaptable in the face of climate and other emergencies.”
Why The World Cannot Afford The Rich by Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett

“In a work that unites the critique of political economy and the psychoanalytic tradition, Jappe explores the dynamics of contemporary capitalism and explains how internalizing them creates a specific kind of person--a narcissist, someone who can only interact with the world by consuming it and who cannot conceive of limits to this consumption. […] Everyone can feel that the world is getting angrier. The Self-Devouring Society provides an original and rigorous explanation of why.”
The Self-Devouring Society by Anselm Jappe

---

🚿 Shower Thoughts

---

That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!

Please support this newsletter by sharing it with your friends and colleagues and thereby helping me gain more reach! Alternatively, you can also contribute by ☕️ buying me a coffee.

Thanks for supporting my work! 😊

Thomas