The return to pre-pandemic norms and its side effects
The Weekly Review: Vol VIII Issue 10
Hello fellow citizens of Earth!
I’m not sure how things are going in your part of the world, but where I live our provincial government recently announced a four-step plan to lift restrictions and get back to “normal.” And while that is great news (enabled only by the better news that vaccine rates are nice and high and COVID rates getting lower), there are two trends that have caught my attention.
One is the housing industry. It is, in a word, ludicrous at this point. We took a good long look at the possibility of moving to another town this spring. Although we decided against it, we were in shock at the current prices in our town and what we’d probably have been able to sell our house for. And I started to hear a lot of news that is was not just our neck of the woods, but across Canada and the US as well.
The Atlantic published a recent piece where the author recommended staying out of this craziness (unless you’re in a position to sell with no need to buy or rent).
The other trend is people getting ready to take extended leaves or holidays from their jobs, or to simply quit entirely. As my professional time has been focused most on building People-First Jobs over the last 18 months, I had a lot of opportunity to think about work and running a business, as well as talk to a lot of people about both.
After the year that just passed, people are burned out. Especially people in toxic workplaces. Now, more than ever, is the time to recognize that businesses exist to support humans, not the opposite. Managers and leaders who believe that the great reopening means it’s time to push for greater productivity and a killer quarter are tone deaf.
As one article I recently read put it:
People miss their colleagues, not their commute.
We shouldn’t confuse the desire to get out of the house and see people with a desire to return to all the old ways of working.
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Items of note
Alan Jacobs spends a few words on one of my favorite topics and distinguishes between these terms:
In short: Blogosphere ≠ blogging. Blogging, at least as I try to practice it here, is a different thing. What I like about blogging, and the reason I have chosen this as the venue for my thoughts on Invitation and Repair, is summed up in Austin Kleon’s post on blogging as a forgiving medium: “Blogging feels to me like a world of endless drafting, endless revisioning.”
Exactly. I post a thought; later, I return to it with an update; someone responds and I incorporate their thoughts into a new post that links to them and to the original – basically, what I am doing right now. Note also that blogging, when done in this fashion and in this spirit, is also seriously dialogical, and I think there is a close connection between a dialogue-friendly medium and a forgiving medium. More on that another time, perhaps.
This makes me think of the trend of digital gardening and I’ll repeat again that I treat a blog as that garden. Thoughts you post can be (and should be) revised as you change and mature as a person. I don’t believe there’s a need to differentiate between a blog and digital garden — they are the same thing.
This is not the first time I’ve pointed to an article that points out how human reading habits are changing since the advent of the internet. It likely won’t be the last either.
But this one is not preachy, it’s really a well thought out analysis of what’s happening to our brains. If you care at all about reading, writing, and human thought, save this one for later.
But more than attention spans are at stake. Beyond self-inflicted attention deficits, people who cannot deep read — or who do not use and hence lose the deep-reading skills they learned — typically suffer from an attenuated capability to comprehend and use abstract reasoning. In other words, if you can’t, or don’t, slow down sufficiently to focus quality attention — what Wolf calls “cognitive patience” — on a complex problem, you cannot effectively think about it.
The knock-on issue thus becomes clear: It is hard to sustain the attention necessary for deep reading when we are distracted and exhausted from being both sped up and overloaded — what tech writer Linda Stone aptly calls “continuous partial attention.” And many, particularly those who have never inculcated the discipline that comes with a serious education, have become, as Senator Ben Sasse puts it, “addicted to distraction.” The neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains it more specifically: “Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation” (emphasis added).
Why I Memorize Books of the Bible
Related to reading and thinking, I enjoyed this post from Andrew Davis. As a believer in memorization as a thinking tool (and vital for followers of Christ), this struck a chord or two for me.
The books I have stored up in my mind have paid back with extraordinary interest — more than I can possibly estimate or describe. This discipline has paid off in my battle for personal holiness (Psalm 119:11), as the Spirit has unleashed the power of his sword to slay temptation after temptation, day after day (Ephesians 6:17). It has paid off in my evangelism, as the Spirit has called to mind miracle accounts in detail from Mark’s Gospel to make it plain to a lost person that Jesus can heal our most fundamental disease: our sin.
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Quote of the week
The answer, in my opinion, lies in leaning into empathy. We now have an opportunity to build on what the past year has taught us, and create a future with less friction and more flexibility for everyone. A truly flexible and hybrid workforce will help us win, but more importantly, it will help our people win…no matter where they are.
Katie Burke, Why We Don’t Care Where You Work From on Wednesdays (or Any Other Day)
Related to my thoughts above, this quote nails why remote-first is a way of running a company that puts the people first.
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Currently
Drinking: I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll repeat it here: I’m not usually a fan of lagers. So when I find one that goes down nicely, I’m more likely to make note of it. Longer Days from Yellow Dog Brewing is just that — it’s a super crisp lager that tastes fantastic. It has a hint of lime to it (they call it a citrus lager) and that seems to make a big difference. Great beer!
Listening: All love everything by Aloe Blacc. Easy listening for the workday.
Watching: I am mother, a Netflix original. An interesting take on both dystopian futures and AIs taking over the world. You watch the film with the mindset the title is from the robot(AI)’s point of view, but it’s not. It’s the young girl who the AI raises.
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That’s it for me, friends. Wherever you are, I pray you’re getting a chance to reconnect with loved ones!