Valuing unpaid time
There’s a week left!
Pardon the ad, but I’ve worked a lot (and many, many people much, much more than me!) on my company’s annual conference, SpringOne Platform. It’ll be chock full of good stuff for everyone: from nerds to suits.
Also, it’s in Austin! There’ll be so many breakfast tacos and BBQ.
You should check it out, and if it looks good, come the week after next (Oct 7th to 10th).
You can use the code S1P200_Cote to get $200 off registration.
Valuing unpaid time
From “Is it inefficient to walk up the escalator?”:
Walking up the escalator remains time efficient, however, if those choosing to walk have much higher valuations of time than those who choose to stand. Might that be the case?
The concept of valuing your time is odd to me: you’re unpaid time. Clearly, if you have the option to choose between doing something paid and unpaid, it’s worth more to get paid.
However, you first have to ask, do you want to get paid? Is the time spent not getting paid on the weekend “worth it”? And, do you even have the option to get paid? When I walk to the top of that escalator, does someone hand me a quarter?
Also, much of the time with this kind of thinking you’re thinking of the money someone else is spending on you, not money you’re denying for yourself: productivity. If you get paid a fixed rate hourly or for a salary, and you’re constantly making a trade off of the best use of time, you don’t get more the more productive you are, your employer gets that profit. So if they offer an in office lunch, that time saved going to and fro an external place is profit for the employer, not you. (If the lunch is free, and just as good as external options, perhaps you get the profit too.)
Getting groceries delivered might seem profitable: if your time is worth $50 and hour, and it costs $20 to delivery the groceries, but you would have taken two hours round trip to shop, then you’ve profited! But…not really: it’s not like $30 is going to show up on your bank account when the last grocery is put away. More importantly, it’s not like you would have been paid for that time in the first place. (Unless you’re self employed, I suppose, and that would be time that you could have used to make money.)
So, taking the escalator and lunch example again. If you’re not the one who collects the profit of productivity - your employer does because you’re getting paid a fixed rate - it’s actually more “profitable” for you to be unproductive.
You can spend that time spacing out, checking Twitter, or whatever. You could argue that, long term, you might get fired because you’re less productive than other people who walk up escalators instead of stand or eat the (usually crappy) food from the in-office cafeteria. But, really?
Original programming
You have to login (with Twitter, GitHub, or a regular login) to see it, but here’s a 30 minute version of my standard talk. They got that up real quick-like!
An articulate noise
In Mencken’s “Footnote on Criticism” he explains that the critic’s (in the more classic sense of the word than we use now) essays are their attempt, their compulsion, to expunging an idea, figure it out and their reaction to the idea, and in doing so, create a type of art. At least, critics do so if they’re good at it. He was never afraid to say who was good at something, more commonly, who was bad at something; most people were, of course, the second.
It is no more and no less than the simple desire to function freely and beautifully, to give outward and objective form to ideas that bubble inwardly and have a fascinating lure in them, to get rid of them dramatically and make an articulate noise in the world.
And:
He is, first and last, simply trying to express himself. He is trying to arrest and challenge a sufficient body of readers, to make them pay attention to him, to impress them with the charm and novelty of his ideas, to provoke them into an agreeable (or shocked) awareness of him, and he is trying to achieve thereby for his own inner ego the grateful feeling of a function performed, a tension relieved, a katharsis[sic]
I was taught Mencken a bit in college, during my expository writing class. I’m not sure if I’m attributing it correctly, but I believe our professor had the following conversation with a classmate:
Classmate: he uses such long sentences and archaic words. He’s not easy to read, his writing is not clear.
Professor: well, perhaps you should just read it more carefully…and find a dictionary.
Much writing that doesn’t follow our modern ideas of Orwellian brevity and clarity. Given Mencken’s assessment that most people are inept at writing, it’s best to at least get most people writing as little as possible.
However, we too easily lose sight that Orwellian style is just one among many; it’s far from universal and both writer and reader will cut themselves off from the majority of Letters (and their own joy in writing!) if they chain their mind up if all they think of are the first five rules. All the joy in reading and writing comes from the sixth rule, too often forgotten by all.
(Though, if I may suggest: replace “barbarous” with “boring,” next thing you know, you’ve got stew goin’.)
Stressing out about death vs. traps
In her book’s first part, she sketches Epicurus’s proto-democratic world-view. The senses, which are the source of knowledge, are common to all and reliable. Each knows what pleases or pains them. As people know their own minds, they cannot easily be bossed about by presumed betters.
“Living well and living justly”, part two, builds on the Epicurean picture of morality as useful rules for reducing harm. Be canny about your pleasures. Don’t stress over worldly success. Be good to friends. Enjoy sex but beware its risks. Don’t expect too much of parenthood. Above all, stop worrying about death. As Dryden put it, when translating Lucretius:
What has this bugbear death to frighten man, If souls can die as well as bodies can?… From sense of grief and pain we shall be free We shall not feel because we shall not be.
Are people really that afraid of death nowadays? Over the centuries of philosophy that I studied in college, fear of death figured in here and there.
The Christians seemed to fear death most, but more out of a different fear: in their charming way, the fear of eternal torment in hell - at the most positive version of this fear, they fear missing out on eternal bliss.
The Ancients had a sort of fear of obscurity (or, a lack of fame), and sometimes an over rationalized idea of how they should live their lives: the Greeks wouldn’t really say to be “ethical” so much as proper and glorious in life - you could say, in modern terms, “respected.”
The fear of suffering and pain seems more important, bondage and slavery: being denied choice and free action. I mean, I don’t want to sound smug, but as Montaigne pointed out (I can never find this reference, so maybe I’m remembering it wrong) when you’re dead, you’re dead - you’re not sitting there realizing you’re dead and upset about it. Otherwise, if you had the facilities to know you were dead, you’d still be…alive.
The more important thing to confront, especially from our modern perch, is how to handle the mental strain of being trapped in whatever bondage you’re in, and for those in the life of luxury, how to avoid boredom. That’s the case for me, at least.
Much of my life is obligation - the call of duty for work, parenthood, marriage, living in a community…even owning a dog (it has to be walked, I have to feed it, and pick up its poop).
These are all “traps” of my own making, and ones I choose to stay in every day. Work pays me well - I get something in return for being in that trap, and even better when considering it a “trap,” I can actually leave anytime (if I accept the payment, loss of income both present and future, for leaving the trap). Still, each of these are things that limit my free choice and very often cause the suffering of having to “deal with bullshit.” Of course there are rewards: the love I get and the good feelings of giving love. And we can all agree on money.
Of course, I realize it’s all a golden cage in comparison to the dark, steel cages - actual cages! - that many people live in. That’s a trap of its own: I’m undeserving of complaining. Relative to most people’s situation, I should shut the fuck up and enjoy life. (Which is a useful tool-of-solace.)
Anyhow. Dealing with, living in, these kinds of traps seems like the real focus of secular philosophy, not fear of death. And, then, it turns out, you’ve just constructed a new trap for yourself, as the review points out, the trap of focusing on your own happiness:
Floating over Epicureanism, for all its appeal, is a sense of loneliness. Family life is inessential. Friends are merely instrumental. Everything comes back to “How is this for me?” Perhaps not philosophy but an over-defensive temperament is at work. Could it be that in arming themselves so well against life’s anxieties, Epicureans overlook its riches?
All I can ever come back to is this: how can I stay happy without being an asshole?
(Sidenote: religious philosophy was always annoying to study. You’d be going along with, most famously Pascal or Berkeley, with a wonderful chain of logic. Then you’d hit an intellectual impasse. “Ah, but God is compassionate and pure,” they would then “reason”, “so He would never be deceptive and deploy trickery.” They pause dramatically, and perhaps cast a nervous eye towards Rome. “Thus, we can ignore where logic leads us here and assume the (I mean, not that I would be biased by this kind of thing) case that (somehow!) conveniently leads to a happy conclusion.” Yes. Indeed.)