Working Poor

I've sometimes been critical of this lifestylism concept because it seems so bourgeois. Do we all have the luxury of self-actualization? I found this CBC series on the working poor in Ottawa this week and it's another good reality check.

Circadian Madness

I know Brian Lamb from my "other life" in educational technology, but I enjoy all of his writing on all kinds of topics. This week he had a great post on the hard-driving folks who are willing to sacrifice sleep in an attempt to achieve work and life goals, and I heartily agree with his analyis: "A tyranny of the obsessed. If this sort of circadian madness is posited as a miracle cure to boost productivity, then we know our culture of work has gone off the rails."

More Living Without a Net

Jory is consistently putting out gems, with fabulous writing about her transition from employee to self-employed. Highlights for me from her last bunch: In Defense of the Free Agent and more reflecting on living without a net. The latter yields some great personal insights into the post-corporate lifestyle:

"I also took more time to walk to places, cafes, to the park in the middle of the day, to stimulate thought. I also didn't clockwatch until meal times. In fact, I've often been so engrossed in projects that I forget to eat (thank God, the b-friend likes to cook and reminds me). I suppose, in spite of the Grande addiction, my solo lifestyle is having a healthy effect on me.

I worried that becoming a solo would mean becoming a recluse, but that hasn't been the case. After a day of self-assigned and self-defined work, I feel satisfied at the end of the day, like I deserve to sit down with a friend and catch up. By month two of solohood I even considered myself deserving of meeting with other solo friends in the middle of the day. We didn't need to justify ourselves and convince each other that we would work for twice as long later that night. We knew that now that we were doing our unique brand of work, it would get done."

Remainders

Great post from Christopher about life's priorities and how we fit them into our days: A Person Divided Leaves a Remainder. There's a nice discussion going there too, and I encourage others to join in the fun.

Lifestyle Decoration

No, I don't consider home improvement to be an important part of lifestylism. In fact, I think people tend to obsess over meaningless details of their lives (like endlessly redecorating interior spaces) to distract themselves from the difficult work of aligning their lifestyle choices (how they spend time, money and energy) with their real values. That said, let's go into the wonderful world of paint for a moment.

Click on the Colour Game on this page for a personalized virtual painting experience. You do a series of little activities and answer questions that creates a sort of customized colour preference profile. You can then choose different colour schemes and see how they'd look in different rooms. It's less sophisticated and offers fewer options than the virtual decorator (Flash) they also offer, but it's still pretty neat. Anyone with a taste for these things could kill hours in there.

What fascinates me about this model is the idea of applying the same sort of simple immersive experience for life planning. Why not let a person do a series of little activities and answer some questions, then let them play with all kinds of variables in their future lifestyle? I love the concept. Just need to build it.

Satisfying Work

I really like David St Lawrence's principles of satisfying work. Please go read his post, but I wanted to also duplicate the main ones here:

• Almost any work is satisfying if you can do it at your own pace.
  
• The most interesting work in the world can be made unbearable, if you are forced to do it in a sequence and at a pace that is not of your own choosing.
  
• Job satisfaction is actually more important than the money you take home. That is why acknowledgement from your peers and managers can easily make up for a lower salary.
  
• Any job that requires you to lie for others will eat you out from the inside until you are no longer able to look at yourself in the mirror.
  
• People will work unbelievable hours for little or no pay if they know they are helping to make the world a better place.
  
• People will perform miracles working for a manager they trust.

Home from Nowhere

Where we choose to live (region, neighbourhood, type of housing) is a huge part of the lifestyle equation. I've been doing a lot of thinking along those lines, but never seem to post about it.

Home from Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler rocked my world in the last few weeks. Read this article to get a sense of his vision for towns and cities that would work infinitely better than the suburban sprawl currently dominating the landscape. He's aligned with the New Urbanism movement, which is basically aiming to create beautiful urban places where people can live, shop and work without needing cars. I was introduced to some of these ideas by reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and it just makes so much sense, both for quality of life and long-term sustainability.

Kunstler also recently wrote about what the future might look like when the price of oil becomes unaffordable across entire economies. It's classic doomsday stuff, but much of the crystal-ball gazing has a ring of truth to me. I wonder how it will affect our aspirations and sense of what is important in life. His take:

"The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class."

Learning the Pursuit of Happiness

The title of this post popped into my head as a possible unifying concept for my thesis. Each of the key words is loaded with meaning, and the intersection between them is where my interests lie. Some preliminary questions I need answers to:

Learning

• How are kids currently learning about which possibilities for their future are likely to make them happy?
  
• Is this learning effectively helping them make good decisions? Do they have the information and skills?
  
• How might these skills and information be learned better? Technology, social software, planning portfolios, mentoring, overhauling career development and guidance programs, etc?
  
• How could a more holistic focus on lifestylism (or entire future lifestyles, as opposed to just family or career goals in isolation) help us make better decisions?
  
• How would rich visualization, simulation and reflection help kids understand the implications and interdependencies of their future choices?
  
• What differences exist in how kids from different socioeconomic backgrounds learn about their future options (career, education, lifestyle)?

Pursuit

• How are young people currently setting goals or directions for their futures? What are the ecological and social consequences of an entire generation of people pursuing those goals? Are they sustainable goals for individuals and society?
  
• Are the goals or directions generally meaningful, realistic, and aligned with their personal values? Are they pursuing what they actually care about? Do they know how to identify and take the best steps to achieving those goals?
  
• How could the process of helping kids set and achieve lifestyle goals be improved so that they'd have better tools and motivation to succeed by their own measures of success?
  
• How does fear motivate and paralyze young people when they think about their future options?
  
• How much of the goals and dreams of young people are borrowed or absorbed from society and the American Dream as opposed to being authentic and personal?
  
• Do young people believe that they can create their own futures, or that they must choose from existing options? How much desire is there to create future ways of living that are more satisfying and sustainable?
  
• How are differences in socioeconomic status manifested in the types of lifestyles kids pursue? How could those differences be minimized? Is class mobility a myth?

Happiness

• How likely are the most common or popular goals to make young people happy, both in the process of pursuing them and in their attainment? How happy is the American Dream making adults right now?
  
• How might lifestylism as an orientation or approach to the future help us better enjoy the journey and the destination?
  
• How could people better understand the connections between their personal happiness and the collective or common good of their communities and planet?
  
• How do kids define and pursue happiness in the present? What needs and wants do they believe will make them happy in their futures?
  
• What do young people believe about the relationships between work and happiness? Is work mostly viewed as the means for generating income to fuel consumption (which should equal happiness)? How well is this model working now? What should replace it if it's not making most people happy?

As I said in a previous post about my thesis topic, it's not a problem of not being interested in enough things -- it's a matter of organizing these questions into some kind of coherent approach or conceptual model. I'm glad I took a few months off from my program to ponder some of this stuff, because I feel like I'm at least identifying the questions I care about. The comments to my last thesis post were extremely helpful, even the abusive ones. Please feel free to comment on the questions I've included here -- even though I'm mostly just thinking out loud, it's great to have others bounce off of them as well. Which ones are most interesting to you (they're all interesting to me)? Which might be combined or expanded to yield the most interesting explorations?

Mac Truck

Jory has been reflecting on the tension between forging ahead on work vs stepping back to consider at the bigger picture:

"There have been times when all I've done is overdo, push to an unhealthy limit, make things that were perfect imperfect because I was bored, or afraid of sinking. I took a project management class once, thinking it would enhance my skills of making things happen. At the time I was very successful knocking off the tasks on my to-do list, and on everyone else's, but the big-picture projects, the ones that were truly revolutionary, didn't ever come to fruition. A few weeks into the course I was given a pet name, Mac Truck, to describe my management style; I don't think it was a good thing."

I suspect she's being too hard on herself, and it sounds like she might be getting a bit tired of all this reflection...but thank goodness for the rest of us that she's writing this stuff.

Permaculture

My beautiful and brainy wife doesn't post very often, but I'm always glad when she does. Her recent post about permaculture is sticking in my brain this week. She found some excellent points about approaches to life that promote permaculture that tie directly into lifestylism, at least as I'm seeing it now...especially these:

• Evoke whole system sensitivity: pay attention to whole cycles, not reduce everything to parts
  
• Model ecologically-appropriate lifestyles for others to learn and mimic
  
• Most importantly--have fun: life is too short for boredom, burn-out, tedium, and the like -- be sure to enjoy all of what you learn and do -- a healthy mind, body, and spirit (and relationships) can then be enjoyed as well. Help to design and grow healthy organizations, communities, and institutions accordingly.

Counterculture

I'm not sure how exactly this relates to Lifestylism, but I wanted to save Pat Kane's post about Creative Crass for the initial argument, later comments, and a few excellent interviews about counterculture.

Talking About Work

Esther's got a great new job and is thinking about how we talk about work:

"Before, I wanted to escape the discussion about work because I was unhappy about my work. In fact, isn't it true that when you ask another person about what it is that they do, then they ask you the same question? Before, that very question would get my mind rolling around about something that I would be happier to forget because my next day was bound to be frustrating and, over time it was becoming less and less a reflection of me."

Doug was just over at my desk and we were talking about how we've both stopped asking people "what do you do?" at parties. He now asks, "what do you like to do?" and I've been using "what do you do for fun?"...after a moment of confusion because of the subtle difference, people's faces light up as they realize that you've just asked them a much more interesting question.

Here and There

Doug wrote a fabulous post this week about the darker side of our dreams and aspirations. I'm fascinated by this tension between optimizing our current lifestyles and projecting ourselves into other possible futures. The process drives growth, but can also lead to a sense of restlessness or general dissatisfaction with our lives that precludes our enjoyment of the present. A quote from Doug's piece:

"In truth, there is no 'there'. We will not find happiness, fulfillment, and/or some sense of inner peace somewhere else. Those things are more likely discovered 'here', as we make present-day life more fabulous, or pursue today those things we dream of tomorrow. The answers people seek are most often discovered inside than out, more often realized in present-day experience than in some future place."

Blue Collar to White Collar Limbo

Betzi e-mailed me an excerpt from a book about social mobility that looks to be worth reading. This topic fascinates me -- it bundles up aspirations, abilities, beliefs about the value of education, socioeconomic factors and the American Dream itself:

"After bricklaying for 30 years, my father promised himself I’d never pile bricks and blocks into walls for a living. He and my mother figured that an education—genie-like and benevolent—would somehow rocket me into the rarefied trajectory of the upwardly mobile and load some serious loot into my pockets. My desire to work at something interesting to me rather than merely profitable was hard to fathom. Here I was breaking blue-collar rule number one: Make as much money as you can, to pay for as good a life as you can get. My father would try to teach me what my goals should be when I was 19, my collar already fading to white. I was the college boy who handed him the wrong wrench on help-around-thehouse Saturdays."

She also sent along an NPR radio interview with the author, including calls from listeners -- thanks, Betzi.

Paradox of Choice

Are too many choices a bad thing? In an another excellent post about options, Jory pulls out a few choice quotes from The Paradox of Choice:

"When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable .... But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize."