Reality Check

Via the Work Less Party comes this excellent newsletter: Reality Check: The Canadian Review of Wellbeing. The November '04 issue (1.6mb PDF) has four simple pages covering a bunch of issues around work: Troubling Trends Overwork, Underwork, Insecure Work, Canada’s blueprint for more jobs & more leisure, and Whatever happened to ‘the leisure society’?. All worth taking a look at.

The work-and-spend treadmill is very short, but it outlines one fascinating indicator of our collective values: "In 1943, the average Canadian house was 800 square feet. Today, the average house has more than doubled in size, to 1,800 square feet. Yet the decline in family size means that these large houses are occupied by fewer people than ever before." Apparently we consume almost twice as much stuff as average people did in the 1960s. Of course the implication is that we're having to work a lot more to maintain this new standard.

Work Less

Via Chris Corrigan comes news of the Work Less Party: "Work less, consume less, live more. By doing this we will have a better quality of life, and at the same time preserve something of our planet for future generations."

At last, a political party I can believe in, and in my own province! They've even got a blog, covering things like the 35-hour workweek in France with intelligence. Worth following...

43 Things

I'm loving 43 Things. It's a web site that lets you record what you'd like to do (goals, dreams, resolutions) and then connects the people who share those to-dos. So you could potentially help each other achieve something, or if you've already done something that someone else wants to do, you can give them advice on it.

They originally launced Twinkler as an earlier version of it, and it still shows the basic concept. The new one still requires an invite, but you can sign up to check it out (I can also invite you if you're interested). It's fascinating to see the kinds of things that people would like to do.

Buy Nothing

'Buy Nothing' campaign aims for different style of giving
I always found the Adbusters version of Buy Nothing Day interesting as a way to get people to reflect on what they buy and why, but I didn't realize there was a movement associated with my Mennonite roots.

Buying piles of stuff at Christmas seems to be one of those unassailable traditions. When I tell people that we do a very low-key version of the present exchange, it's almost as if I've told them that they I don't like puppies or teddy bears or happy children. But think of how much more we have to work to pay for all that stuff nobody needs, which means we're spending less time and money on the things we really value throughout the year.

Two and a Half Things

I met Doug in the lunch room at work last week and we had a fantastic conversation about parenting and values. He talked about how he learned that he could only ever do two-and-a-half things well at any given time, and he's written it up this week:

"When my kids were still young, I wanted to be a good father, a good husband, a good worker, a good rugby player, a good rugby coach, a good friend, a well-read person, a musical person, and a person who was physically fit. I tried to do ALL these things for a period of time. I did not feel fulfilled. I felt tired.

That's when I learned that you can only do 2 1/2 things well. So, I made some tough choices. I focused on being a good Dad, focused on excelling in my work, and any remaining time (whatever there was) was dedicated to continuously building my great relationship with my wife. My rugby playing/coaching went out the window. Our social life virtually disappeared. Reading, music and exercise - gone. But I loved and was energized by the vast majority of my days."

Of course he's generalizing, but I thought it really captured the essence of the tradeoffs we make with our time (and money). Every challenge I've felt as a new parent has been related to this truth -- you can't do it all.

Different Like You

I like Gwen's connection between Different Like You, a wonderful photographic collection about identity (related to this book by Hal Niedzviecki), and The Rebel Sell. Great food for thought that raises some questions about how we perceive ourselves in relation to those around us, and how we spend money to differentiate ourselves...Adbusters territory, for sure. A quote from Hello I'm Special:

"Individuality is now the new conformity. In contemporary society, it is now considered 'normal' to be 'an individual' above and beyond all other concerns. Though the traditional notion of conformity – earning a modest daily wage, regularly attending the religious institution predominant in your community, raising a family – still remains the model we seek to rebel against, strict adherence to traditional conformist structures is now the aberration, rather than the norm."

The Entrepreneur's Paradox

I've had this sitting here for a while already, thinking I was going to turn it into a real post with some thoughtful additions, but I'll just let it stand on its own. Jory frames entrepreurial ventures as almost necessary risks in moving toward self-actualization and personal freedom...which I found inspiring.

Well Said

From some Adbusters coverage of The Play Ethic:

"It's about helping individuals and societies to step back from free market frenzy and create new more creative, independent, appropriate ways of living."

Legacy Matters

The Experience Designer made a great find, called Legacy Matters. Interesting tagline to the category of 'personal legacy archives': "Because your life counts and what you leave behind is the evidence of the life you lived. Why not tell it your way." I'm still not totally sure how this stuff ties into lifestylism, but the connection seems to be through reflection, the idea that a reflective life will be more balanced and meaningful. There's also something compelling about leaving a legacy -- it implies that you've made choices you're proud of and lived your life to its fullest.

Game Developer OT

Also via Play Journal comes the story of a class-action lawsuit by employees of video game giant EA suing for unpaid overtime. It seems like the thing was at least partially set off by an anonymous blog post from the spouse of an EA employee, who describes what she'd ask the CEO if she got him on the phone:

"The main thing I want to know is, Larry: you do realize what you're doing to your people, right? And you do realize that they ARE people, with physical limits, emotional lives, and families, right? Voices and talents and senses of humor and all that? That when you keep our husbands and wives and children in the office for ninety hours a week, sending them home exhausted and numb and frustrated with their lives, it's not just them you're hurting, but everyone around them, everyone who loves them? When you make your profit calculations and your cost analyses, you know that a great measure of that cost is being paid in raw human dignity, right?"

I wonder if this is the case in many "buzz" jobs and industries like video-game design. When you get so many people wanting to work in a field like that, employers seem to be able to treat them however they want, knowing that there will always be others to take their places.

The Pro-Am Revolution

There's something so cool about The Pro-Am Revolution:

"The report defines Pro-Ams as amateurs who pursue a hobby or pastime –which in many cases is an all-consuming passion – to a professional standard. Pro-Ams are involved in ‘serious leisure’, which requires specialist knowledge and a major time commitment.

As people live longer with active retirement years, or downshift mid-career to improve their quality of life, the authors predict that ‘serious leisure’ will become a growing part of our lives.

'Pro-Ams are a new social hybrid who force us to rethink they way we think about work and leisure time,' say the report’s authors, Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller."

Via Pat Kane.

Update: A great essay version apppeared in Fast Company, along with a contrary blog post I mostly disagreed with (read my cantankerous comment at the bottom). You can also download the entire report (315kb PDF). Oh, and one more article from the creator of Twinkler.

Measuring the Economy

The True Measure of Success isn't GDP, and the types of statistics governments collect don't tell us anything about what really matters, says Daniel Pink:

"We measure whether life is getting better by checking whether the good numbers (GDP, personal incomes, and so on) are going up and the bad numbers (unemployment, inflation, and so on) are going down. However, over the past half century, something strange has happened. The US's per capita GDP - the value of all the goods and services a nation produces divided by its population - has nearly tripled, but American well-being hasn't budged. We've grown almost three times richer but not one jot happier. There's ample evidence that in all postindustrial societies, material wealth and broader happiness are no longer closely in sync."

His ideas for collecting data related to well-being are compelling. Idealistic, of course, but why not imagine a better future?

Local Lifestylism

I posted a link to Joie Gastronomic Guesthouse and Farm Cooking School earlier in the year, but followed up on it a bit more this week. Their story may be an example of the type of deconcentration I talked about in a previous post -- moving away from the buzz and opportunity of the big city to create a more integrated lifestyle in a rural area. It seems like the progression often involves parallel transition from jobs to self-employment in some form, because the rural areas don't tend to support much new employment, or at least not the kinds that people from the city tend to be looking for.

I've wanted to write more about food here, because it's so fundamental, and the eating choices we make often don't reflect our values. It looks like Heidi and Michael really get this, and I like the focus on local foods and sustainable agriculture. They even helped start Vancouver Chapter of the Slow Food Movement and now run the Okanagan Chapter. A couple of quotes from the official Slow Food Manifesto:

"We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods."

"In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes. So Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer."

This reminds me that I've got to bug Tannis to start working on the site she talked about to feature local farmers, food and wine providers, places nearby to get organic foods, and restaurants offering smart (and delicious) food choices.

On the Virtues of Idleness

Via Chris (and a second recommendation from Brian) comes this excellent article -- QUITTING THE PAINT FACTORY: On the virtues of idleness. It's not an easy read, but it's worth slogging through for the pearls of wisdom. A tiny taste:

"Look about: The business of busi­ness is everywhere and inescapable; the song of the buyers and the sellers never stops; the term "workaholic" has been folded up and put away. We have no time for our friends or our families, no time to think or to make a meal. We're moving product, while the soul drowns like a cat in a well."

Update:Brian deconstructs and supports the same article with his usual depth and skill.

From Here to Autonomy

I quoted Jory in the last post without mentioning that it's part of a series of articles called "From Here to Autonomy". If you're at all interested in how we perceive our roles and level of control in organizations and how we find meaning in our work, I'd recommend reading the entire series:

• Part 1
  
• Part 2
  
• Part 3
  
• Part 4
  
• Part 5