Wise Words

Since I was little, I have loved words.  I love to play with them, to pick them apart.  And then, when picked apart for other reasons of play, it seems wasteful to not learn the etymologies of the morphemes of the lexicon. I have accumulated some of those over time, but the real thing is to play.

My love is a love of discovery, not really systematic understanding.  Still, you figure things out over time if you keep going.  And it is easier to keep going if you love what you are doing.

Amateur
====

This leads to our first word: amateur.  I find it somewhat embarrassing that I didn't figure out this etymology for myself as I have studied enough Spanish to know that "amar" is "to love."  Furthermore, I hope we all know about the kind of amore that hits one's eye in the fashion of a larger than average pizza pie.

That an amateur is someone who loves can be taken a few ways.  For one, since they are not paid for the activity, it could be inferred that the only reason left to persist is some kind of love, hopefully for the activity itself, but someone could love attention as well, no?  Another possible spin is that the word contains an old truth that to do something for reward takes away at least some of the love.  Working for money puts you on deadlines, causing stress and forcing you to pick techniques and tools for speed and power rather subjective enjoyment and perhaps even safety.  Because I am never on a hard deadline with my creative work, I get to choose the tools I like.  Handsaws for wood, and first drafts written in pen on paper.

Sadly, in our contemporary culture, if you love something you are encouraged to "go pro" in it.  To do this, you first need the right (often expensive) credentials, and this process alone can take away the fun.  Even if it doesn't, the grind of doing something every day, and to the specifications of customers, can.  Lastly, you are almost in all cases forced to be "a pro" in only one thing.  I would rather have the option to be an amateur in -- ie love -- multiple things.

Integrity
===

Even if our society can keep itself going on a material level, something which I have my doubts about, I think we are dealing with a crisis of integrity which threatens us psychologically.  I don't just mean the dishonesty of our culture, where nearly everyone of a certain class works in PR, though that is a big problem.  I mean that we are dis-integrated, socially, psychologically.  Talking with people who are better adjusted to our systems, such as my wife, I often hear about how important it is to "compartmentalize."  I contend that is a part of the problem.  Putting everything in these non-integrated compartments makes it easier to accept more horrible things (fair enough as survival skills go), but it also makes it easier for those who do horrible things to feel fine and ultimately do more horrible things. This isn't quite the same as arguing there is a rise in sociopaths, or even sociopaths in high places, as has become a fashionable line of argument (something fashionable can be correct), rather a good many bad person and an army of enablers all think they are the good guys.

In order to join nearly any paying organization -- and many that do not -- it is expected that you will dis-integrate from any prior principles you might hold in order to serve the organization, the biggest two being clarity and honesty -- both part of the long-gone square-dealing.

As Wendell Berry writes in What are People For?

Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity.  They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment.  But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best.  They enlarge the ground of judgment.  The context of love is the world (54). 

The rituals surrounding dis-integrity start with the very beginning, with one's bid to join the system.  In academic courses that deal with "values," it becomes telling a teacher what he or she wants to hear.  In interviews, questions are built to force you into something other than real candor. "What would you say is your greatest weakness?"  It would be smart to say something like "I work too hard ... some say I care too much" rather than what you know to be the truth, or what would know is the truth if you were a person of integrity.  (It's even better for the systems if you are so out of practice with self reflection, or so practiced at giving these types of responses, that you don't even know you are playing the game).

Note: do what you need to do on the interview.  These rituals have become so wide-spread that even some relatively enjoyable jobs have them.  In the long run, you need some purchase within systems to live and in order to interact with first-order sane -- but second-order insane-- people (or maybe I mean vice a versa).  Do not underestimate how unpleasant it is to have radicals, drop-outs, bohemians, or anarchists as your only emotional support system.  Also, when you are inside systems you have to hide that you are doing the right thing, but at least you have some capabilities to act.  My advice: render truth unto truth, lies unto lies, and bullshit unto bullshit and hope for (as well as work on) having the wisdom to tell the difference.

Fulfilled
====

Peter Korn's Why We Make Things and Why It Matters belongs right up with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and, in my opinion, above Shopcraft as Soulcraft, which I find a bit too reductive in its pronouncements.

There is a lot to the Korn book, and I highly recommend reading it all, but what stuck me the most was its observation on fulfillment.  I will let Korn speak for himself.

Happiness and fulfillment feel like two distinct states of mind to me, and of the two, I find happiness greatly overrated by those who present it as life's ultimate goal. (124)

[. . .]

However recalcitrant the universe may be, when I am creatively engaged I have a sense of purpose and fulfillment that makes happiness seem like a bauble.  Ask me if I'm happy when I'm making something in the workshop and I have to stop and think about it.  It's not an important variable in the equation. (125).

He also gives this life pro tip

Creative fulfillment is not something to achieve and keep, like a college degree or an Olympic medal.  It resides in the process of making the table, not in the satisfaction of sitting at it.  Without generation, the wires go dead. (126).

These are profound truths, ones I am inclined to think our society does much to hide.

As I turned over the importance of fulfillment in my mind, it started to seem so simple: fulfilled is to be filled fully.  And the only thing that fills you fully is what you can give all of your attention to.  Unfortunately, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) does not back this up as the etymology, leaving me with more of a mnemonic (or less politely, a slogan) which I find charming.  OED traces the earliest uses of "fulfilled" to objects physically filled to the brim, which is now archaic ("look how fulfilled that cup is!")  When fulfilled moved closer to an emotional sense, it meant to completely supply what is wanted or needed.  Unsurprisingly, the citations for this transition period are mainly religious -- the idea being that only God can leave you fulfilled. 

Happiness
====

This etymology I came to through my time teaching.  In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo says "Hence will I to my ghostly father's cell,/  His help to crave, and my dear hap to tell."  Hap here means fortune, ie luck.  In this case, the OED very much backs me up, showing that "happiness" as a subjective state does not even begin to show up until the 16th century.  Shakespeare was alive for when the meaning began to shift.

The etymological sense of hap as what happens to us lives on in words like "hapless" and "happenstance."  Whatever happens happens -- and in this view it is somewhat absurd to think your happiness is within your control.

There is, however, an old sense of "happy" to mean "successful in performing what circumstances require; apt, dexterous" that has citations as old as circa 1340 and 1400.  While this doesn't sound much like the "happiness" that American consumers take as life's only goal, it is close to the fulfillment-via-craft Korn is alluding to.

I don't think it would be worth the effort to try to restore the older uses of happiness, however.  After all, our current use has a meaning, one that be measured, researched, and even brain-scanned.  Take Daniel Gilbert's book Stumbling on Happiness or Tony Hsieh's framework/checklist to get that subjective state so valued in our culture

1) perceived meaning
2) perceived progress
3) perceived control/autonomy
4) social connection

Well golly, these seem to have more to do with environment, much of it happenstance, than simply having a positive attitude or getting your mindfulness on.

Putting It Together
============

Pursuing integrity -- keeping myself together and down to relatively few compartments and faces  -- makes it easier, or, in my case possible, to create meaning.  Also, it frees energy to make progress. Furthermore, our culture leaves less and less places for autonomy as we shift further and further from the habits of a free people.  Some proximate causes for this shift were 9/11 as catalyst within our culture of fear, reforms in our school systems, multiple generations of entitlement culture, and group-think as entertainment and brand engagement model.  None of these seem to be going away, so autonomy will continue to be a rarer and rarer commodity.  If you can find durable autonomy at your job, good for you.  Most of us will have to find a place to retreat instead.  I have my workshop and my pen.

Fulfillment-via-craft, even if it is not treated as it's own intrinsic value, is a vehicle to happiness.  You can find progress, meaning, and control in it.  But there is a great tension between craftsmanship and social connection.  This is especially true in these times, as it turned out our social needs are very easy to hack into.  If you have to be watching and/or performing at all times you are trading away time and energy you could use to be immersed in a freely chosen project.  We should look at waves and cycles, rather than mindless habits.  There is a time to create and a time to connect.  In order to be psychologically integrated or get to all of the legs of happiness you must challenge the ideology of always needing to be connected and its enforcer: the fear of missing out.

Rhetoric Workshop: Abolish Jobs, Not Work

I like Bob Black's essay The Abolition of Work so much that every time I  mention it, or even think about it, I feel a strong desire to re-read it in its entirety. It and David Graeber's essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs provide the quickest education I know of in real liberty instead of making government a singular scapegoat for a life wasted and otherwise poorly lived.

With that said, for a long time something has felt off to me about Black's essay.  I have reflected on the matter for years, and have come to the conclusion that the concern is that I don't use the word "work" in the way Black does, which is after all, a rather large issue with the essay, considering the title itself.

I think the difference in meaning comes from the domains in which Black and I do our thinking and thus our writing.  Black is talking in the domain of political philosophy, whereas I am concerned about living a good, private life. In doing so, I think a lot about art, and find the process of creation to be one of the most important answers to questions of meaning and fulfillment.   Black's use of "work" is semantically close to "worker" and the phrase "worker's of the world unite."  My use of "work" is closer to "work of art," and the phrase "the collected works of Shakespeare."

When I have leisure time, as well as, crucially, a minimum effective dose of real human contact, I feel driven to create.  And though I have found that there is a time and place aimless creation, such as making a painting by just slopping color, what I really want is something that forces judgement, refinement, and, yes, some effort.  I have to agree with Aaron Swartz when he wrote:

Hard work isn’t supposed to be pleasant, we’re told. But in fact it’s probably the most enjoyable thing I do. Not only does a tough problem completely absorb you while you’re trying to solve it, but afterwards you feel wonderful having accomplished something so serious.

I don't think this kind of work has to be assigned by someone else, and in my experience it usually isn't.  After all, the authoritarian mindset will push a leader to find some way to break the flow or otherwise hamper the task, but the fact remains that I really love to work and I even work hard to find ways to find meaningful work.

If his essay is anything to go on, Black would probably counter that I am describing a love for a particular kind of play.  Perhaps, and I wouldn't quibble too much with someone who wanted to maintain that position, but I think that "work" is the best word for what I often want to do because the labor and effort I put in shows up on some level and adds immensely to the charm of a piece.

Thus, I propose that instead of talking about abolishing work, we can use the word "job."  Instead of thinking bad things about, and occasionally writing pieces criticizing the work system, I conceptualize it as the job system.  This also tracks closely with how the ideology in question functions; if you do a lot of hard work on your own, but it isn't for a business, it usually doesn't count in other peoples' minds.  "What do you do?" is a question to figure out your job, and thus figure out your role and what status should go with that in the questioner's eyes.  Almost no one wants to hear what you are working on, especially now that so few people do any work of real value.

What do I do?  I report to bullshit for billable hours.  I try to live below the means of those credits from billable hours and invest the proceeds, hoping to give my life more slack so those I can take care of those I am responsible for while still being a righteous dude.

Oh, what do I do for purpose?  I think, I read, and I create art, trying to work at it as hard as I can considering all the bullshit I have to deal with.

Fun with Word Mentions

If you type in "define" as well as a word into google, you will usually get not only a definition and etymology, but also a chart with the word's usage over time.  Here are some words that I think help tell the story of the United States during the modern (post WWII) period.

asshole




So, there has been an explosion of these types of people since World War II, aka The Gasoline War. What kind of society were we building at that time?

exurb




exurbia




For a brief time, it was understood by Americans that they were making something new and different, that those levels of sprawl don't amount to a real connection with the main city we wanted to swoop into for goods and services at command, afterwards retreating to utopian "good neighborhoods."  A new term was coined and brought into usage.  But "exurb" was not destined to replace "suburb."

suburb




suburbia





The cultural suicide of the Big Three Era didn't make the suburb.  It made suburbia.

racism




I think this one is first about the awareness of racism, and then its continued rise in use comes as a cold-prickly-style insult.

awesome



It often takes a non-American perspective to see how ridiculous our usage of this word is.

bargain




Everyone wants a bargain. Also, I just wanted a word to serve as a baseline.  Not every usage has exploded here in the modern era.  In fact. . .

dignity




Yeah. . .

One Definition of Insanity is Expecting the Quote to Go Away

One of my pet peeves is the quote "the definition of insanity is repeating the same action, and expecting a different result." I'm old enough to remember a time before we pretended that Einstein came up with the quote. . .

The quote is one of those things where people nod knowingly every time they hear it.  However, all it takes to break the spell is to say "yeah, but it isn't."  Then most people will instantly see that you are correct . . . until the next time they hear it so that they can nod knowingly.

I did some research on everyone's favorite stupid saying:

Here's a psychologist taking down the quote, and I think, interestingly, revealing that he hears it on average several times a week.

And a Salon article proclaiming it "the most overused cliché of all time," and then giving a bunch of examples of it being used, saving the trouble of making such a list, which I was strongly considering.

Here is a breakdown of the history of the quote. The original wording found in print was from a Narcotics Anonymous book in 1981 --  which, by the way, is 26 years after Einstein died.  Here is root of the madness:

Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.

Not only is it mind-blowing that the quote is from a 12-Step Program and first came into being in the Reagan era, but also note how much better the original formulation is. While there are loads of situations -- like sales, investing, or watering an un-sprouted seed -- where doing a lot of the same thing and expecting different results is part of the path to success, mistakes are not good to repeat.  It appears that in order to make the quote sticky in public discourse, it had to be made significantly more vague and thus inaccurate.

The first time our modern, less accurate wording shows up in print comes from a novel by Rita Mae Brown published in 1984.  And while her Wikipedia page is impressive, Einstein she is not.

Now you know that the most over-used cliché of all time is from a 12-step program.  It seems that if we're every going to recover from it, the first step is to admit that we have a problem.