Stuff-love, materialism, is a large part of our human experience, but it isn’t everything.
Very often it is the little things that make a big difference in lives that are lived on the edge. In poorer parts of a city, where people’s homes often do not have access to reliable electrical service and where windows that let in light might be a bad idea in terms of home security, people either spend a lot of time outside their unlighted homes or use open fires, candles or oil lamps as light sources. These can be…
Poet, artist and musician Joy Harjo is a member of the Mvkoke (Creek) Nation. (More usually, that word is spelled “Muscogee.”) Harjo became the first Native American to be appointed as a Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the American Library of Congress in 2019 by Librarian Carla Hayden. In case you didn’t know, the Library is America’s oldest federal cultural institution and is said to be the largest library in the world. As well as other things, national poets…
I didn’t get it; really, I didn’t. It took a long time, but finally a light dawned. The whole pseudo-argument about Life being a “journey” rather than a “destination” is a crock. I mean, think about it. How can you have a “journey” without having a “destination?” It’s sort of a package deal. If you’re a tourist yearning to go traveling, you’ve got all kinds of professionals – a whole industry — trying to help you find a way to…
[Writer’s Note: This post was written at the height of the Bitcoin madness, before it imploded and left gaping holes all over the place. It seems to me that I’m not the only one who got confused by the Bitcoin virtual world. Makes me feel less stupid, that.] ACK! I’ve been wandering around, lost, in the Bitcoin virtual currency world these past few weeks in (another) failed attempt to understand what the heck is going on with that. I chose…
The process-oriented mindset is one of several styles of moving to the beat of your own passion. Another name for it is “mastery.” One of the best breakdowns of the requirements and outcomes of pursuing “mastery” is the one the celebrated art curator Sarah Lewis delineates in her book, THE RISE: Creativity, the Gift of Failure and the Search for Mastery. This 2014 book is a fascinating exploration of the constant pursuit of excellence that is pretty much what distinguishes…
Nipun Mehta walks his talk. He’s been doing it for over 20 years now and his walk has been highly successful at helping other people walk theirs. Mehta was a UC Berkeley computer nerd and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who witnessed and participated in the peak of the DotCom madness. By the time he was in his third year at UC Berkeley, he was at Sun Microsystems doing work that gave him what he says was more money than he…
As a Perfectionist in remission, I am here to tell you that wabi-sabi — a Japanese way of seeing the world — works as an antidote to the never-good-enough, shiny-new-thing madness induced by the classical hyper-focus on perfection and the kind of seamless orderliness that arises from the mathematical, mechanical precision that evolved in the super-industrialized Occidental West where more is always better. I grew up in a pineapple plantation camp on Molokai. Many of my neighbors were Issei, first-generation…
Consistently over the years, assorted research has shown that job dissatisfaction is a problem for about two-thirds of the people in America. This “disengagement” has wide-ranging effects. Gallup tells us that this job irritant issue has cost as much as $350 billion a year in “lost productivity.” (It can also suck a soul dry, and turn your life into a desert, but nobody scientific ever mentions that.)
18th-century British textile designer, poet, writer and socialist activist William Morris famously advised: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” It’s become a sort of go-to standard that organizers, minimalists and de-clutterers of every ilk use to look at the stuff with which we all surround ourselves. These days every time you hear that phrase, you can pretty much expect that somebody is going to try to persuade you…
Probably since the beginning of time the love of stuff has ruled the world. And as long as there has been stuff-love, there probably also have been those who growl about all this rampant “stuff-ism.” According to those grouses, making and getting and keeping and trading and maintaining and so on and so forth goes against “right” thinking and the proper order of something or other. Stuff-ism is going to destroy the world as we know it, they say, or…
