Lifestyle & Culture
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »A Pronoia Refresher – Every Little Thing Is Gonna Be All Right
[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 16, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010The suspicion that the universe is conspiring on your behalf can be pretty helpful at times.
 Of course there are other ways to achieve this state |
The other day, a friend was lamenting the sad state of affairs in the world. War, poverty, hunger, crime, environmental catastrophes, the shameful state of our government and its duopolistic party system…they were really digging in. I ordinarily would be the source of this kind of lamenting myself, but whenever some else does it, the rebel in me starts acting up, and I drag out my favorite toolbox for dismantling this kind of gloomy thinking. I start by pointing out that if you take a city like Los Angeles – which has a population of about 4 million people – you’ll find that every day a person is murdered, there are about 45 robberies, 80 cases of aggravated assault, 70 burglaries, and 90 cars stolen. That means that out of a city of 4,000,000 people, 3,999,714 of them were pretty much behaving. Which actually is pretty remarkable. I then introduce the idea of Pronoia, the suspicion that the universe is conspiring to work in your favor. For “Pronoia 101″, I always point people to Rob Brezsny’s Glory in the Highest, an excerpt from his book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia
Can’t You See I’m Busy?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 10, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010It’s interesting that in both boom AND bust times LOOKING like you’re doing work is more important than actually DOING it.
 This woman understood the importance of fake spreadsheets on the computer screen, but lost her job shortly after this photo was taken. Why? She forgot to generate fake desktop clutter. |
We used to have a weekly feature called Monday Demotivators in which we featured Flash-based games and puzzles to help you avoid actually (gasp) doing work on Monday morning. During the boom economy of a few years ago, I couldn’t help noticing that – as an aspiring entrepeneurial type – I often worked 60-70 hours a week, while my friends with “real” jobs spent an awful lot of time calling me during the day to fill time while they shopped on line or sent friends stupid links they found on Fark, or doing just about anything but their actual job. This not only had a big impact on my understanding of things like the 20-60-20 rule and the logic of overseas outsourcing, but eventually led to my amusement with spending time working to find ways to help others avoid working. Given the unemployment figures of the last year however, we decided to discontinue our little Monday feature. I mean, if you don’t have a job, you don’t have any work to avoid, right? The other day though, I received an e-mail in which the visitor said “I know this sounds crazy, but I miss your Monday Demotivators. Not because I’m trying to avoid work, but because of force reductions, I’m afraid I’ll get cut because I don’t look busy enough.” Yes, in the bizarre world of corporate employment, if you’re not the CEO that gets a bonus for running your company into the ground, you’re just a commodity that risks being shipped overseas if you’re not perceived as an asset as the ship sinks. And one of the best ways to be perceived as an asset is to not actually be an asset, but to look like one. So we’re here to help. It’s funny that “looking busy” was a valuable skill during boom times because your employer was oblivious to the same inefficiency that led to the staff cuts that now make “looking busy” a crucial skill again. Your Guide to Looking Busy at Work from 2003 is a slightly humorous piece that’s all about frittering away your surplus work hours with high-tech approaches, but last month’s NYT piece Working Hard to Look Busy was all about the new busywork, the kind that helps you keep the job that you were always avoiding. Decent management is hip to the more obvious “furrowing of the brow while clacking on your keyboard and faking a phone call” methods, so you have to get clever. This article gets down to the finer points like “abusing the interoffice envelope system” and “propping out your desk”. Following the simple suggestions in that peice should have you looking Busier than a one-legged man in a butt kickin’ contest in no time. Once you’ve successfully created the illusion of busy-ness, it still may be hard to get back to the more obvious nonsense like first-person shooter games, so you might want to try the games over at CantYouSeeImBusy.com, which are all designed to look like common office programs. Like Leadership, which appears to be a quarterly progress report, but is in fact a “navigate your rocket through the alien terrain” game. You could also resort to things like creating a fake desktop with lots of programs open (see below). Just remember that it IS fake if the boss wanders in; you’ll look pretty stupid if you start trying to drag around fake program windows. Got any tips of your own for looking busy? I have to get back to work now. Read the rest of this entry »
Virtual Realty Inchvestments & Sovereign Citizenship
[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 6, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Saturday, March 6th, 2010Homeless? Jobless? No worries. Become a real estate mogul for a buck an inch. Or secede and start your own darn COUNTRY.
 I think Inchvesting is kind of like FarmVille except it’s no fun and costs real money. |
Arthur Miller said “Figure it out. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there’s no one to live in it“. Well, these are hard times; an estimated 15 million Americans can’t get work so they can even try to work their butt off to own a house, and later find themselves overextended and joining the ranks of millions nationwide who already blew it and defaulted on their mortgages. This probably has contributed to the estimated million or so homeless people already in America, the only upside being that it may have improved tent sales considerably. Heck. Even Iceland seems to be defaulting on its loans these days. I always laugh when an advertising-kludged pseudo-liberal site like Huffington Post asks stupid questions like Should Congress Take a Pay Cut?, because the fact that they’ll take a democratic legislator’s bandstanding seriously highlights in a convoluted way just how deep the problem really runs. Of COURSE they should take a pay cut. They should also think about spending less than 60 bucks on lunch each day. So. If you don’t have the job security of the guys who get paid out of the taxes they always say they don’t want to charge you, and you’ve lost your job and your home, is there still any chance you’ll ever live the American dream and have your own piece of land? Well, while you’re still homeless, you might want to get creative with your signage like these guys or abuse celebrities like this guy. And once you panhandle a few bucks, you could think about inchvesting it. Yes, for a dollar an inch you can have a little piece of Detroit. Another option would be to disregard social order altogether, secede, and claim any land you like. Think those teabaggers are crazy? You obviously haven’t heard about America’s new sovereign citizens.
You Can’t Always Get What You Want. So Maybe You Should Want Less.
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on February 28, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, February 28th, 2010Half of you think you’ll be rich someday, but one third of the world is content with two dollars a day. Could you be?
 From need to want less. Some images are also available as prints here. |
Could you live on two dollars a day? Well, according to the book Portfolios of the Poor
What Are You So Afraid Of?
[ 5 Comments ]Posted on February 23, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010Or…How Learned To Stop Worrying & Enjoy My Abject Poverty. Whoever said there’s nothing to fear but fear itself probably had a job. And has never spent time in Detroit at night.
Recently, I found myself experiencing something I hadn’t felt in a while: FEAR. At first I was calling it anxiety, saying things like “I’m just a little anxious” about this or that thing. But it persisted, and as I explored the feeling, I realized it really was – plain and simple – fear. Do you ever feel anxious or fearful? Maybe you need to take the Anxiety Potential Quiz if you’re not sure. I generally don’t experience a lot of fear, so it was an extremely uncomfortable feeling for me. I could have probably gone to a doctor and said “wow, I’m really anxious all the time” and ended up getting a prescription for it, but that presented two problems for me. First of all, it seems like a fear-based reaction to fear; an attempt to just make it “go away” instead of confronting it. And secondly, I don’t have insurance, which is a nice segue into a broader angle on fear. Insurance itself is part of the Culture of Fear that many say we live in. It’s an elaborate scheme of high-risk investments using the money you give someone to protect you in case something you don’t know is going to happen to you does in fact happen to you. That view on insurance actually makes me fear it more than any unexpected tragedies that await me. So what to do when you’re feeling fear? In my case most of my fears lately revolve around my phones getting shut off or having to live on ramen because my business ventures have all hit a wall. So all I really have to do is get a job, right? Well, then I’m likely to start experiencing Job Search Anxiety. So let’s get more to the bottom of this fear thing. What is it really? Well, you can take the How Stuff Works approach and break it down into its biological Read the rest of this entry »