Journal

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how he or she could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorized stratum of the universally reviled unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.

It was truly a wonderful surprise just how good Bullshit Jobs turned out to be. I thought this book was going to be a simple, fun little exploration into the drudgery of those everyday jobs that feel pointless. But it was much more than that. David Graeber really dug in on the history of pointless jobs, the human toll they take, and the societal/political implications of removing them.

David broke the types of Bullshit Jobs into five sub-categorizations—interesting in itself—but the comparison to feudal times was what really resonated with me. The role in leadership being rewarded for growing their organizations above all else (into little kingdoms!) matched with what I’ve observed in life:

If the organization grows in size, higher-ups’ importance will almost invariably be measured by the total number of employees working under them, which, in turn, creates an even more powerful incentive for those on top of the organizational ladder to either hire employees and only then decide what they are going to do with them or—even more often, perhaps—to resist any efforts to eliminate jobs that are found to be redundant.

I might have this book tagged “Sociology” but in reality it’s more “Anthropology”. The stories and interviews that David did with a number of people who consider their jobs to be bullshit was particularly interesting.

Near the end of the book, David starts imagining solutions to this. David suggests UBI as one way to solve this issue. Why would someone work a bullshit job if they already were paid to do something more fulfilling?

Overall, this book was almost five stars for me. But it is a very solid four and I’d recommend it to practically anyone.

When we get angry, we suffer. If you really understand that, you also will be able to understand that when the other person is angry, it means that she is suffering. When someone insults you or behaves violently towards you, you have to be intelligent enough to see that the person suffers from his own violence and anger. But we tend to forget. We think that we are the only one that suffers, and the other person is our oppressor. This is enough to make anger arise, and to strengthen our desire to punish. We want to punish the other person because we suffer. Then, we have anger in us; we have violence in us, just as they do. When we see that our suffering and anger are no different from their suffering and anger, we will behave more compassionately. So understanding the other is understanding yourself, and understanding yourself is understanding the other person. Everything must begin with you.

I loved this book. It provides guidance and structure for how to think about—and how to resolve—heated, angry, situations. It discusses this both from the perspective where the reader is the angry party as well as the perspective where the reader is the person dealing with another angry party.

For a reader that has read other Thich Nhat Hanh books, this one covers a lot of the same ground and could feel a bit redundant. However, I still found value in how the same principles from other teachings were applied here for one hyper-specific topic.

Even within the book it can be a bit repetitious. This is my common complaint about Thich Nhat Hanh books. However, I’m starting to come around to this as it really forces engagement and absorption of the ideas.

If you are still bound and haunted by the past, if you are still afraid of the future, if you are carried away by your projects, your fear, your anxiety, and your anger, you are not a free person. You are not fully present in the here and the now, so life is not really available to you. The tea, the other person, the blue sky, the flower, is not available to you. In order to be really alive, in order to touch life deeply, you have to become a free person. Cultivating mindfulness can help you to be free.

This book was surprisingly tedious.

I’m going to let it sit a while before writing a full review. Hopefully I get around to it.

One thing was now very clear to me. If we continue to be a society of people who are severely under-slept and overworked; who switch tasks every three minutes; who are tracked and monitored by social-media sites designed to figure out our weaknesses and manipulate them to make us scroll and scroll and scroll; who are so stressed that we become hypervigilant; who eat diets that cause our energy to spike and crash; who are breathing in a chemical soup of brain-inflaming toxins every day—then, yes, we will continue to be a society with serious attention problems. But there is an alternative. It’s to organize and fight back—to take on the forces that are setting fire to our attention, and replace them with forces that will help us to heal.

Stolen Focus is an easy read (in the best of ways). It is one of those books with chapters of just the right length where you tell yourself “just one more.” The subject matter—what our self-made environment is doing to us and our attention—is downright horrifying and draws you in. It’s a great book to force self reflection to one’s own relationship with technology.

Towards the end, the book became a bit of a slog to me. While reading the final two chapters (centered around children) and the conclusion I found my reading pace slowing and ended up just having to skim since I didn’t care for that material as much. That certainly doesn’t diminish the rest of the book—especially since the book starts with the best parts.

I would recommend this book to almost anyone.

Our top-down perspective reverses the hierarchy between laws and reality in physics. It leads to a new philosophy of physics that rejects the idea that the universe is a machine governed by unconditional laws and replaces it with the view that the universe is a kind of self-organizing entity, in which all sorts of emergent patterns appear, the most general of which we call the laws of physics. One might say that in top-down cosmology, the laws serve the universe, not the universe the laws. The theory holds that if there is an answer to the great question of existence, it is to be found within this world, not in a structure of principles outside it.

Solid and well-written book detailing the history and evolution of the ideas that built up to what the author calls Stephen Hawking’s final theory.

I was surprised at how much of the book was dedicated to the history of the ideas that Hawking built his theories upon and how little of the book was actually dedicated to the holographic principle. It really left me wanting for more on the latter! In the end I didn’t end up minding it too much since this history set the scene for Hawking’s perspective and approach to problem solving. I also really enjoyed learning about the philosophical approaches of tackling cosmology from the bottom up versus from the top down.

A great book for cosmology enthusiasts and eminently beginner-friendly.