Back to work

...it’s true that I really wanted to make money so that I could quit my job. That’s the only point of having money, to have the freedom of your days, but it’s fundamental.

Michel Houellebecq, Paris Review interview

Life outside of academe means failure

What almost no prospective graduate students can understand is the extent to which doctoral education in the humanities socializes idealistic, naïve, and psychologically vulnerable people into a profession with a very clear set of values. It teaches them that life outside of academe means failure, which explains the large numbers of graduates who labor for decades as adjuncts, just so they can stay on the periphery of academe.

Thomas H. Benton, Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go

What I'm doing now

almost taiwan

Philosophy calls for simple living, not for doing penance, and the simple way of life need not be a crude one.

Seneca, Letters from a Stoic p37

My girlfriend moved into this house a few weeks ago, with the gaps between her going back to her place becoming longer and longer and then ending. We work together, break for meals and eat good food, drink coffee and wine. So far it's an easy way to live, with no fight and no resistance.

One odd thing about the last few months is how contentment has stopped me from needing or even wanting to update this blog.

When I was a lot younger and writing [very badly] all the time it was because I had none of the good things in my life that I have now, and even though I enjoyed writing a lot, it was like drink or drugs, a poor substitute for the thing itself, a coping mechanism rather than a solution.

Great things can come out of sickness, but never mine, and the only way out after butting my head against the wall for so long was to change my life. I quit my job and keep whatever hours I want as long as the work I accept gets done. I work in shorts or a sarong, take breaks and bike rides whenever needed, never face a boss and never need to work when not in the mood. It's as close to idyllic as I could expect with minimal effort or talent.

My ambitions when I was younger mostly concerned lifestyle rather than achievement, but for a long time I focused on the latter and failed. When I gave in and went straight for the thing itself rather than tokens I found that it was easy to achieve and [so far] to maintain. Life is essentially a joke and a game at the moment, although I'm sure it'll get serious again soon enough.

If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to people's opinions, you will never be rich.

Seneca quoting Epicurus, Letters from a Stoic p65

Would you buy a used paradigm from this man?

jaron lanier by allan j. cronin

Good talk by Jaron Lanier at the LSE [link to MP3 on that page] that starts slow and fairly rambling, but touches on a lot of interesting things [Xanadu / the importance of boundaries / the wrong turn at Turing / anti-Singularity / anti-Wikipedia / anti-neo-Maoism / pro-micropayments] as a way to a) sketch out the ideas in his new book, and b) make a case for a new [well…old] technological / economic model for the Internet, essentially based on one copy of each file [Ted Nelson's Xanadu] and micropayments.

Since Larnier was previously on the ‘free’ side of the ‘information wants to be free, but it also wants to be expensive’ debate, it’s an interesting trip he takes the listener on. The bottom line – of this talk, at least – is that micropayments will be embraced when anyone can launch themselves as a creator – already possible – and become part of the system [not yet in place, but presumably something like a bigger version of the iTunes store]. With the right incentives thus in place, people will work harder at being more creative, because they’re being [potentially] rewarded for their efforts and can maybe pay the rent and so on without a day job.

Side note: things are sloooowly getting back on track here, and something like abnormal service will kick back in later this month.

OMG (of limited interest)

Illustration from Listen, Little Man [full text]

This week is the one year anniversary of me quitting my job and going full time freelance. The year has gone very fast, in a blizzard of work and extremely late nights, with all kinds of systems tried and abandoned, essentially a series of mid-life crises that start in a quest for fun, seem to end with the joke being pushed too far, and then start up all over again. Somehow the center holds, I move between the poles of discipline and dissipation, and things do not fall apart.

At some point I'll buckle down and write a post about it, just to get my thoughts together, but right now I'm grateful that I've got no boss, the $ comes in every day and it looks like I'll get away with it for longer.

It can only be a matter of time

Rafael Silks, above and below

Another in a series of superficially depressing posts about giving up dreams that depend on artistic success in terms of recognition + career in the cause of overall liberation and improved mental health.

Your Inner Whining Artist (IWA) is the part of you that tells you you’re a genius waiting to be discovered. If only the big bad world would sit up and recognize your talent, the IWA tells you, all your problems would be over. Audiences and critics would bow at your feet, agents would queue up to represent you, and all the people who’d ever rejected your work would be gorging themselves on humble pie. You just need to get your break, to be discovered. It can only be a matter of time …

Lose Touch with Your Inner Whining Artist

The oldest, deepest dreams may be the most distant and inapplicable now, in spirit and in practice. It's good to keep shedding skins.

Related posts:
A millionaire artist
Throw in the Towel
The myth of 1,000 true fans

Fun for amateurs

I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again — or else you'll be evicted, and that gets old.

Hunter S. Thompson

Sometime in the summer I had two women ask for test prep classes, one for TOEFL and the other for IELTS. On a whim I said I'd teach former for free and I charged the latter my normal fee. Both women were [are] attractive and smart, although the TOEFL one turned out to be more motivated and hard-working, but that may've been because she had to earn her class with homework.

What happened happened very quickly - I realized that I enjoyed teaching the free class far more than the paid one. Doing it for free was fun, there was no pressure, and I was happy when things went over time. It was an interesting experiment, which I continue now by doing some work for free if the person seems like they'll make it worthwhile. Otherwise, I take the money and do the work, but this is a tiny part of my income compared to the editing + reading, hardly enough to keep me in beer. I'd rather keep teaching as a hobby than a living.

Anyway, Isabella, the student in question, is taking her TOEFL this weekend, so an online thanks for the interesting classes and a wish of good luck for Sunday.

A millionaire artist

hugh macleod, read the post

A post a little while back that was just a link to a piece by someone else called Throw in the Towel, about when to give up your dream of being a screenwriter, although it applies well to various other [but by no means all, or even the majority of] creative pursuits with the potential to become paying gigs.

A similar article from another, more hopeful angle, that runs through all the ways to lose again and notes that you can still find yourself if you're doing it for pleasure rather than success - i.e., don't quit the day job.

Hugh MacLeod, who runs a wine business and draws on business cards, has written 40 ideas on how to become more creative. Here's the bullet points for the first 10:

1. Ignore everybody.

2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours.

3. Put the hours in.

4. If your biz plan depends on you sud­denly being “dis­co­ve­red” by some big shot, your plan will pro­bably fail.

5. You are res­pon­si­ble for your own expe­rience.

6. Ever­yone is born crea­tive; ever­yone is given a box of cra­yons in kin­der­gar­ten.

7. Keep your day job.

8. Com­pa­nies that squelch crea­ti­vity can no lon­ger com­pete with com­pa­nies that cham­pion crea­ti­vity.

9. Every­body has their own pri­vate Mount Eve­rest they were put on this earth to climb.

10. The more talen­ted some­body is, the less they need the props.

A lot more here [actually 25% of the full book].

Another law of nature

Poincare Halfplane by Claudio Rocchini

Rudy Rucker has a post on finishing his memoir.

...thanks to the chapter I wrote about society as a kind of computation in The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, I’ve finally came to accept that writers’ sales obey a scaling law that’s technically known as an inverse power law distribution. You’re not getting lackluster book advances because someone is actively screwing you. It’s the scaling law.

The scaling law applies across the board—to the populations of cities, the number of hits on websites, the heights of mountains, the number of friends that people have, the areas of lakes, and the sales of books. There’s no getting around it. Thus, if you’re the hundredth-most popular writer, you earn a hundredth as much as the most popular one. Instead of a million dollars, you get ten thousand bucks. That’s how nature is. It’s not anyone’s fault. [more]

About the same time I read that I saw John Gray's review of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton [which I haven't read], and this passage jumped out:

One episode covers the time the author spent with a career counsellor, “a professional dedicated to finding ways of ensuring that work will be synonymous with fulfilment”. Describing a session with Carol, a private client, “37 years old, a tax lawyer, in charge of a department of 45 in an office near the Bank of England”, de Botton recounts how Carol suddenly stared to sob as the counsellor “watched her with his kindly eyes, and outside, the neighbour’s cat took a stroll round the carp pond”. The counsellor has dedicated his life to the belief that work is a quest for self-enactment, a way of becoming who we really are. The trouble is that, like many of his clients, Carol seems perplexingly diffuse in her interests, and it is not clear whether there is a self concealed somewhere within her that is waiting to be enacted. Worse, it is unclear whether, if such a self does emerge, anyone will have any interest in it. These uncertainties extend to the counsellor himself who, in return for allowing de Botton to sit in on the sessions, asks to be referred to a literary agent who could promote a book on which he has been working. Twelve agents are contacted, and each replies with polite enthusiasm. The book remains unpublished.

Commenting on this episode, de Botton writes: “For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary projects or organisations. It will remain no more than a hope carried over from childhood.” [more]

I don't have these anxieties anymore, but that might be due to a lack of imagination or effort. This week is the first for a long time [four weeks, more?] when too many deadlines to reasonably handle have not been trailing me. I spent today [Monday] sleeping in, worked a little, scootered around town, collected cash from some clients, came home, cooked, read, took out the trash, bought some coffee and settled down for an hour or two's work ahead of a swim, and then came home to this. I don't have a boss, and work in my study or anywhere else I set up my notebook. I know how lucky I am, but I also know my story, although I almost never think about it.

Power laws and the failures necessary for success were also explored in this earlier post: The myth of 1,000 true fans

But what goes on

Jane Birkin & Brian Ferry "In every dream home a heartache"

Sometimes I can only listen to one song all day, again and again and again.

In the process of shedding skins, although it may just be another mid-life crisis / breakdown.

Taiwan is forgiving.

EDIT: Wrote /posted the above late last night, a little drunk after a long bike ride, which is all cool, but in the morning it reads slightly alarming. There's nothing wrong with a small crisis and breakdown now and then, as generally they're just milestones on a path of interesting changes that I observe as much as order. And these days my idea of a breakdown is just the collapse of one system or outlook and the emergence of another. Nothing to fear, and much to enjoy.

This is just the result of physical+mental relief+relaxation at the end of a huge piece of work, waking up at the end the summer with my aims achieved and various attractions laid out in front of me. Now I wait and see what happens next.

El hombre invisible

Always the romantic, Lester [Bangs] viewed [Richard] Meltzer, [Nick] Tosches, and himself as heirs to the Beats. He claimed the mantle of Jack Kerouac. Meltzer he named Neal Cassady, and Tosches became William S. Burroughs. Nobody wanted to be Allen Ginsberg.
Let it Blurt (the life and times of Lester Bangs), Jim DeRogatis, p91

Finally done editing the textbooks and now want to spend as long as possible away from this machine. Just work on paper, in cafes and the garden, or sprawled on the daybed with a fan.

Summer's end

Huge backlog of work almost done, and so the 7am starts and night time finishes are over, and I can start enjoying my life and this city again.

In England the end of summer is always sad, because it's so short and a long, dreary season is all that's ahead until next May, at best. Out here the summer is the worst season, so hot and wet, and the rest of the year is just warm. Also, being just in the tropics, there's barely any change in hrs of daylight. In this way time feels more linear than circular, and it's easy to wake up two or three years later with few points of reference for all the times past.

The Beatles - Within You Without You / Tomorrow Never Knows

The loss of normal responsibility

Ryan (2003) describes the tourist as a ‘displaced’ person: the traveler finds himself in unfamiliar surroundings, without being obliged to daily routines, thus being more susceptible to hedonism and the loss of normal responsibility.

The Roles of Perceived Risk, Travel Motivation and Perception Image on Destination Choice and Travel Satisfaction: A Hierarchical Model Approach, by Wann-Yin Wu, Hsiao-Yun Lu, and Sein Htaik [unpublished]

These last two weeks I've been up at 7am, coffee, starting work at the desk at 7:45 and on / off until at least 8pm, then a swim, then back to work for an hour or two if not out to a pub.

I've got all the usual papers on the go, plus six English for Special Purposes textbooks that are badly and / or half written to try and pull into shape for the local university on six wholly different domains, each with 16 classes of material.

While it's a little intimidating there are moments of pure Zen flow when things get done in the office and then it's out for a meeting or class that flies by full of interest, and money in envelopes, turning up in my account, like drinking water from a fire hose, but able to keep up, and as much as possible I surround myself with friends and / or beautiful women. An empty head can be a happy one.

Also running certain experiments on myself, which I'll get into in a later post. But am generally in a pseudo-manic phase, with all the superficial elements but none of the genuine mania. It's like I'm observing myself from inside and out, unconcerned with what's happening, controlled by forces that are unconscious and probably almost wholly external. A willing puppet of forces unseen, like spastic dancing on mdma, the realization of what just happened coming sometime after the event.

So I have this loss of normal responsibility, because at the most elated moments on the line just at the edge of chaos / order, where all the cool stuff happens, things neither breaking down nor boring, I seem to be able to give up choices beyond i) work hard, ii) exercise / eat right, and iii) try and be nice. The idea of this game being that you set up very simple systems and then release them into the wild, and see what happens over a period of time, making small adjustments all the while and clear in the knowledge that if one system is grasped for too long then failure is assured. The only way to not lose face is to tear off the old one on a regular basis, and not linger on the past.

Knowing when to stop

freelancers operate unconstrained by dress codes and other workplace conventions

Have burned through various systems & schedules in the last seven months of freelancing. The current iteration is to get up at 8am and work through until a bike ride / lunch, then work again until somewhere between 4pm and 6pm, when it's clear that nothing more can done at a decent speed or in good spirit, and then I just quit and forget about work until the next morning.

What's striking to me is how, after all the strange schedules I've tried, the most conventional one, essentially 9-to-5, is the one that feels and works best

Apart from a few months in 1992, I've never had a 9-to-5 job. The novelty has yet to wear off.

Occupational hazards of the self-employed, #1

Never have a job, because if you have a job someday someone will take it away from you and then you'll be unprepared for your old age. For me, it has always been the same every day since the age of 12. I wake up in the morning and I try to figure out how am I going to put bread on the table today? It is the same at 75, I wake up every morning and I think how am I going to put bread on the table today? I am exceedingly well prepared for my old age.

John Cage, via Milton Glaser

For a while I've been letting the work fall into a random plan- but my life in its current iteration seems to lack the property of self-order. Or maybe I'm expecting too much. Every deadline is met and yet I appear to be doing nothing, hanging out in cafes and bars.

To misquote Flaubert, I need to be orderly and disciplined in my working life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wilder the rest of the time.

Interesting properties tend to arise just on the border of order and chaos, while one of my weaknesses is to blindly rush far over either side and hunker down, like an exile.

Panopticon

My wife has a small building downtown, a two up two down that's her atelier and hang out space. It means she has somewhere to go everyday, and it's a nice place.

Because I don't want to clean / decorate, or need to meet clients, I thought about renting a room in a cheap hotel to serve as an office so that I'd have somewhere to go and focus on work, rather than pottering about at home, half dressed and dragging three hours work out into six.

But it turns out that just being outside in cafes for an hour or two each day is enough, as with the world's eyes somewhat upon me there are fewer distractions, and it gets me dressed, albeit in alohas and cut-off jeans - a stereotypically unpresentable early middle-aged foreign man in the tropics.

A cheap room in a hotel looked good until I looked into my heart. I don't need an office with room service, mini-bar, cable TV and massage services on call. As I get older there is a diminishing gap between what I want and what I need, but in places my judgment is still very poor, and the best I can do is to avoid putting myself in certain situations. This is analogous to making all your good choices at the market rather than in the kitchen. Once the potato chips and beer have been purchased I'm already doomed. The simple answer is just not to let them in the house.

Working on this principle I now go to bars three or four nights week.

Matryoshka selves, strange loops and inner voices

I don't do anything in particular to keep my energy level up during the summer. I guess the only thing I do specifically is try not to drink so many cold drinks. And eat more fruits and vegetables. ... I'm not eating these, though, simply to stave off the summer blahs, but because my body just naturally craves them. Being active every day makes it easier to hear that inner voice.

Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, p49

My last day at work was November 31st '08, and it's taken me a while to even get slightly used to the demands [and lack of] of a freelancing, unscheduled life. Meaning that for the first four and a half months or so I colored outside the lines way too often, but the almost total lack of stress and the freedom to follow the dictates of the body inre. food and rest seem to have more than offset the late nights, alcohol and often poor dietary choices. I may be distracted, but never tired.


The last few months have been a fall down the stairs series of surprises and sudden rebirths, like waking up within recursive dreams. So I feel like an entirely different creature than a few weeks ago, never mind a year, all the time sloughing off lives like snake skins, and although I don't feel personally responsible for anything that I may have done, other people are bound to think differently.



Related post:
Strange loops and the pleasure of finding things out

Moving average

The standard freelance work is famine or feast, and while it'd be nice to have things smoother that'd also take away the random and non 9-to-5 nature of the work, and it's in the peaks and troughs that you get the rushes of doing the right thing with regard to getting lots of work / $ and then having enough loose time to bicycle around town at odd hours and do other things.

Below is one way to smooth things out.

Freelancing income, arbitrary units, June 2008 to February 2009

I plotted my freelancing income for the last nine months as regular numbers and as a cumulative average. What's unsurprising is that wild fluctuations are far more likely to come at the start of the process, and the line gets progressively smoother, with even large changes having little effect.

Now halfway through March, which so far has been less busier than February, although I'm due 200 or so pages of a philosophy thesis [book?] from the UK this Friday, which is supposed to be finished by Monday. No doubt it'll be on Derrida and make no sense, whether well written or not. Accepting jobs like this makes me wish I hadn't eaten all my modafinil long ago, but I charge by the hour and it'll take up the slack of the last few days of doing nothing paid.

Still, halfway through March and the income is not where I'd like it to be, and because I'm relatively new to this game and waiting on general economic collapse there are small episodes of panic...but then plotting it out as a moving average makes it that much easier to relax. [That and the ton of work that came in today after this was written, not posted]

Looking at the figure and thinking back to the stoicism of the last post and whether this can be applied more widely. Wild fluctuations of feeling in youth, and then gradually less buffeted by life's ups and downs. One thing against this is that humans are not rational, and specifically not rational accountants of their own well-being. But then the theory of the hedonic treadmill would support the idea of something like a moving average for happiness (I think....my brain fails when it comes to real stretching).

Abstract from a related paper [pdf] with too many numbers for me to really enjoy

There is consent among psychologists and some economists that satisfaction from some events, like income and marriage, is adaptive. We propose a subtle but vital difference: happiness may itself be adaptive. First we present a model to explain the emergence of adaptive stimuli. We test our hypotheses running dynamic happiness regressions based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, the British Household Panel Survey and the Swiss Household Panel. Surprisingly, the autoregressive component is positive and significant in most econometric models considered. We propose that the hedonic treadmill may be mixed with what we call the "scale treadmill".

Deconstructing the Hedonic Treadmill Perez, Ricardo and Bottan (2008)

The utility of slack

tanaka lab

I have a mania for systems, never having given up the childish hope that there's a right way to live and it can be codified and broadly applied. This is not how things appear to be, but appearances can be deceptive, and these things come in waves. On some scales there's chaos, and then you pull back or draw closer and order resolves itself. Further back, closer in, chaos returns, alternating in and out.

My own system broke down either a few weeks or months ago, depending on how the story (fiction) is told, although I didn't really have one to begin with. It was a set of external routines that made little sense on their own, and thus were ready to collapse the moment the external influences (my job) were removed. Left to my own devices I've never stopped being a wayward child, full of hope.

This next stage of the experiment is one that teases out the utility of slack, the need for inefficiency at all points of the system so that the inevitable unexpected stresses can be met without any loss of function. Which means what? More time, energy, money and so on than you 'need'. Just enough is a state of permanent near crisis.

Fun with zero sums

Photo by Ben McLeod

I don't have a job, but I work. Only back two days after the Chinese New Year break, but it certainly seems slower, and this could be, as everyone thinks, the recession kicking in and people cutting back.

It doesn't really bother me. I've seen this several times before. When times are good I work hard and save money. Then when times are bad I relax and spend money.

Of course, I write the above and save it, cycle out for exercise / lunch and drop off a paper at the university, find a stack waiting for me there and then come home and two more by email, plus a book on Kate Chopin. So much for the days of idling.

My original freelance schedule was getting up early and finishing by noon, and although this works it has a flaw, which is that Tainan is really a night time kind of place, and fading at midnight is no good. The bars open at 10pm and don't pick up until after eleven, then go on until four or five, and there are plenty of restaurants and food stalls open until dawn, when a new set opens up for the tai chi crowd.

So, starting this week I put myself on a different schedule, with the loose aim of sleeping at 4am and getting up at eleven. That way any time I go to bed before four is an early night, and as long as I start work at noon then all's right with the world.