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New Year’s Resolutions are (still) Stupid.

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment

Before we get started, I should mention that New Year’s Resolutions are still a stupid tradition. I don’t feel this way out of an objection to self improvement, of course, as much as from the belief that if you’re unwilling to effect a change in your life on December 31, you’re probably going to be every bit as unwilling to make that same change on January 1.

More often that not a New Year’s Resolution is an excuse to put off trying something new until some time in the future (how about January?), and the rate at which we fail on our resolutions is, at this point, a cliché.

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Publically stating your goals for the year seems like a good way to increase your accountability. In reality, the act of making the statement usually suffices to let your friends and loved ones know what you’d like to improve in yourself, and that’s about where it ends. With a New Year’s Resolution, a dramatic act of proclamation replaces the slow and deliberate effort required to modify behavior.

I’ve been fairly outspoken about this, which is why it will probably come as a surprise that I’m about to encourage all of you to make a resolution this year.

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Most of these so called resolutions are silly, nebulous things. “I’m going to give up carbohydrates.” “I’m going to exercise more.” “I’m going to eat more cheese.” They’re difficult to quantify, continuous challenges that take significant commitment in order to yield any palpable benefit. On the other hand there are a number of discrete actions, things we only need to do once or twice, that fit more squarely with the nature of The Resolution and still improve our quality of life.

And so, in 2016, you should go someplace alone.

I don’t mean the entire year. Or a month. Or even necessarily a week. For most people even a few days will probably be a huge shock. What I do mean is alone. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to hike into a Wildnerness and stay there for a while (although that does sound nice). It means that you should take some time to travel and disengage from your status quo.

Alone does mean don’t bring anyone with you. Don’t go visit friends or family. Leave town, and don’t take the computer. Turn off the phone. Let an auto-reply tell your world here that you’ll be right back.

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Take a few days away from work and from family. Away from the cell phone and emails, and remember what it is you like to do. Bring a book or a journal. Bring a camera or a sketchbook. Or don’t bring anything.

If you disconnect entirely, if you can be completely selfish for even a few days, you can fill your days with exclusively what you want to do. You’ll remember a lot about what really makes you happy. You might even learn something new. Don’t feel pressure to come back and tell stories, or put pictures on Instagram. Just go and be with yourself for a little bit.

You might remember that you like to paint. Or write. Or that you want to exercise because it makes you feel better, not because you looked frumpy in the hot tub at Christmas. You might even find that eating more kale is something that you’re really passionate about.

The only changes that will stick are the ones that you really want to make. The first step is remembering what they are.

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How Was The Skiing, Really?

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

This time of year ski conditions tend to be pretty variable from day to day. Where last week it might have been twenty below and windy, tomorrow it could rain to 8,000 feet. The snowpack tends to be a little thin, and weather in the valley is frequently wildly different from weather in the mountains. As the season is starting to ramp up, the quality of the skiing is kind of a crapshoot.

Because of this, most water cooler and brewery conversations starting around Columbus Day John Lennon’s birthday navigate toward whether you’ve been skiing, where you went, and how it was up there. This is a highly subjective kind of conversation. Some people are only interested in deep powder, others just like being out in the mountains, and others allow their definition of “good skiing” to shift with the tone of the season. If it’s been nothing but breakable crust for a month, after all, a non-breakable crust starts to look pretty good.

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More often than not, it seems like people feel a need to justify the time and effort they spent to go find snow, which leads to palpable inflation in the quality of the skiing between the time your roommate took off her boots and the time that you met her for a pint. If you’re looking for a reliable story, you’re better off asking your grandfather about the biggest fish he ever caught than your buddy how the skiing was on Halloween.

What’s interesting about these early season conversations is how much superlative language is used to describe skiing that tends to be subjectively marginal. In fact there seems to be an inverse relationship to how fantastic the reports of skiing are, and how good the skiing really was.

So how was the skiing, really? Here are some helpful hints.

“Bro, so epic.” – No it wasn’t. Aside from being categorically wrong, it probably didn’t even meet any of today’s lax standards. The powder was not over their head. They probably hit a bunch of rocks. This person is really just trying to show that they’ve been out already, and have insider knowledge that you, the patient skier who approaches skiing by the season or by the lifetime, do not. Don’t sweat it.

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Epic, bro.

“It was awesome up high.” – It was pretty good, after a terrifying drive and a long walk. Worthwhile? Probably. The best skiing since last February? Certainly not. The season’s just getting going, but if you’ve got a day to spend sniffing around for a turn or two, head to the alpine!

“Not too bad, actually.” – Right here in an honest answer. Hit any rocks up there? You know it. Buried trees and willow? Yep. Carry the skis for a while before even putting them on? Probably. But way back there, the skiing was nice. Maybe they found an inch or two of soft snow on a rain crust. Maybe they found a few hundred feet of sastrugi to lap. Whatever they found, it scratched the itch for Thanksgiving turns.

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The dog prefers more of a supervisory role.

“It’s good! Let’s get out.” – No hyperbole here. Just an honest assessment that if there’s skiing at all, it’s probably a good way to spend some time. If it was all just breakable crust, this person would tell you about it. So go find your skins, change the batteries in your beeper, and try to get all your crap at least in one place. The next time this person calls, you’ll want to be ready to go.

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How was the skiing? Just check Instagram! That’s sure to be reliable.

“Pretty fair.” – You blew it. The casual understatement. The humble nonchalance. This person had a damn good day, and you probably should have gone when they invited you. They know it’s a long season and it’ll be filled with good days to come, so they’re not going to rub it in. But let there be no doubt, this person found the goods, and probably only hit a couple of rocks.

At the end of the day, though, the only way you can be sure is to go out and see for yourself. Who knows? It might even be ok.

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We Shouldn’t Increase Minimum Wage

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

I used to drive kind of far to get to work. A couple of years ago I had a ten mile commute with fourteen stop lights. There were two different ways to get from my house to the office, but they each had fourteen lights and at rush hour it took about 45 minutes to drive. In Missoula, Montana, the little mountain oasis, I had a commute that wasn’t all that different than if I lived in suburban Chicago.

Driving begets driving, and as long as I was behind the wheel it was easy to run out to the box stores on Reserve Street after work or drive someplace for lunch. I went through about two tanks of gas a week, and in the height of my last summer at that job it cost more than $4 a gallon to fill the tank.

Twice a week I stood at the pump, and as the meter spun frantically I did the quick mental math to calculate how many hours of my life I was pumping into my Ford Ranger. It didn’t matter if I’d finished a project at work, landed a new client, or just played flash games all day, a tank of gas cost me about two hours behind a desk.

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I didn’t take this picture.

There’s a lot about that anecdote that is classically American, and a lot if it I consider bad form. But the worst part is that the foundation of our work infrastructure lies in our time, rather than what we do with that time. It tells us that we live in a system that doesn’t care what you’re doing, as long as you’re doing it at your desk.

When you are hired at a new job, conventional wisdom gives that your employer is purchasing the work that you will produce during your tenure. Conventional wisdom here is wrong. Your boss is actually purchasing 2,080 hours of your life each year, give or take, and betting that you will use that time to produce at least your salary in value.

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or this one.

Of course, this assumes that you’re working a white collar job as a software engineer or something, but the fight to increase minimum wage factors into this in a big way as well. A minimum hourly base pay is, essentially, a safety net within a free market that all but guarantees that certain inscrutable employers will exploit their workforce at any opportunity. Forget for a moment that it’s not working (hence the national debate on raising the minimum wage), and remember that this position has a point. Workers in industrial America had a pretty rough go of it.

But the existence of minimum wage legislation is a necessary evil within a fundamentally flawed way at approaching work. It encourages slow, inefficient progress and allows the (arguably obsolete) 40 hour 9-5 grind to kill our fellow countrymen slowly over a 40 year career as an insurance salesman.

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or this one.

Advances in technology increase our capacity to work effectively at an exponential rate. In most industries you will not be expected to churn out work at that same accelerating rate, the same way you’ll probably be fired if you start showing up to work increasingly infrequently. The result is that there’s a tremendous amount of time wasted in the average office. Your employer pays for it financially, and you pay for it with something a lot more valuable.

Even the kinds of jobs that tend to pay hourly (and low) wages place value and ownership on the person, not the work. A job on a construction site or a fast food restaurant should compensate employees in terms at least of shifts, if not as a function of production.

If the difference appears mostly semantic, you’re not wrong. Payment by the hour or payment by the shift is basically just a different breakdown of the same job. But writing a job description to a task, rather than the time it might take to do it is a significant shift in thinking. The way we define pay informs what we value as a culture, and most of us work in a system that incentivizes being inefficient with the one thing we can’t make more of.
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