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Acedia: The ADHD of the Middle Ages

December 30, 2011 / Klint Finley

John Plotz writes for The New York Times:

By some miracle, you set aside a day to tackle that project you can’t seem to finish in the office. You close the door, boot up your laptop, open the right file and . . . five minutes later catch yourself thinking about dinner. By 10 a.m., you’re staring at the wall, even squinting at it between your fingertips. Is this day 50 hours long? Soon, you fall into a light, unsatisfying sleep and awake dizzy or with a pounding headache; all your limbs feel weighed down. At which point, most likely around noon, you commit a fatal error: leaving the room. I’ll just garden for a bit, you tell yourself, or do a little charity work. Hmmm, I wonder if my friend Gregory is around?

This probably strikes you as an extremely, even a uniquely, modern problem. Pick up an early medieval monastic text, however, and you will find extensive discussion of all the symptoms listed above, as well as a diagnosis. Acedia, also known as the “noonday demon,” appears again and again in the writings of the Desert Fathers from the fourth and fifth centuries. Wherever monks and nuns retreated into cells to labor and to meditate on matters spiritual, the illness struck.

New York Times: Their Noonday Demons, and Ours

(via Adam Gurri)

Acedia was also considered a precursor to the deadly sin of sloth.

Is Getting Paid to Do What You Love All It’s Cracked Up to Be?

December 27, 2011 / Klint Finley

Drawing on stairs

David McRaney writes:

The Misconception: There is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what you love.

The Truth: Getting paid for doing what you already enjoy will sometimes cause your love for the task to wane because you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feelings.

If you pay people to complete puzzles instead of paying them for being smart, they lose interest in the game. If you pay children to draw, fun becomes work. Payment on top of compliments and other praise and feeling good about personal achievement are powerful motivators, but only if they are unexpected. Only then can you continue to tell the story that keeps you going; only then can you still explain your motivation as coming from within.

Consider the story you tell yourself about why you do what you do for a living. How vulnerable is that tale to these effects?

You Are Not So Smart: The Overjustification Effect

Interesting stuff. I wonder if this is part of why self-employed people are happier even though self-employment is far more stressful than working for hire?

(Photo by Bo Nielsen)

3 Reads on the Financial Industry

November 30, 2011 / Klint Finley

Wall Street Unoccupied as 200,000 Job Cuts Bring ‘Darkest Days’. Schadenfreude, especially considering:

The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen

Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress

But the level of dislocation is disconcerting, especially as it continues to demonstrate how jobless this “recovery”” really is – even the bankers are out of work.

Where Do Companies Get Ideas for New Robots? They Look at Areas with Lots of Manual Labor

November 7, 2011 / Klint Finley

Cup of Robots

Julia Kirby writes:

I heard about other applications — the use of robots to inspect sewers for damage, to automate warehouse operations, to harvest crops in fields. The list goes on. In response to one would-be entrepreneur’s question, “How do you come up with a good idea to turn into a business?” a panel of CEOs had no end of answers.

Charles Grinnell, who leads Harvest Automation, said simply: look at places where there is still a lot of manual labor. When his team did that, he says they narrowed things down to 15 very viable product ideas. Deborah Theobald, CEO of Vecna Technologies, put it this way: “In whatever field you work in—ours is healthcare—you see what the issues are. If as you look around, robots are on your mind, you see the applications everywhere.”

Harvard Business Review: Seeing Robots Everywhere

(via Race Against the Machine)

Artwork by hobvias sudoneighm

New Survey “Proves” There’s a Generation Gap Between Workers

November 2, 2011 / Klint Finley

The Globe and Mail covers a new survey of Canadian workers of different ages:

The millennial generation, workers in their 20s, are most likely to want a job that offers quick advancement, congenial co-workers and fun.

Generation X workers, in their 30s and early 40s, put the most value on balance between hours at work and their personal lives.

Baby boomers, between 45 and 60, are most likely to say they want to continue to grow and use their skills on the job and get clear information from management on what’s expected from them.

Mature workers, over 60, are actually more concerned with advancement than boomers or generation X.

Globe and Mail: Study of workplace priorities highlights generation gap

Does this show a generation gap? I suppose it depends on what you mean by “generation gap.” It could just show that people at different stages of their careers value different things. People just starting their careers want to find a job they like that has room for advancement. People further along in their careers, who are more likely to have families, are concerned with work/life balance. Workers older still start to be interested in developing skills and advancement again, as they look towards paying their kids’ way through college and saving for retirement. Maybe that’s a “generation gap.” Maybe it’s just a normal, natural cycle.

The article also mentions that older workers are more likely to value challenging work than millennials, while millennials value a “fun” workplace. That could indicate a shift in maturity as workers get older, but it’s probably worth noting that part of what makes work “fun” is challenge. It could be that older workers just have a better idea of what makes work rewarding. Though it is possible that there’s a generational difference between the prioritization of work and fun (there’s been some interesting research about which one is more motivating).

Generation Catalano: Between Generation X and the Millennials

October 31, 2011 / Klint Finley

catalano

Doree Shafrir writes for Slate:

I was born during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, a one-term administration remembered mostly for the Iran hostage crisis, the New York City blackout, and stagflation. The Carter babies—anyone born between his inauguration in January 1977 and Reagan’s in January 1981—are now 30 to 34, and, like Carter himself, the weirdly brilliant yet deeply weird born-again Christian peanut farmer, this micro-generation is hard to pin down. We identify with some of Gen X’s cynicism and suspicion of authority—watching Pee-Wee Herman proclaim, “I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel,” will do that to a kid—but we were too young to claim Singles and Reality Bites and Slacker as our own (though that didn’t stop me from buying the soundtracks). And, while the proud alienation of the Gen X worldview doesn’t totally sit right, we certainly don’t yearn for the Organization Man-like conformity that the Millennials seem to crave. […]

But maybe we’re not the only ones who feel unmoored. After explaining the gist of the piece to a 29-year-old friend over email, she responded: “I feel like I’m especially without generation because I’m not quite a Carter baby but not really a Millennial either. … I feel like Noreen, who is only two years younger than me, is of a slightly different generation, which seems crazy! But it feels true.” Her email was a classic Generation Catalano move: dancing near the spotlight, and then dancing with herself.

Slate: Generation Catalano

(via Amanda Sledz)

I hate the name, but I can identify with this, although I missed the Carter administration by about 10 months. Some measures of when Generation X place its end as late as 1981, while the Millennial generation starts as early as the late 70s. There’s a lot of overlap.

I’ve previously generations aren’t really that different from each other, but I get really annoyed at articles like this that refer to young people’s desire for a better life as a “sense of entitlement” (especially since the author of that article clearly didn’t even read the article he was replying to). I was lucky enough to graduate college in 2003 as the economy was recovering from the dotcom bust, so I was able to establish a career and avoid many of the long-term effects of the current recession on young people. But those effects are real, they’re worse for the millennials than most and they have every right to be upset about it.

Degree Inflation as Predicted in 1975

July 7, 2011 / Klint Finley

Andrew McAfee points to this passage from economist Thomas Sowell’s Race and Economics in 1975:

The widespread use of high school diplomas and college degrees as employment screening devices by employers has led to a belief that increasing education will increase opportunities, and/or that the reason for escalating educational “requirements” is a corresponding increase in the knowledge necessary to perform a given job. The well-organized education lobbies exploit these beliefs to the fullest. In fact, however, educational ”requirements” are often used by employers who are wholly unconcerned about the specific content of the education, but who regards a diploma or degree as an indication of the job applicant’s willingness to persevere and his grades as a rough index of his mental capability. The educational requirements are a hurdle which eliminates enough job applicants to narrow the employer’s choice down to manageable proportions. By making it possible for more young people to go over a given hurdle, society also makes it necessary for employers to raise the hurdle in order to weed out the same proportion of applicants. The result has been an upward spiral of credentials and requirements with more and more young people being forced to endure more and more years of education that they do not want in order to qualify for jobs where the education is not needed. As more and more jobs have been put beyond the reach of those without the necessary credentials, whether or not such individuals can do the work itself, those ethnic minorities who are not traditionally oriented toward formal education are particularly hard hit.

McAfee adds: “Higher education has become much more expensive, student loans now account for more debt in America than do credit cards, and a lot of diploma mills (by which I do not just mean for-profit universities) have sprung up.”

Andrew McAfee: Education and Employment: Some Thoughts Against the Conventional Wisdom

I would add to the list of woes the sorry amount of actual learning that seems to go on in universities.

McAfee also discusses briefly potential solutions.

Commuting is Making Us Fat and Miserable

June 7, 2011 / Klint Finley

traffic jam

People who commute more than 45 minutes a day are more likely to get divorced, according to a Swedish study. And that’s just one of many studies indicating that commuting ruins lives that Slate’s Annie Lowrey shares in a recent story on the subject. “The joy of living in a big, exurban house, or that extra income leftover from your cheap rent? It is almost certainly not worth it,” she writes.

Long commutes are associated with neck and back pain, high levels of stress, obesity and a high level of dissatisfaction with one’s life and work.

Despite everything, commuting time has only increased over the past 50 years. The number of “extreme commuters,” who commute 90 minutes each way, has doubled since 1990 to 3.5 million. Why? The number one reason seems to be housing costs. People tend to want to buy larger houses, even if that adds significant time to their commute. According to Lowrey, economists have been warning us since at least the 60s that we tend not to take the value of our time into account when we buy houses far from work.

It’s not always that easy, though. I don’t own a home, so I have more flexibility in where I live. But back when I was doing IT contracting I would work in one place for a couple-few months, then move on to the next gig. I worked in one northwestern suburb of Portland (Hillsboro) for six months, then in a southwestern suburb for 3 or 4 months (Tualitin) and then in a northeastern suburb (Gresham) for a month or so. Eventually I found a full-time job in the city. I could have tried moving closer to that workplace, but my wife worked on the other side of town. And really, I could have been laid off at any time and had to start commuting to another corner of the metro area. Living centrally (close-in southeast) helped – my commute was never more than about 45 minutes (by car) each way. But not everyone can live in the middle of a city.

Slate: Your Commute Is Killing You.

(photo by epSos.de)

Top 5 Most Common Regrets of the Dying

June 2, 2011 / Klint Finley

Bonnie Ware spent many years working in palliative care, nursing patients in the final weeks of their lives. She shares what she says were the five most common regrets of the dying.

Dying by Alex Grey

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard. (“This came from every male patient that I nursed,” Ware wrote).

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Bonnie Ware: Regrets of the Dying

Generation Lost: The Unemployment Crisis Among Young People

May 17, 2011 / Klint Finley

Meghan O’Halloran was one of those who had her career derailed by the timing of her graduation.
She left Cornell University with a degree in architecture and six summers of internships at top firms in New York, Milan and London.

“I thought getting a job would be a snap,” she said.

But after graduating in December 2008, just as job losses in the economy were reaching a high point, she was confronted with a very cold reception into the labor force.

She followed her boyfriend to China for a year, and found architecture work plentiful in the building boom there. But when she returned home at the end of 2009, not much had improved, and no one was hiring.

“I’ve applied for temporary work,” she said. “The answer is always the same, ‘We wish we could hire you.'”
She’s decided to leave behind her hopes for a career as an architect and has started her own business making custom fabric, carpets and furniture.

Money: The Great Recession’s lost generation

The kids mentioned in this article seem relatively lucky. They have jobs, or businesses. What’s only hinted at in the article is trickle down unemployment – as college graduates settle for jobs for which no college degree is required, it makes life more difficult for those without degrees.

Technoccult

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