Fernando Gros's Blog, page 8

The Rise Of The Studio

Does anyone even work in an office anymore? The pandemic forced many people to work from home. Workers are starting to return to offices, but the shape of work and expectations around it have shifted.

Every few years, the world of work changes. Skills that were once the domain of experts become widespread. Typing, word processing, managing spreadsheets and databases, and creating presentation slides once required specialist training.

Now it’s video. Workers around the world learnt to perform on camera and became video streamers.

The trend for responsibilities and required skills continuing to expand is sometimes called job-creep. With every round of cost-cutting, productivity enhancements, and consultancy-firm-led restructuring, three jobs become two and everyone’s commitments broaden and grow more complex.

But there’s another way of looking at this. At least for the highest paid workers, jobs are becoming more creative.

And nobody understands this quite like Apple.

From Office To Studio

For a long time, working meant using Microsoft Office. It’s no coincidence that when Microsoft turned computing into a serious business (rather than the domain of geeks, nerds, and hobbyists), they relied on the word Office to add gravitas to their suite of programmes.

But it wasn’t just office workers who used Office. Students, writers of all types, engineers and scientists found themselves relying on the Office products as well.

We stopped calling that space in our home where we did some work – or reading or thinking – a den or study. We started calling it a home office.

Office was the aspirational term for a place where you did serious stuff.

Now Apple has released its most powerful consumer computer. Apple didn’t call it the Mac Office. They called it the Mac Studio.

Names like this don’t appear in a vacuum. They’re the result of mountains of research into consumers and cultural trends. Apple understands how to trade on their association with creative industries to help make their products better.

And they also know that the aspirational vision for a workplace has shifted. Now, everyone wants to work in a studio.

Studios are cool.

From We Work To Work From Home

A kind of recent nostalgia permeates WeCrashed, the Apple TV+ adaptation of WeWork’s spectacular rise and fall. As Katy Perry’s anthemic song Roar transports us back into the middle of the last decade, we’re reminded how innovative the idea of co-working spaces once felt.

In a way, it was an expensive version of “sitting in a cafe with your laptop”. But WeWork managed to make it feel revolutionary – as if making your workday feel more like hanging out at a college library would solve our workplace woes. Eye of the Tiger indeed!

But, in a more subtle way, a revolution was happening. Increased computing power and cloud services meant workers didn’t need to be tethered to a desk. And companies were less willing to provide a permanent space to every employee anyway.

This coincided with the mainstreaming of skills once associated with creative fields. Presentations became more elaborate. Infographics emerged. Use of video became commonplace. And an explosion in new digital work tools made it easier to personalize your work experience.

Moreover, people started wanting to work in spaces that felt more “creative”. WeWork’s claim that they were going to “elevate the world’s consciousness” became a punchline as the company’s value collapsed. But many workers’ consciousness, or at least their expectations, grew.

What most people want from their workspace now is an aesthetic we associate more with a studio than an office. They want something that feels freer, sparks ideas, but also welcomes them as a unique individual.

Post-Industrial Creativity

The office of the ʼ80s and ʼ90s was like the shadow of the Henry Ford-inspired industrial society. The approach to work, division of labour, and even the philosophy of productivity was a reflection of industrial economics.

Since the mid-ʼ90s, we’ve been living in a transition – call it postmodernity, or post-industrial, if you like. Work has become networked. Job descriptions are less clear cut. Responsibilities are shared. Agility is prized. Creativity is required.

For the fortunate few, those with the best paid jobs in the best fields, this way of working is not only rewarding but also meaningful. This trend is explored in more depth in Carolyn Chen’s book Eat Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion In Silicon Valley.

The studio reflects this new philosophy of work. Not everyone can afford the new Mac Studio. But those that can are probably also enjoying a quiet revolution in the shape of work itself.

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Is Personal Branding Just Bullshit?

I’ve written about personal brands before. A few times, in fact. In 2016, Debbie Millman gave a Creative Live course entitled “A Brand Called You.” I’m one of over 51,000 people who’ve taken that course. It changed the way I present myself to the world.

So, I was a little surprised to hear Debbie rip into the idea of personal brands during recent podcast interviews with Kara Swisher on Sway and with Elise Loehnen on Pulling The Thread.

What’s Wrong With Personal Branding

Debbie made four arguments against the idea of personal brands. First, brands are something we create for things. Second, the idea of a personal brand is an oxymoron. Third, personal brands can limit your growth. Finally, developing your character is more important than developing your brand.

These points perfectly sum up the best criticisms I’ve heard about personal branding. So, it’s worth looking at them in a little more detail.

Brands Are Complex Creations

Think of any famous brand – Apple, Coke, Nike – and there will be an army of marketing people whose job it is to safeguard the “brand architecture”. This means saying no, over and over again, to many requests to use the logo or associate the brand with all sorts of “opportunities”.

The NASA brand handbook is a remarkable example of this. It shows how the famous NASA logo will be displayed on everything from business cards to space shuttles and every variation of vehicle, equipment, or stationery in between.

Corporate brands can do this because they serve a very limited set of objectives. Coke isn’t trying to have a well-rounded life. It’s a soft drink. Coke exists to deliver a return on investment to the brand’s shareholders.

The tools of branding (and marketing, more generally) help companies communicate what a product promises and how it will deliver on that promise. Competing for attention and loyalty in a society where people have many different tastes and points of view is hard. Doing this coherently, in many markets, with thousands of employees and millions of consumers, is staggeringly difficult.

That’s why the companies with the strongest brands have a marketing department that doesn’t just “make ads”, but also thinks about branding and marketing at all levels – especially in the development and design of new products and services.

Bringing Your Brand To Life

Whenever you set a goal for yourself, you’re trying to will a fictional version of yourself into existence. You have a “this is me now” moment, when you shift some part of who you are. You change career, or take up a serious hobby, or relocate, or alter some other fundamental part of your identity.

The concept of a personal brand is one way to articulate this.

You’re obviously not like a bottle of Coke. But you still have a message. You make promises. And you want to be noticed for the ways you’re different and unique.

Just like editorial calendars or kanban boards or other things we borrow from the business world, branding is a toolset we can apply to the extent that it’s useful for us.

Let me say that again: branding is just a tool.

Personal Brands Are Oxymorons

As a kid, I was fascinated by family crests. Being an immigrant kid growing up with a third culture, I was always wanting to better understand the stories my parents told about who we were and where we came from. I thought surely we must have had a family crest once upon a time. Then I saw an ad in a comic for a company that would send you your family crest. So I got a postal order. A couple of months later, it turned up – a few photocopied sheets of paper in a blue plastic folder. The image and text felt so generic. No one in the family wanted to keep it.

But crests were a thing. As were family seals.

In Japan, they still are. The Hanko, or personal stamp, is required for a lot of official documents. And many families still cherish their Mon, which is like a family crest. The widely recognized Mitsubishi logo, the three points, is derived from the Mon of two families involved in founding the original company.

People don’t just identify with symbols. They use symbols to define themselves in striking and non-negotiable ways. Think about tattoos.

Your Fashion Is Your Brand

The clothes you wear might be a less indelible version of it, but nonetheless a powerful marker of how you define yourself and perform your role in society (as you understand it). This is true whether or not you think of yourself as “into fashion”, and, if anything, it will become more important as you age.

Personal branding means being intentional about self-presentation. It’s part of a larger decision to design your identity rather than just accept the roles and fashions and social norms that have been handed to you.

Sure, your clothes don’t say everything about you. There used to a be a cliche that you could know everything about a man by looking at his shoes and his watch. That feels laughable.

And yet, your clothes say something. So does the way you use email. Or the kinds of meetings you host. Or the story you tell about the life you’ve lived.

You can choose to improvise your way through all of those. Or you can choose to bring some coherence to them. To make them reflect a core set of values you aspire to.

Thought of like this, which I’ll admit uses the word “brand” more metaphorically and less literally, a personal brand is not an obvious oxymoron. Rather, it’s a set of choices.

Personal Brands Are Cages

Yes, Debbie is right. A personal brand can be limiting. This is true of any identity you draw for yourself or any set of beliefs you have about who you are and what you do.

This can also be true of goals you set for yourself. Every goal you’re working towards right now was set by yourself sometime in the past.

“The trouble with setting goals is that you’re constantly working toward what you used to want.”
– Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments

We change, we evolve, we grow. We also contradict ourselves and act inconsistently. Sometimes, we’re hypocritical. Mostly, we’re just trying to work things out as we go.

And yet we want to be “true to ourselves”. We hope our values shine through in what we do. We want to be admired, respected, or in some other way well regarded. Most of all, we want to be loved.

Somehow, we have to try and tell our story.

Character Is More Important

Unlike today, the ʼ90s and early 2000s were a time when ethical issues didn’t dominate the daily news cycle. Sure, there were controversies. But the so-called “Culture Wars” were only of interest to people with the most extreme religious and political views. Companies tried to avoid wading into moral issues. Politics didn’t dominate every conversation.

It’s in this context that the idea of a personal brand evolved. This was a context where you had to curate how you presented yourself carefully, so as not to “give people a reason to dislike you”. The corporate world, and much of the creative world as well, was apolitical. Say too much about your beliefs and you risked being labelled moralistic or judgmental. Best to “stick to business”.

We’ve now come to prize authenticity far more. We openly celebrate our identity, our history and other aspects of what makes us unique.

We’ve come to expect something similar from brands as well. Apple, for example, devotes almost as much attention to its commitment to diversity and sustainability as it does to showing off how amazing its devices are. Those ethical commitments contribute as much to making the products cool as the tech does.

Ethics are no longer avoided. They’re embraced.

Considering this, Debbie is right to say working on your character is more important than working on your brand. I agree. But it’s not an either/or decision because the world has changed since Tom Peters first wrote about personal brands back in 1997.

Personal Branding 3.0

I’d like to bring this back to the problem that initially inspired me to consider creating a personal brand: the anxiety that comes with trying to introduce yourself and your work. This anxiety is, of course, amplified for those of us who “make things for the internet” because of all the ways we can be misunderstood.

Personal branding is a tool to make handling the “so, what do you do?” question a little easier. It helps us address the “trust equation.”

Perhaps the language of personal brand isn’t quite it. “Artistry” feels better to me. But, for many people, that’s not “relatable”. “Identity” is another contender. But that now feels reserved for specific aspects of who we are.

Bringing a robust set of tools to the question of defining what we believe, how we articulate our beliefs and explain what we do, and how we approach our communications, all feels like a good idea. Maybe personal branding is a good way to describe this. Or perhaps we need a new word. I’m not sure.

Whatever we call it, we still need something like that.

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How To Read More Books

This year, I’ve been writing a short review of each of the five or six books I’ve read in the last month. These have proved popular, and many of you have written to ask how to find more time to read, how to find interesting books, and how to focus on reading in this digital age.

Why Reading More Books Matters

Twyla Tharp said it best. “The books you read and the people you meet are the best predictor of who you will become.”

Books are ideas, and worlds, and patience and concentration.

I don’t want to diss digital technology. But half an hour rage-scrolling through Twitter, or Instagram, or TikTok isn’t the same as half an hour reading a book. There’s no point pretending it is.

If you’re reading this, then you already know that. Or at least your intuition is suggesting it might be. You want to make more time to read, and you want to read more broadly, because you want the kind of experience you’re not getting from staring at social media or online videos.

How To Make More Time To Read

Sadly, you can’t make more time. We all get dealt 24 hours in the day. To find the time for something, you have to take it away from something else.

Most people spend over two hours a day on social media. Cut that by a third, and you’ve got enough time to read an extra book a week. That can be a radical difference.

We can also make smaller, more personal changes if we take a serious look at how we spend our time. Maybe we spend a little less time watching TV or listing to podcasts (both of which seem to get longer with each year).

We can also find time by rethinking how we transition from one task to another. The time we can’t account for often exists in the space between tasks and chores.

I keep the books I’m reading all over the house. It’s not my family’s favourite habit. But there’s a book near the kitchen counter so I can read while waiting for something to cook or after washing up. There’s a book on the sofa so I have an alternative to reaching for the TV remote. And yes, there’s always a book in the bathroom!

When you pick up a book, commit to a minimum amount of time. Reading for an hour sounds great. But that’s a big commitment. It’s easy to get restless or frustrated or to procrastinate. Five minutes doesn’t sound like much. But that’s a page or two, and once you’re reading, you might want to read some more!

I do most of my reading in 20-minute bursts. These happen throughout the day – over morning coffee, after lunch, while cooking dinner, or late at night. Sometimes, I have longer reading spells. Rainy weekend afternoons lend themselves to that. But generally, regular reading snacks suit me better than marathon book banquets.

How To Find Books

When I first got on the internet, I was still a student at theological college. I was delighted to discover a lot of professors around the world posted their reading lists for courses. Whenever I had a challenging essay, I’d go searching for reading lists for similar topics. These would then form the basis for my own reading and bibliography for essays.

Earlier this year, I did a writing workshop with Sabrina Orah Mark, the author of Wild Milk. Sabrina posts a reading list for all her workshops, and you might recognise some of the books I read in January and February from those lists. Many workshop leaders post similar lists to give an insight into the tone of their workshop.

Podcasts can, sometimes, be a good source for books to read. Unfortunately, a lot of interview podcasts just feature the same famous authors promoting their latest work. I don’t feel inclined to read another book from Seth Godin, Steven Pinker, or Malcom Gladwell. But some podcasts, like On Being, Conversations with Tyler, Longform, and The Knowledge Project, often have interesting guests with fresh voices, and they also discuss books that influenced them.

Seasonal recommended lists can be good. The Financial Times does them very well. Just skimming through The New York Review of Books will give you a world of reading suggestions. The New Yorker has a well-curated short list of recommendations each week, while New York Magazine creates excellent topic-specific lists.

I’d advise against “asking the internet”. Too often, open requests for books to read become opportunities for people to show off by citing the longest, hardest, most famous, or most obscure book they’ve read. Ask the internet, and you’ll be told you just “have to” read Infinite Jest, War and Peace, or Ulysses.

How To Get Books

I buy almost all my books. Yes, that’s an outrageously expensive way to do it. I try to buy good second-hand copies, or order direct from publishers or small stores when I can. If the Kindle version of a book is cheaper, then I buy that.

Most of the books I buy get revisited eventually. Poetry collections almost demand to be re-read. Sometimes just picking up an old book brings its story or ideas back to life. And there are few better impromptu gifts for friends and family than a book you’ve enjoyed.

If you have a good local bookstore, it’s worth developing a relationship with them. They’ll usually be willing to order in books for you, and some, like Om Books in Delhi and Bookazine in Hong Kong, have great loyalty programmes.

Good bookstores often give great recommendations. Some do handwritten cards from staff highlighting books they’ve enjoyed. A few stores, like Hatchards in London, have curated subscription services. After signing up and chatting with a member of staff, they send you a book every month tailored to your interests.

Libraries are, of course, a great resource. In most countries, they will order in almost any book you request. We should all support libraries because they are increasingly under threat from government cutbacks.

Finally, a lot of books are available online for free. Recently, I’ve been re-reading ancient European philosophy, and most of those books are available via university sites, like the wonderful MIT Classics archive, which has been online since 1994.

Read Shorter Books

No, I’m not joking. The average bestseller is 80,000 to 100,000 words. That’s a long book. Same for a lot of the highly recommended, serious non-fiction books. That’s a big time investment if you’re trying to ramp up how many books you read.

It’s also a big investment if your goal is to be introduced to lots of new ideas and voices. A lot of my favourite novels and the non-fiction books that changed my life are a lot shorter.

Also, poetry collections are usually shorter. The same goes for a lot of contemporary memoir and other more experimental writing.

Of course, you’ll end up reading a range of books of different lengths. But, to start with, if you focus on reading shorter books, you’ll have a feeling of accomplishment from finishing more and enjoying a wider selection of authors and reading experiences.

Read More Than One Book At A Time

Typically, I read three or four books at the same time. This doesn’t cause any confusion. After all, you have multiple conversations with multiple people doing the day, and you don’t confuse those.

Of course, you can push it too hard. Reading very similar books at the same time can be confusing. It’s often better to balance it out. Mix serious with fun. Or straightforward with experimental.

And sometimes, a book is best enjoyed to the exclusion of others. Some books want to be read fast. Some ask to colonize your mind for a while.

But most books can be enjoyed in the company of others.

Don’t Finish Bad Books

You don’t need to finish a book you’re not enjoying. If reading feels like a chore, then stop. Pick up a different book. Just because someone else liked a book doesn’t mean you have to as well. This isn’t homework.

Sometimes, a book just comes into our lives at the wrong time. It might be good, but it doesn’t click for you right now, or speak to you in the way you need in this moment. You can always borrow a book again later or pluck it from the shelves at another time.

Trudging through a bad book can be slow, frustrating, and likely to make you do something else to avoid the pain. Better to invest your time and enthusiasm in something else.

After all, there’s always another good book to read.

Books I read in January 2022
Books I read in February 2022
Books I read in March 2022

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Books I Read In March 2022

Here are the books I read in March 2022.

Once again, here are the books I managed to read in the past month. Much like the February list, it’s a mix of poetry, non-fiction, and ancient philosophy.

300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso

At first, this feels like a collection of pithy aphorisms. As you read on, it becomes clear this is something deeper and the insights are not as random as they first appeared. What emerges is a set of essays told in fragments. Manguso has a lyrical economy with words and brings power and clarity to her ideas about love and lust, hope and failure. Remarkable.

Gold by Rumi (translated by Haleh Liza Gafori)

This new translation of Rumi’s poetry brings more of the passion and lyricism of the original Farsi text to contemporary approaches to poetic style in English. Gafori’s translation really comes alive, challening and comforting the soul in equal measure. Whether you’re new to Rumi or looking for a fresh take on the poet’s work, this edition begs to be read and re-read.

Putin v The People: The Perilous Politics Of A Divided Russia by Samuel A. Greene and Graeme B. Robertson

Recent events found me scrambling to better understand contemporary Russia and, in particular, the cult of personality that keeps Vladimir Putin in power. While propaganda and repression play a big role in making this happen, Greene and Robertson, who are academic specialists on Russian politics, outline how various levels of society, from churches and schools to local political institutions and attitudes of ordinary citizens, contribute to keeping Putin at the top of Russia’s many-layered political system. This social contract is complex, vast, and also potentially fragile.

Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein

A classic of modernist prose poetry. Descriptions of simple household objects become evocative journeys into the limits of language. This edition (which only includes the Objects section) is brought to life even more by Lisa Congdon’s playful illustrations which accompany and add a counterpoint to Stein’s words. This is the kind of delightful work that gives you permission to play with your own writing.

The Republic And The Laws by Cicero

A provincial politician makes a name for himself by totally geeking out on the best way to govern. Sadly he only got the influence he craved only many years after his death.

Why Design Matters by Debbie Millman

Artfully assembled from the best episodes of a pioneering and highly regarded podcast. Anyone with an interest in art, design, or making intentional choices about how to live well will find a lot to enjoy and consider in this richly satisfying and beautifully designed book. It is perhaps best enjoyed as a coffee table book you revisit when needing a little inspiration.

Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion In Silicon Valley by Carolyn Chen

The decline of religion in western countries is well documented. What’s less often noticed is the way the workplace, especially the workplace of well-paid white-collar workers, is increasingly filling the social and spiritual role that religion once did. Companies all seem to have a mission. Workers practice mindfulness on the job, often build much of their social life around the people they work with, and expect their work to be meaningful and reflective of their values. This is an eye-opening look at what recent trends in workplace culture mean for the future of society.

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The Slap

You know how the other day a male actor slapped a male comedian at some awards show and then the whole world decided this was the only story in the universe?

I can’t believe I’m doing this. But, well, I want to talk about that.

No, not the slap itself. I don’t care to evaluate performative violence. I’m not here to judge the joke, or the reaction, or the state of mind of any of the participants.

I want to talk about us.

Blinded By The Slap

The Academy Awards have been subject to criticism recently. For being too white, too elitist, too old-fashioned and too US-centric, the once unassailable Oscars have been under attack. It took them too long to respond, but respond they have.

This year, the awards celebrated stories that championed all sorts of diversity and answered almost all the recent criticism. And the ceremony itself had moments of touching humanity.

But all the attention – and I do mean ALL THE ATTENTION – was on the slap.

Did we talk about deafness and disability, the plight of the working class, the role of women, prejudice around sexual identity, aging, or grief and loss, the struggle to define ourselves in this confusing time, or any of the other themes explored in this year’s surprisingly great crop of films?

No. We made memes and jokes and embarked on endless hot takes about the meaning of the slap.

But what if the slap didn’t mean anything at all? What if the real story was how quick we were to focus all our attention on it, rather than everything else that was going on?

Let’s Talk About Films For A Moment

CODA won this year’s best film. It’s a worthy winner. CODA has a moment that is so full of surprising drama and emotion that, on first viewing, I couldn’t breathe. This is a film with a lot to say that speaks in a subtle and beautiful way.

And like so many of the films that won this year, it wasn’t a big-budget, tent-pole film or part of a larger franchise.

Belfast, Drive My Car, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, The Power of the Dog… these are the kinds of films we worried might not have a future in a world where cinemas are under increasing financial pressure and studios constantly mine existing intellectual property and endlessly reboot old films.

This was a year to fall in love with cinema again.

Great films live long in your memory. They inspire meaningful conversations. Seeing these sorts of films is like seeing a great work of art, or visiting a place of stunning natural beauty, the sort of experience that marks your soul in such a way that when you meet someone who shared that experience, you don’t even need to talk about it because you recognise it in each other.

We Were All Slapped

The Monday after the Oscars, I felt flat. It was the kind of feeling you get when someone cancels on you at the last minute. I was ready to play my small part in a conversation, with friends, and the great online commentariat, about the films that won and what they meant to us.

There were conversations to be had about disability, grief, joy, the plight of the working class, feminism, sexual identity, what makes a well-told story so satisfying, and how great films can affirm our humanity.

Instead, we got the slap.

Worse than the asinine memes were the anodyne opinion pieces. Many criticized the act. Some tried to justify it. In an era when bad ideas like book-burning and eugenics are making a comeback, it’s not surprising to hear people argue for a return to chivalry.

There’s a famous Australian novel called The Slap, by Christos Tsiolkas. It was made into a TV series. Not once, but twice. That story also centres on an act of performative violence: a slap. But also the repercussions of that slap. Everyone saw it, but no one agrees on its significance, or how to respond.

This week we had a global slap. It showed how shallow and distractable our culture can be.

But it also showed how willing we were to talk about anything but films that centred on the experience of people with disabilities, or the experience of women, or the working class.

This year’s Oscars had great art on display. We just weren’t grown up enough to acknowledge it.

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De Tocqueville And The Habits Of The Heart

Our obsession with daily habits, from mindfulness to productivity hacks, could be destroying democracy in our lifetime.

Last year, I re-read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. My daughter was studying the book for a college course, and I thought it would be fun to read along.

I’d always wanted to revisit de Tocqueville anyway. Sometimes I think about writing a comparison of Democracy in America and Jean Baudrillard’s America, a contrast between the younger USA’s promise at the start of modernity and what it became in post-modernity.

But late last year, my thoughts were not so grand. I was happy to let de Tocqueville accompany me during another pandemic wave. I was curious but not driven in my reading.

“Habits of the heart” was a thoroughly modern phrase de Tocqueville used several times. As if the young French aristocrat was reaching through time to speak to us today, we have become obsessed with the power of habits in everyday life.

Except his words are more of a rebuke than an affirmation.

Habits Of The Heart

For Alexis de Tocqueville, the habits of the heart were what distinguished Americans from Europeans. Family life, church, participation in local town politics, even reading newspapers as a way to stay informed were surprising features of the lives of ordinary people in the New World democracy of America. The way these people’s habits shaped a thoughtful and reflective approach to life impressed de Tocqueville.

These habits of the heart also helped to establish and sustain democratic institutions. They meant people came to the ballot box relatively well informed and with a coherent moral ethos. People were engaged with civic institutions like local government and felt able to speak about and influence the issues of the day.

The habits of the heart reinforced democracy.

De Tocqueville was one of the first to write about individualism, and he wasn’t a fan. He was concerned individualism would lead people to see themselves as distinct from, rather than connected to, other citizens. Individualism might lead people to be less interested in the habits of the heart. They might focus instead on themselves and be less informed about the issues that affected society as a whole, or less interested in participating in civic institutions.

The Danger of Individualism

A particular obsession of de Tocqueville was how a society could resist tyranny and despotism. Local civic institutions and a sense of “common interests” are a way for society to hold on to freedom. The French Revolution was, for de Tocqueville, an example of how democracy didn’t automatically guarantee freedom for all citizens. After the Revolution, local institutions in France were weak, and the country was torn between freedom and tyranny.

In 1985, Robert Bellah et al. wrote Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, a collection of essays that tried to warn against the rise of individualism – particularly the kind that undermined democratic institutions in just the way de Tocqueville suggested.

Since then, though, culture wars, the rise of populism and, in more recent pandemic-era manifestations, individualism have become more prominent, while trust in civic institutions has declined.

Five Contemporary Habits Of The Heart

In his book Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit, Parker J. Palmer expands on de Tocqueville’s idea to name five habits we could practice as a way to heal our sense of civic trust.

First, we’re interconnected and interdependent; we need each other, including each other’s experiences and expertise. Second, we need to appreciate “otherness” and be hospitable to different people and traditions. Third, we have to creatively embrace tensions in society and not just shut them down or explain them away. Fourth, we need to cultivate our own voice and agency making an active contribution to society. Finally, we need to create communities.

These five habits help us feel like we’re part of something bigger. They also encourage humility since they help us see how things that seem true for us might not be true for everyone. And they encourage us to take an active role in society.

Habits And Moral Coherence

Habits are a hugely popular topic. I’ve mentioned habits in at least a hundred articles on this blog. And writers who focus primarily on habits, like James Clear and Charles Duhigg, are often quoted in everyday discourse.

But most of the conversation around habits is personal. Primarily, it’s about personal improvement. Habits are a way to be healthier, more productive or more successful. Habits are for our individual benefit.

However, we’re faced with bigger problems than our individual well-being, like the health of our societies and our planet.

De Tocqueville believed the “moral and intellectual state of a people” influenced their ability to maintain the civic institutions required for freedom and democracy. The habits of the heart are the way we address our common interests.

“Democracy is not a state, it is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.”
– John Lewis

The conversation around habits needs to become less atomized, less focused on us as individuals, and better able to address our responsibility to each other. If all our habits are just arrows that point back to our own self-importance, then we’ll never adequately address the problems we all share and cannot solve alone.

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How This Blog Has Changed

I’ve been thinking about this blog lately. Not “why bother?” I went through that mood late last year. IL Rather, I’m wondering about its significance and whether, maybe, it’s my life’s work!

In their heyday, blogs were often derided as vanity projects. Today, they seem kind of old-fashioned. But I’ve been doing this since 2004, and 2,204 posts later this thing must mean something, right?

Why Blog?

Blogging is a way to think in public. It’s a way to stay accountable to learning and growing.

This public act is also a way to regain ownership of our story.

Even the humblest blogs have always been an act of defiance, a challenge to the established order of who gets to speak, to publish, to write history.

Newsletters – like blogs in many ways – reflect the same ethos. Newsletter writers have similar motivations to early bloggers. And they are growing in number because of economic uncertainty and ethical considerations in the publishing and writing world.

The Significance Of Small Things

Even though I’ve been blogging for so long, this blog has never been my main priority. I’ve never thought of myself as “a blogger” and felt odd if others have introduced me as one.

I’ve always treated blogging as “just something I do”.

Thankfully, all the posts are still there. It’s astonishing how many articles I posted and then forgot about. My interests have shifted over the years. But there’s a lot of fascinating observations in the older articles.

This makes me wonder about the stuff we keep doing for years and years without allowing ourselves time to see how all that activity is shaping a body of knowledge for us.

I think of the thousands of meals I’ve cooked with no record to show. All the photos in my digital library that were never looked at again. Even though I could go through all my tweets and messages and online comments, I never will.

But at least I have the blog.

Three Evolutionary Phases

While preparing for the recent article about SEO, I trawled through my blogs. The frequency with which I posted changed over the years. There seemed to be three clear seasons. You can see that in the chart below.

In the early days, I was posting about once a day. Some of these were essays or longer reviews, but a lot of posts were little more than just a link and a comment.

From 2008, the cadence drops to 10–12 posts a month. The advent of social media meant the smaller observations had a home there instead of on the blog. The average length of posts also increased at this time, with few articles shorter than 450 words.

Then, from 2015 onwards, we get the current rhythm of about 4–5 posts a month, or once a week. The articles have got even longer, with few under 600 words and several reaching over 2,000 words.

Themes also changed. Early on, there are lots of small observations about life as an expat in Delhi and then Hong Kong. There’s quite a bit of religion and politics, and a lot of newsy updates about music gear and technology.

Around 2008, the blog becomes about “studio life”. The writing about making music, or photos, or using technology becomes more reflective. There are pieces on expatriate life and family, but there are also a lot of reviews of concerts, films, books.

Then, from 2014, the focus on creativity and making things increases. Productivity features more prominently. As does mental health. I still write occasionally about being an expat, but it’s mostly in the context of relocation and learning to adapt to new environments.

Moving Fast And Leaving Broken Things Behind

Over the years, this blog’s categorization system and tagging structure has changed again and again. Early on, I tagged posts as “daily life” and “thoughts”, which are pretty useless descriptions. For a long time, I used categories like “sounds” and “images”, which was not a helpful guide to whether a post was a review of a piece of gear or a description of something I was working on.

Almost everything, though, is some form of essay. Some are critical, many are personal, but the essay form prevails.

If I had to start a new blog and could take with me only 10 per cent of what I’d posted here, that would still be over 200 essays. Choosing the best 10 per cent would be challenging. Sure, my writing style is poor in a lot of the early pieces. But there are so many fascinating pieces.

The best 200 would actually be a pretty good body of work. It blows my mind to think about that.

If you’d told me when I started this blog that I’d manage to write 10–12 decent essays year after year, I wouldn’t have believed you. I was so stuck as a writer back in 2004. So mired in failure. So unsure what to even write about.

The question now, of course, is to keep asking what this means and to keep going.

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Share Cropping In The SEO Wasteland

This blog peaked, in terms of daily visitors, around 2011–2013. There was a similar peak around 2005–2007. In the last couple of years, visitors have been up but nowhere near close to those two golden seasons.

Of course, numbers aren’t everything.

Actually, that’s trite bullshit. I wouldn’t do this if there were none of you out there willing to read these words. Blogging (or writing articles online, if you’d prefer to call it that) is a public act. We write because we have something to say.

From the early days of blogging, more than 20 years ago, this has been a communitarian act. We aren’t just sharing our experiences; we’re sharing as a way to find connection with and encourage each other.

The relationship benefits us both.

SEO And The Dynamics Of Discovery

What’s surprising, when I think back to those peaks, is how little time I spent wondering how people would “find” this blog. Of course, the digital landscape was different then.

Blogs were the place to find reviews, commentary and original writing before the advent of online video, podcasts, newsletters and social media.

Meanwhile, bloggers encouraged their readers to check out other similar blogs or articles they liked. Backlinks drove actual readers to your blog.

Things started to change as blogging became more commercial. High-profile bloggers became less generous with links. And then social media pulled a lot of people’s attention away. It was easier for most people to share their ideas on Facebook or Twitter than go through the hassle of hosting a blog. YouTube was better for a lot of creators wanting to share educational or how-to content, or who simply wanted to share their lives and perspectives. And podcasts quickly became popular as a place to discuss interests, hobbies or culture.

But discovery of, or at least holding on to, your audience, still wasn’t a critical problem, thanks in part to RSS and compliant social media algorithms. Then Google closed down Reader, and the social media algorithms became greedier, promoting native content over posts that linked to other sites, like blogs.

Back in 2014–15, the bloggers I spoke to regularly were all concerned about falling readership. Things had changed, and old strategies didn’t work.

Entering The SEO Wasteland

Not all blogs died. Some articles were getting traction and flooding social media feeds. They often had catchy titles and were written in easy-to-digest chunks. “Five mistakes every…”, “Ten ways to…”, and “3 Things You Should Always…”

Yes, we’d entered the age of clickbait and listicles.

The dynamics of discovery shifted from community, sharing and subscription to search and virality.

The game of SEO became more important. I call it a game because that’s what it is. You try to guess what Google wants before they’ll show your site to people performing searches. But you don’t know. No one outside Google does. Everyone is guessing, perhaps making good guesses, but still playing the game, as Google’s behavior changes and shifts.

The recommendations for SEO cover everything from how you name your site to how articles and headings are formatted, the number of words between each heading, the style of writing – and, most important of all, keywords, or the words and phrases you use to describe your subject.

This has led to a tremendous amount of sameness and standardization in online content, what Casey Newton, the founder and editor of Platformer, calls the “SEO wasteland”. Years before this, author Hugh Macleod and others had written about digital sharecropping and what we used to call the blogosphere being turned into “content” against which Google could share ads with Google in control of who saw what.

My Misguided Obsession With SEO

I had no desire to sharecrop in the wasteland by writing clickbait or listicles. But I still had a problem. I’d relied on this blog as a greeting card, of sorts, an introduction. It generated a lot of opportunities, personal and professional.

This was important as I moved every few years – from India to Hong Kong, then Singapore, and later to Japan. One of my favourite quotes is from choreographer Twyla Tharp: “The best predictor of who we will become is the books we read and the people we meet.”

Given our digital age, I’ve come to think of this as “We become what we consume and create and how we connect.”

But if new readers are not finding the blog, then this dynamic of meeting people and connecting starts to break down.

It became clear I needed to do something about SEO, but what that something was remained elusive. So many of the articles about SEO are really a pretext to a grift. They’re a way for someone to sell you something.

I’m not suggesting all SEO services are scams. But the sales pitches do generally play on your insecurities, on your fear of making mistakes, on the self-doubt that comes from seeing your traffic fall, and on your ignorance of what Google wants from your site.

The Misadventure

The period 2015–17 was a bumpy transition for me. I loved living in Tokyo. I was proud of the book I’d recently self-published. But it hadn’t sold as well as I’d hoped. I was a little lost professionally, trying to shift to doing mainly photography. And I was struggling with anxiety.

A new website (the design you’re currently looking at) hadn’t solved much. I spent many nights reading articles about SEO and just got more and more confused. After making a few enquiries, I settled on working with an SEO agency in Melbourne.

They started by doing an “audit”, which sounds like a medical check-up but is more like a mechanic surveying your car for every potential repair they can charge you for without a clear sense of which are essential and which are just wear-and-tear you can live with.

They said this site had “potential” and “great content”. But they recommended I focus on writing about only one niche, photography, and focus on only one location, like Tokyo, or Japan. Basically, I should just have a template for all my blogposts, so they are kind of same, just different photos and subjects, but all photography in the same part of the world.

I tried some of their suggestions. But those articles did worse than my regular writing. And writing that way, even thinking that way, felt crushing and destructive.

All the while, my self-doubt grew. I gave up on the strategy. Instead, I wrote on topics which interested me and saw a modest but welcome growth in readers.

That was a costly lesson. What SEO companies and SEO in general can offer works on two levels.

First, there’s a basic level of fixing technical problems with your site. I describe that as SEO minimalism.

Second, there are the benefits of hyper-specialisation. SEO can work great if you’re a plumber in Luton, or an interior decorator in Raleigh. Google loves a specific service in a fixed location.

But if you’re writing to a broad audience, or on a wide range of subjects to people in several locations, then there’s a limit to what playing the SEO game can do for you.

The Internet’s Weird Anti-Globalism

My younger, techno-utopian self believed the internet would give us a borderless world. If you think back to the ʼ90s, to the rise of globalism, to the way digital technology upended every form of publication, that dream of a borderless world perhaps wasn’t as crazy as it now seems. I hear faint echoes of that utopianism in some of the arguments people make today for cryptocurrencies, Web3, or NFTs.

The truly odd thing, though, is how much the internet breaks this globalism by design. The algorithms want to serve you local content. Websites want to localise. Social media sites want to feed you local content and focus on your attention on what’s trending in your city. These actions reinforce boundaries rather than making them disappear. Even Amazon, once the great globaliser, now seems to want you to buy from your local Amazon store.

I first bought books from Amazon as a student at a provincial theological college in Australia. Back then, the internet opened up the world for me when my desire to explore was far greater than my bank balance would allow.

The internet doesn’t feel big anymore. It feels smaller. YouTube wants to keep showing me the same videos from the same creators. Twitter feeds me the same accounts over and over. Trying to teach the algorithms what I want feels harder than training a stubborn cat.

Welcoming SEO Minimalism

So, what can you do? Well, there are some SEO jobs that every blogger should consider. These are the health-of-your-site type issues. A brief list would include:

Install an SEO pluginLearn to use headings (H1, H2, H3)Include relevant links to other articles in your postsEnsure your site navigation and menus work wellAvoid using really large imagesUse a mobile-friendly designFix broken linksAdd tags and snippetsMake sure your site is crawlable and indexable

If the last suggestion makes your head spin, then maybe it’s a sign you’ve already reached a limit. If not, then this post is as comprehensive a list of SEO recommendations as I would suggest exploring.

But I don’t want to give you the impression I “fixed” all this. I didn’t. This site has over 17 years of articles, and plenty of them still have problems. And, I don’t write for one niche, or start with trending topics, or keywords. I’ve just learnt to accept the situation for what it is: a problem that won’t easily resolve itself for writers like me.

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Books I Read In February 2022

Last month, I started sharing the books I’d read that month. So, here are the books I read in February. It’s an assorted collection of essays, memoir, poetry and non-fiction.

Be Recorder by Carmen Giménez Smith

Identity and racism are made as big and abstract as possible, so they can easily be yelled about on talk shows. But identity is shaped, and racism is felt, in small everyday experiences. This collection of constantly surprising poems gives voice to those everyday moments in ways that constantly made me stop and remember similar experiences in my own life.

Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto by Vine Deloria Jr

Written in 1969, this book is a classic that still confronts the reader’s assumptions about the role of government and liberal society in indigenous issues. With an equal measure of wit and blunt fact-telling, Deloria reveals how harmful “good intentions” can be. One of the most eye-opening books I’ve ever read.

Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer

Does your daily routine in some way act as a summary for your whole life? This astonishing collection of poems and prose, written on a single December day, gets close to that. It’s small and grand at the same time. This should be essential reading for any conversation on “work–life balance” or gender roles in family life.

Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes

Grief is often written about after the pain becomes a story filled with ideas about the meaning of life. But here, grief is written as it reveals itself. This is all the more telling and disarming because, although Barthes is so well equipped to fill a book with abstraction and ideas, instead, at every turn, he leans back into the raw emotion of his mother’s passing.

The Republic by Plato

A budding young content creator tries to make a name for himself by retelling the fantastic stories of a cancelled influencer.

The World Doesn’t End by Charles Simic

This Pulitzer Prize winning collection of prose poems is a wild ride. Scene after scene greets the reader with memoir, social commentary and even hints of magical realism. Simic often references the post WW2 world of his childhood and those visions, given our current moment in history, make this collection feel especially urgent today.

Thinking Better: The Art of The Shortcut by Marcus du Sautoy

I have a moralistic aversion to shortcuts. They feel like cheating. But, whenever I live somewhere for a while, I always end up figuring out the shortcuts that make traveling from one place to another a little quicker. Thinking Better is all about the mental shortcuts we can use to make problem-solving a little less taxing. It’s not one big theory or a collection of hacks, but rather, it explores a series of mental models that can you use in a variety of situations. Perhaps the most interesting parts are the interludes where the author explores these ideas in specific contexts, like music, art, finance and therapy.

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The First Digital Sabbatical Of 2022

Late last year, I wrote about how I was going to structure my time in 2022. One of the things I mentioned was taking regular digital sabbaticals. I wanted these sabbaticals to “force me to rethink my routines. To remind me that time is passing and it’s important to consider where it goes.”

The word “sabbath” comes from the Ancient Hebrew word shabát, which means “day of rest”. Our English pronunciation owes a bit to the progression of the word through Ancient Greek and Latin. From this, we get the root for the word “Saturday”.

This day of rest isn’t marked just by a lack of work but also includes reflection, retelling of important religious stories, like the escape from slavery, and the exodus, and looking to the future with hope.

But, increasingly, the word “sabbatical” is used to imply a kind of holiday. In the business world, so-called “sabbaticals” are used as a perk to discourage tired workers from joining the “great resignation.”

I’m aiming for something more like a one-in-seven ritual. It’s not a holiday. It’s a break from my dependence on the internet, and screens, and digital technology inside the normal routine of work and life.

The Idea Of A Digital Sabbatical

The concept of a digital sabbatical has been with us for a while. The earliest reference I’ve found is this hilariously dated piece from 2008. But the idea continued to gain traction before this New York Times article in 2010. Tiffany Shlain wrote an influential essay about digital sabbaticals in the Harvard Business Review back in 2013 called Tech’s Best Feature: The Off Switch.

The concept also has its skeptics, most notably Cal Newport, who wrote in 2015 that it papers over the challenge of digital addiction and exhaustion.

Still, digital sabbaticals remain popular. A cursory search reveals articles like It’s Time for a Digital Sabbatical, Enrich Your Life – Go on a Digital Sabbatical, and How My Digital Sabbatical Helped me to Revolutionise My Workflow.

I’ve tried digital sabbaticals in the past. But, to Newport’s point, they’ve often felt like a reaction to exhaustion and overwhelm. A last resort, if you like. I’ve never tried a planned sabbatical.

Compare the sabbatical with a holiday for a moment, and then imagine what life would be like if we took holidays only when we couldn’t cope anymore, if we waited until work and stress was drowning us before taking time off? Thankfully, we don’t wait that long. We plan our holidays and look forward to them. Why not do the same with sabbaticals?

And if a sabbatical is going to function as, you know, a sabbatical, then it has to happen again and again, as a recurring ritual with its own rhythm.

Creating A New Ritual

You may have noticed the last two years have been odd. My guess is it will take a while to understand how this experience has changed us.

I’ve been increasingly unhappy in recent months with how I move through the day. I get through everything I need to, but it feels like there’s a lot of friction. Mostly this comes from a habit, which has worsened in the last two years, of punctuating each transition in the day with some kind of digital candy, a Twitter check, a YouTube video, a game of digital solitaire… small and largely innocent acts that are a kind of self-medication for existential pain.

In particular, I was troubled by how I didn’t seem to have the usual appreciation for the passing of the seasons. The way I was using digital technology didn’t help.

So I spent the last week largely offline, taking a digital sabbatical.

My original goal was ambitious: no “social media, no blogposts, no YouTube, no streaming TV, no Zoom, no online courses, no non-urgent communications.”

What Happened On This Digital Sabbatical

I did manage most of that. I deleted the Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram apps from my devices. But I watched a bit of streaming TV, attended a writing workshop via Zoom, and did the same for my regular Pilates workouts.

The interruption was still palpable. Early in the week, I found myself seeking cheap dopamine hits anyway, surfing websites like Create Digital Music or Mac Rumors, which are full of little hits of dopamine delight.

Several times during the week, something would happen, like seeing a horse and buggy go down my street, and I would find myself composing a tweet or Instagram post in my head.

This is the challenge: taking things like social media away is largely meaningless if you don’t have something to replace them with.

Instead of tweeting about the horse and buggy, I wrote about it in my journal. Instead of picking up a device while waiting for the kettle to boil, I just watched the clouds pass by or the birds in the sky. Throughout the week, I enjoyed handwriting drafts and notes and future blogposts.

From one perspective, the sabbatical wasn’t as pure and radical as it could’ve been. Screens played a bigger role in the week than I’d hoped.

But from another perspective, the week did force me to reflect on how I use my devices and why I turn to them so often. It did see me asking some big questions about how I use social media.

The sabbatical prompted reflection – which is the whole point.

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