Colin Wright's Blog, page 7

Slow Fast Near Far

I think (and write) about consumption a lot, because—as someone who loves to create things—what I consume informs what I produce, and the time and energy I spend consuming are resources I cannot use to make things.

Consequently, I use several mental models to help keep things balanced, and one of them is focused on the perceptual distance of what I’m taking in.

World news contains data about things happening far away: on the other side of the planet, or even off-planet, at times.

Local ...

Social Media

It hasn’t been a great year for social media companies.

They’re still raking in money, dominating the ad-sector, and shaping personal, economic, and political discourse, but they’re also at the center of many lawsuits and scandals.

The increasingly dominant narrative is that these companies are on a downswing, shamble-walking toward a zombie-like existence of irrelevance, and even the balance-sheet winners are coming to be seen as bad bets: uncool uses of one’s time and attention, unfortun...

Small, Simple, Every Day

How do we become the people we need to be to live the lives we want to live, do the things we want to do, and face the challenges we want to (or must, because of forces beyond our control) capably face?

There are countless ways to pursue this type of outcome, but the one I’ve found to be most effective and sustainable (for me) is to implement small, simple, daily changes and maintain them over time.

In practice, this means deciding to put away yesterday’s washed dishes each morning before ...

Coiling and Uncoiling

For the past few years, I’ve been spring-coiling.

That’s how I think of it, anyway: a focused process of assessing, experimenting, consolidating, retracting, refurbishing, replacing, upgrading, upskilling, scanning my personal, interpersonal, and professional horizons, and generally questioning every aspect of who I am, what I’m doing, and where I’d like to be as a next-step version of myself.

This stage, this state, isn’t unfamiliar territory; I’ve gone through this process more times tha...

Cause-Orientation

When you’re cause-oriented—there’s something you care deeply about and you’ve committed part of yourself, your life, to it—it’s normal and understandable that you might wring yourself out in support of that cause on a semi-regular basis.

You believe in this mission, this ideal, so when variables shift, opportunities arise, or conflicts brew, you realign your life so you can throw more time, energy, and resources at this most-vital undertaking.

The unfortunate consequence of such a pivot is...

The Work Itself

I’ve had a similar conversation with maybe a half-dozen people recently, about how “work”—in the sense of doing what one does to make a living, and especially creative work—has slowly grown in definitional scope to encompass things well beyond the work itself.

It’s possible, if you’ve already become a well-known entity, to make a living just writing, just painting, just making music or food or whatever else. You have a name and probably other people to handle the other stuff for you.

But f...

Expand and Contract

As someone who typically travels quite a lot, it’s important to me to have comfortable, sustainable inflated and deflated modes of operation.

This means having a sense of what goes where in my bag, what I wear for which travel scenarios (for smooth passage through checkpoints and TSA screenings, for various weather conditions and social settings), and how I get my work done if the WiFi isn’t good, if it’s noisy and I need to record something, and if my attention is pulled in a million differe...

Fluffy and Foundational

I’ve historically experienced a significant shift in my lifestyle, priorities, and thinking every seven years or so.

Based on that schedule, I’m likely to see another such shift around a year from now.

Between these fairly radical recalibrations, I tend to undertake minor to moderate situational and orientational renovations every few months.

At the base of these lower-grade overhauls are what I think of as interior purpose statements: journal entries, basically, but focused on how I’d ...

Tools

When I’m learning something new and looking to veteran practitioners of that field, study, or craft to see how they do things, I almost always find they’re less fixated on gear than newbies and middling-range practitioners.

Instead, they tend to concern themselves with how they use the tools they’ve got, and how they might accomplish what they want to accomplish with what they have at hand.

This isn’t universal, and there are many cases in which a next-step in one’s development as a chef o...

Grief

We grieve we when lose someone, but we also grieve when we lose a sense of place or time or self, a path we feel we’re walking (toward something important), or a reliable-seeming understanding of how the world works.

A lot of us have lost things over the past few years.

Many more before that, too, of course, but since 2020 it’s seemed like one massive everything-overhaul after another: a global pandemic, geopolitical strife, military conflict, famine, mass shootings, climate-related tumult...