Love & Work
A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.
I love Kate Soper's suggestion that a truly sustainable economy is also a very pleasant economy for more.
Happy Friday.
How We Live
Kate Soper and Lynne Segal discuss the unsustainable obsession with economic growth and consider what it might look like if we all worked less.
According to Lynne Segal, a core of Kate Soper's work "is to argue for alternative hedonism. Alternative hedonism is not only going to help us create sustainable consumption, create a better possible future, but also, in the process, it is actually going to bring us greater pleasure, give us more time, enable us to slow down and enjoy life more."
Lynne Segal's work makes clear the connections between care-work and political optimism.
Boston Review and The Philosopher recently brought them together to share their ideas.
Article: Reconsidering the Good Life
Video: "The Politics of Pleasure": Kate Soper in conversation with Lynne Segal
Futures Thinking
What if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rachel Carson had met?
Illustration by Gabriella Trujillo
"Imagining an exchange in the year 1964, as the civil rights and environmental movements were forging parallel and increasingly urgent paths into American culture, J. Drew Lanham explores the power and necessity of convergence."
Article: A Convergent Imagining
Storytelling
Revisiting a childhood favorite
"Thacher Hurd, son of illustrator Clement Hurd, wrote in the 75th-anniversary edition of the book that it was a sleeper hit, nearly going out of print a few years after publication in the 1950s. By 1981, when the book was going strong again, a parent wrote to say that his son had pressed his foot into the pages, trying to enter the great green room, which was real to him. The room was based on Brown’s neighbor’s living room—not a child’s nursery at all. In fact, the room and the entire book, came to Brown in a dream." - Jess de Courcy Hinds
Article: 75 Years of Goodnight Moon: Today’s Best Writers Reflect on a Children’s Classic
Community
Our democracies are already gamified. Our goal should be to do it better.
Adrian Hon
"I believe gamification can strengthen democracies, by designing democratic participation to be accessible and to build consensus. The same game design ideas that have made video games the 21st century’s dominant form of entertainment — adaptive difficulty, responsive interfaces, progress indicators and multiplayer systems that encourage co-operative behaviour — can be harnessed in the service of democracies and civil society.
"Wildly popular — and very different — games like Mario Kart, Minecraft and Zelda all have one thing in common: they’re exquisitely designed to be enjoyed by as broad an audience as possible. That doesn’t mean they’re easy. It means they’re incredibly patient in giving beginners all the time and assistance they need to learn the skills required to learn the game and have fun. And they make the learning process itself fun, often eschewing tedious tutorials in favor of a simplified version of the game itself. They recognize and reward players for every bit of progress they make, and when players are ready to venture into multiplayer activities, they encourage good sportsmanship. While all of this effort is at least partly in pursuit of profit, there are clear lessons to be drawn about how to motivate users to engage with systems that could be applied for the greater good." - Adrian Hon
Article: How Game Design Principles Can Enhance Democracy
Self-Management
People who believe in people
Sketch by Andy de Vale.
"I recently flew to Lisbon to participate in a two-day talk and workshop led by Pablo Aretxabala and Jabi Salcedo from K2K Emocionado. K2K has successfully transformed 70 organisations (many of them industrial companies) in the Basque Country from traditional hierarchies to flourishing, self-managing organisations.
"That they have successfully transformed and improved results (profitability, productivity, absenteeism, salaries) in so many companies with such consistency piqued my interest. So how do they do it?" - Lisa Gill
Community
"When we perceive threats to our sense of belonging, our horizon of possibility shrinks."
"We can all become vulnerable to doubts about our belonging at any given moment, depending on the situations we find ourselves in and how we interpret them. Greg Walton and I coined the term “belonging uncertainty” to refer to the state of mind in which one suffers from doubts about whether one is fully accepted in a particular environment or ever could be.
"We can experience it in the workplace, at school, at a snooty restaurant, or even in a brief social encounter. Belonging uncertainty has adverse effects. When we perceive threats to our sense of belonging, our horizon of possibility shrinks. We tend to interpret ourselves, other people, and the situation in a defensive and self-protective way. We more readily infer that we are incapable or that we aren’t meant to be there, that we will not understand or be understood. We’re less inclined to accept challenges that pose a risk of failure.
"Greg Walton and I crafted an intervention to address people’s feelings about whether they belong when they enter a situation that, though threatening, offers opportunity for growth. The intervention produces such good results that it is used in many colleges, middle schools, and high schools throughout the country, as well as in graduate school and workplaces." - Geoffrey Cohen
Book Excerpt: Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides
How We Work
You can't solve the problems with meetings by removing meetings. But you can fix the problems with meetings.
Cam Daigle has a system, what he calls a survival mechanism, for classifying, planning, and executing meetings in a way that helps keep him sane at work.
"I believe all meetings can either be defined as either Status meetings, Feedback meetings, or Decision meetings."
Article: There Are Three Types of Meetings.
One-liners
Article: Banning books is a threat to public education
Article: ‘There’s endless choice, but you’re not listening’: fans quitting Spotify to save their love of music
Playlist
When I think of the Dead I'm often thinking of the early 70s, and I'm often thinking of Dark Star. This is so lovely.
Video: Grateful Dead - Dark Star → El Paso, Veneta OR 8/27/72
Image of the Week
The Meuse River, rising in France and flowing through Belgium and the Netherlands before draining into the North Sea from the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta, has been widened, and the riverbanks lowered, expanding the floodplain.
Article: This is What a River Should Look Like: Dutch Rewilding Project Turns the Clock Back 500 Years.
What's Love & Work?
Love & Work is the weekly newsletter by me, Mitch Anthony. I help people use their brand - their purpose, values, and stories - as a pedagogy and toolbox for transformation.
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