no subject

I haven't been diagnosed with attention deficit anything, but I can really relate to a bunch of things Captain Awkward says in this twitter thread. Starting with "Putting a task on the [to do] list can 'solve' its urgency & I forget," moving on to "I...internalized a fallacy that I was not 'allowed' to do rewarding ambitious enjoyable things until all my 'chores' were done" to "hi to the people who really need an assistant but have no idea how to delegate things to an assistant and/or find the whole assistant thing terrifying."

https://twitter.com/CAwkward/status/1077726114376806400

PS: Also if I try to look at any of the suggested task management systems, I will get sucked into a task of "looking at, but never actually using, task management systems." Or I will decide I need to use ten of them.

The benefits of leisure

I recommend this essay, and to tempt you I've swiped a bunch of quotes from it, both from Russell's essay and Maria Popova's surrounding text.

The only thing I have a problem with is that I suspect Mr Russell, in claiming that we can set things up so that no one has to work more than 4 hours a day, wasn't thinking about some of the kinds of work women are more likely to do, like childcare.

In Praise of Idleness: Bertrand Russell on the Relationship Between Leisure and Social Justice by Maria Popova

Leisure is not the same as the absence of activity… or even as an inner quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness.” -- German philosopher Josef Pieper, "Leisure, the Basis of Culture"

Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery. -- Bertrand Russell

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. -- Bertrand Russell

I remember hearing an old Duchess say: “What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.” People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion. -- Bertrand Russell

[Russell] considers the radical shift that would take place if we were to stop regarding the virtue of work as an end in itself and begin seeing it as a means to a state of being in which work is no longer needed. -- Maria Popova

The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. -- Bertrand Russell

The seedbed of this soul-shriveling belief is the notion — a driving force of consumerism — that the only worthwhile activities are those that bring material profit. -- Maria Popova

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational potboilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and the capacity. -- Bertrand Russell