Tag: adrian

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Mr. Corbyn, Please Stop Phone Scammers

My phone number was temporarily stolen last month. Rather than just tweet about it, I decided to write a letter to my local MP, Jeremy Corbyn, with specific suggestions on how to combat identity theft and phone scams.

Dear Mr. Corbyn,

In the last month, I have been subject to multiple identity theft attempts and fraud scams. No permanent harm was done, but it was very distressing. Moreover, it highlights major shortcomings with the government’s regulation of personal data security, particularly for mobile phone companies.

On XX December, I received a text message from Three telling me that my registered billing address had been changed, even though I had not requested this. I was in Canada on holiday and unable to contact Three until I returned on XX January.

It emerged that someone had called Three on XX December pretending to be me (they only needed my billing address and date of birth) and successfully changed my billing address to “19 Haling Park Road, South Croydon, CR2 6NJ” — presumably a forwarding address. They then requested a replacement SIM card be sent there.

The SIM card would have arrived a few days later, giving them possession of my mobile phone number. They attempted to buy £650 of goods from Boots.com on my credit card. This attempt was stopped automatically, and when the scammers called the credit card compnay, they were unable to authorise the purchase because they didn’t know my PIN.

When I returned on XX January, I visited a Three shop and was given a new SIM card. I also changed my billing address back, and XX issued me a new credit card (with new number). Everything was back to normal — although on XXJanuary I received a call from a person with an Indian accent on 0333 338 1019, telling me that they were Three customer support; this was obviously untrue, so I hung up. Continue reading “Mr. Corbyn, Please Stop Phone Scammers”

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Lacking Inspiration

I’ve been struggling to get started writing a new book. I find it all to easy for my time out of work to be nibbled away, seconds and minutes and hours, by genuinely intriguing articles, blog posts, videos, comments, TV shows, work, and games. Like a lot of people, I have the urge to complete tasks and fill up progress bars, but with the internet and media, the progress bar can never be filled. And so I never end up starting that book, even though I have plenty of notes and (I think) good ideas.

But maybe that’s not the real reason. I did write a book a few years ago, after all, and I don’t recall being any less busy or distracted back then. Perhaps it’s because the media environment has become even more distracting – who knows?

Coincidentally, I heard Elizabeth Gilbert talk about this very subject on the Longform podcast. I’ll first admit that I only knew one thing about Gilbert beforehand, which is that she wrote the highly successful Eat, Pray, Love; a book that turned into a movie starring Julia Roberts, which a lot of people whose opinions I trust found very shallow. So I was skeptical when I saw the episode’s guest, but not so skeptical that I deleted the episode out of hand; the Longform people have earned that much trust from me over the years.

Here are a couple of good bits from the episode, firstly on being multitalented:

…When it comes to deciding what you’re going to be, it helps if there’s only one thing you’re good at… I know a lot of multitalented people… but I do think it’s hard to them sometimes to know where to put their energy. And it’s easier if you’re not so great at a bunch of stuff.

I confess that I think of myself as multitalented. I like to think that, given sufficient effort, I could become pretty good at making videos or games or writing or whatever. I like learning new things. And for me, that makes it hard to decide whether my next big personal project should be a game or a book or something else.

Another good bit is about inspiration, and why it’s valuable to identify the things that you really care about when it comes to taking on a big personal project:

The calculus has to be, what’s the thing that makes me want to get up in the morning, what’s the thing that I’m psyched that I get to do this…. It’s about being very awake, about being very alert. The work is clearing your life of distractions enough so you are actually capable of feeling that excitement when it arrives. That you haven’t overbooked yourself in ten different directions so that you are so exhausted that you wouldn’t know inspiration if it punched you in the face. You can’t do that to yourself. It’s about being sober. It’s about being hopeful. It’s about a certain faith, it’s a way of being, which is about being ready.

And it’s about trusting your own curiosity enough to follow it, even if it doesn’t make sense. Even if the inspiration that you had doesn’t align with anything you’ve done before, even if it doesn’t seem like it would be marketable, even if it’s something that you can’t even believe you’re interested in, but you sort of have to have full faith that if you’re curious about something, it’s for a reason, that it’s a clue on the great scavenger hunt, and that you follow that clue and then the next and then next.

The tricky bit is that you have to start from a place of ‘this is what I’m most excited about, this is what I’m most curious about’, and then you have to recognise and know what will happen, which is that six months into it, it’s going to feel very boring and tedious because making things is often boring and tedious.

Another idea is going to come along very seductively, and do the dance of the seven veils in the corner of your studio, and say, I’m a much more interesting, much more exciting idea, why don’t you abandon this project that you’ve been working on for six months and come and run away with me to paradise. And you have to be smart enough to know not to do that, because six months from now that project will also be dull and boring and another idea will come and seduce you have to be able to stay through it thorugh the boring part to get to the end, so when those other seductive new ideas come along, you have to tell them to take a number, that we’re doing this now. And until this thing is finished, I’m not going to run away with you.

First it’s the excitement, then it’s the discipline… I have this theory that everything that’s interesting is mostly boring. So, life is filled with all these really interesting things and we chase the high and the buzz of the excitement of that thing, but 90% of that thing is boring.

None of this is new to me. In fact I’ve given similar advice to other people. But sometimes you need to someone else to tell you what you already know, and Gilbert did that pretty damn well in this podcast.

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30 Kickstarters in 30 Days

On Ep 226 of the Core Intuition podcast, Manton Reece discussed his 30 Coffee Shops in 30 Days challenge, which he promptly followed up with a 30 Libraries in 30 Days challenge. They also jokingly talked about a ’30 Kickstarters in 30 Days’ challenge, which immediately made me wonder, as a Kickstarter veteran and aficionado, whether it could be done well.

Of course it could be done, given low enough pledge goals. But I wonder what the bounds of this idea are. Could one person really launch 30 satisfying projects in 30 days, and deliver them in a reasonable amount of time – say, two years? Would you need more than one person to do this? What counts as ‘satisfying’? If it was, say, writing 30 100-word stories or drawing 30 single-frame cartoons, that seems a little too easy. But 30 completely unique projects is probably too much to expect.

And how could you promote this? Practically speaking, most Kickstarters are powered by friends and family, and even then it’s hard enough to get them to back you a single time, let alone 30 times. Sure, you can make the standard pledge level $1 for each project, but they’d still need to remember to visit Kickstarter once a day.

Realistically, working in a team would make this much easier – it’d give you access to a much broader pool of backers. Or if you insisted on doing it as an individual, you’d need Batman-levels of preparation.

I quite like these kinds of creative constraints (see Perplex City, A History of the Future in 100 Objects, etc.) but perhaps this is a bridge too far.

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Ingrateful Expectations

This week, I bought a new iPad Pro 9.7″ to replace my iPad Mini 2. I use my iPad at home for at least two hours every day, mostly for web browsing and reading magazines, so it didn’t feel like a stretch to spend the not-inconsiderable £619 to get an upgrade. I was particularly interested in the iPad Pro’s new screen (40% lower reflectance than the Air 2, maybe 70+% over the Mini 2; laminated display; etc.), the Apple Pencil support, and most importantly, a 3x speed increase compared to what I have now.

Has my Mini 2 gotten slower since I bought it two and a half years ago? It feels like it, but according to benchmarks, iOS 9 actually increased the speed of the Mini 2 for my most common activity, web browsing. Perhaps the benchmarks are wrong, but it’s also likely that I just expect much more from my devices every year – not just because web pages and apps are becoming more complex, but due to the ratcheting-up of performance on my other devices. When I first got my iPad Mini 2, I’m sure it made my iPhone 5 feel slow in comparison, but my iPhone 6 now makes the Mini 2 feel slow.

And now the iPad Pro makes my iPhone 6 feel slow(ish). That’s to be expected, but more surprisingly, in my tests it loads webpages just as fast as my 27″ iMac from late 2012, which has 24GB of RAM; the iPad Pro has ‘only’ 2GB. Last night I used FaceTime while browsing the web and scrolling in Twitter, and there was nary a hiccup. I’m sure I could make it slow down with, say, a dozen Safari tabs and Grand Theft Auto, but that’s not a common use-case for me.

The display is just as good. Yes, it has lower reflectance, which makes for a more pleasant reading experience (no getting distracted by subtle reflections in front of the text); yes, it can go brighter. But the real MVP is the True Tone feature, which basically white-balances the display by sensing the colour temperature of your surroundings. It’s not headline-grabbing but as soon as you turn it off, you realise just how blue the display would be without it. The ultimate effect is less eye strain because it makes the iPad feel more like a piece of paper rather than some artificial glowing rectangle. I wouldn’t be surprised if True Tone was introduced to all new Apple displays in the next couple of years.

Naturally, the world wouldn’t complete without Apple fanatics who are deeply, personally offended by the iPad Pro not having, say, USB 3 support or 4GB of RAM or a faster Touch ID sensor. Without them, it’s apparently not a sufficiently impressive upgrade over the iPad Air 2 from 18 months ago. I think that’s arguable, but what’s more interesting to me is that there are people who really want to upgrade a 1.5 year old tablet.

Now, we all know people who upgrade their phones every year, and while I don’t care enough to do that, I can understand the impulse because it still feels like there’s a rapid pace of improvements in smartphones. But I don’t know anyone who upgrades their computer every year. In fact, it wouldn’t even be possible to do such a thing on many Macs, because they don’t get updated that often – and in any case, the upgrades would get you a scant 10-20% speed increase.

Tablets occupy a middle ground. Since they share the same core processors as phones, they share the tremendous speed improvements. But their other features are changing less rapidly; people just don’t care as much about the camera or touch sensor on tablets as they do on their phones, because they use their tablets less frequently and for a narrower range of tasks. So I find it baffling that anyone would even want to upgrade their iPad every release.

I suppose people are upset because it’s called the iPad Pro and that Apple are marketing it as a replacement for your computer. If so, that’s unfortunate. ‘Pro’ is a marketing term; the iPad Pro is no more meant for ‘professionals’ than the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro laptop is meant for professionals. The iPad will never be a true replacement for a traditional computer until it’s much more flexible and runs a windowed operating system… but… who cares? Many people don’t need a traditional computer any more, and most people are using traditional computers far less – I know I am. For the rest of the time, I’m happy using my tablet.

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Understanding Pain

Two weeks ago, I was at the Six to Start offices discussing the cost of shipping packages internationally for our next Virtual Race. I bent over to pick up something on the floor and felt an intense stabbing pain in my lower right back. I attempted to straighten up, but it hurt to much that I dropped to my knees and, on the advice of Matt, lay down on the floor for a few minutes.

This alleviated the pain somewhat, but I was still barely able to walk. Even sitting down didn’t help. That morning, I’d packed my running gear to use on the way back, but it was obvious nothing of the sort was on the cards. Still, I was determined to hobble back home that night, which I successfully did.

Things hadn’t improved the next day, or the day after that. I’d evidently strained or pulled a muscle in my back, and it wasn’t going to clear up quickly.

What struck me in those days was how difficult it was to do anything. Getting up from a sofa or from bed, putting on trousers, tying shoelaces, even brushing my teeth – all these activities caused pain, to the extent that something which would normally take 10 seconds and no thought at all instead could take a few minutes each. Everyone was very helpful during this time, particularly my girlfriend, but my back pain still caused real problems. I worried about how long it would last for – would I need to figure out some new way of exercising other than running? How might this affect my work? If it lasted much longer, it would certainly have worsened my health in other ways.

Thankfully, after a week, I was back to 90% and able to start running again, and now I’m pretty much at 100%. Part of the reason for the quick recovery, I think, is because I was already very healthy and had a habit of walking a lot; I’m told that back pain is worsened by not moving, and in my experience, that’s definitely the case.

However briefly, I gained a new understanding of what it means to have back pain. More broadly, I realised the kind of difficulties people have when it’s just hard or tiring or painful to move in general. It’s not news to me that many, many people have these problems, and I never doubted that walking or stretching or so on was genuinely difficult – but it’s one thing to believe it, and another thing to experience it. It’s actually astonishing to me how hard it was to do everyday tasks.

I don’t have any bright ideas about how to treat or combat back pain; I’m not about to suggest that an app* would solve it, or that we should all get exoskeletons (although that would be pretty cool). It’s just clear to me that it’s a problem that, while seemingly invisible, is bound to seriously reduce a person’s quality of life and exacerbate or create new ailments.

*If you could measure posture in real time using wearable devices, you could create an app or chatbot or game that might gently encourage people to move and stretch in a sensible way. But that’s a) obvious and, more importantly, b) rather far off given the NHS’ (in)ability to deploy that kind of technology to patients.

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A History of the Future, Now Free

Two years ago, A History of the Future in 100 Objects was published. The book describes a hundred slices of the future of everything, spanning politics, technology, art, religion, and entertainment. Some of the objects are described by future historians; others through found materials, short stories, or dialogues.

Today, I’m making all 100 chapters available online, for free.

The book has sold a few thousand copies – reasonably well for a first author. More importantly, it was received well by the people whose opinions I value; I was invited to speak at the Long Now Foundation last summer by Stewart Brand, and it was praised by the BBC’s Stephanie Flanders and by Grantland’s Kevin Nguyen, who called it one of the ‘overlooked books of 2013‘. Next month, I’ll be speaking about the same ideas at the Serpentine Gallery’s Transformation Marathon.

So, at this point I’m much more interested in spreading the ideas far and wide. Of course, you can still buy the book via Amazon or directly from me (it’s very nicely formatted), but I’m just as happy if you read it on the web.

I wrote A History of the Future in 100 Objects because I’ve always been deeply fascinated by what’s coming next. I’m a neuroscientist and experimental psychologist by training, and a games designer and CEO by trade. It’s my job to think up new ideas and ways to improve people’s lives, and perhaps because of that, I’m optimistic – cautiously, skeptically optimistic – about the future.

The future that I want to realise is the hard-fought utopia of Kim Stanley Robinson and Iain Banks and Vernor Vinge, not the dystopia that dominates fiction nowadays. But I’m not naive, and technoutopianism brings me out in hives, so don’t expect me to tell you that technology will make everything better.

This book is my small contribution to the exploration of the future. It turns out that writing a hundred short stories was far, far more difficult than I had ever imagined, and in truth only some of the chapters hit the mark perfectly. But even so, I think there are plenty of fun ideas there.

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Ridiculous Movie Ideas #1 and #2

1)

Meet Maddie, and her very own invisible guardian elf, Gerry, one of Lapland’s finest. But when Lapland’s new CEO buys a new robot named SAFETY (Substitute Autonomous Friendly Elf TechnologY) to reduce staffing costs, Gerry’s decides to defeat the robot in a head-to-head trial, no matter what. Disaster ensues, and Gerry, Maddie, and the robot are stranded in a remote island in Finland. Only by working together can they return home in time. Fasten your seatbelts, because Elf ‘n’ SAFETY are coming!

2)

We pan down past a blue sky, past the dreaming spires, to a beautiful, peaceful river. Willows droop lazily over their reflections, and blue-shirted boater-hat wearing students guide their punts downstream.

Brr–br-br-br-boom! Dubstep. A fleet of jacked-up punts with LED lights, spoilers, massive motorised punt poles, etc, slide into view, complete with gyrating dancers in skimpy outfits. One deep-black punt is the centre of attention; it’s Dominic Thatcher, with a first-class degree in engineering. And here’s the young turk, Brian Connor-Smythe, a fresher studying fluid dynamics. They draw up beside each other.

“I live my life a quarter mile at a time. Nothing else matters: not the college, not the department, not my lab and all their bullshit. For those one hundred and twenty seconds or less, I’m free.”

Who can make it to Iffley Lock in time? Will Brian discover the secret of Dominic’s illegal success in research? You’ll only find out, in The Fast and the Furious: Oxford Drift.

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How Useful is the Apple Watch, Anyway?

Back when I worked out at gyms, I’d often be found on the exercise bikes. Unlike the other cardio equipment, it was easy to grip the heart-rate monitors, and it was intriguing to see the numbers skip up and down as I went through my routine. But after a few sessions, I stopped bothering. The numbers always followed the same predictable pattern and I wasn’t learning anything new or useful from them.

I feel the same way with fitness devices and the notion of the ‘quantified self’ as a whole. Regularly recording your weight, steps, calories, heart rate, and so on, is useful when you are looking for changes, whether that’s because you’re trying to lose weight, run faster, or detect an illness. It’s good for professionals who are pinpointing exactly how to improve their performance. It’s good for long-term reviews of your weight or heart rate over many months or years. And it’s good for beginners who don’t know much about how their bodies will respond to change. But unless you fall into one of those categories, it’s not really that useful to know that your heart rate was, on average, 70 bpm this week and 68 bpm last week.

When I started running, I found it motivating to track my distance and pace with various gadgets. I stopped routinely recording my runs a few years ago when my habits settled down. These days, I run three or four times a week along two or three different trails, and I know exactly how long and difficult they are. It’s not that interesting for me to know exactly how fast I run because I can’t do anything with that data, and in any case, I can already tell.

There is a huge novelty factor for fitness trackers these days, precisely because everyone is now a beginner – even those people who were already running and walking. It really is interesting, for the first few months, to know how many steps you’re walking. But eventually it gets predictable and at least half the people stop using them altogether.

It’s refreshing that the Apple Watch dispenses with step counts as a primary measure, and to highlight three different numbers related to exercise, movement, and standing; and, by and large, to dispense with numbers as well. But I suspect even this simplified measure will get boring as well.

So if that’s the case for one of the Watch’s best features – fitness – what about the others? One week in, and I have a better idea of what the Watch is useful for.

Communication is, unsurprisingly, the killer app – just as it is for the iPhone. It really is much more convenient to receive texts on your wrist – and much less distracting. Often, when I receive a text or email on my phone, I’ll read it, and then I’ll mindlessly open up a whole bunch of other apps and end up wasting five minutes. With the Watch, I look at the text, and then that’s it. There is no temptation to fiddle with other apps because the screen is too small and frankly, it’s tiring to mess with it for more than 30 seconds.

Dictating texts with Siri is very good. But there’s one thing that’s even better – sending drawings to other Watch owners. In the two days that my partner and I have both owned Watches, we’ve sent a whole bunch of little drawings to each other. I am not a huge texting or emoji person but it’s a lot of fun to send drawings, and I’m surprised there’s been so little discussion about this. Perhaps it’s because so few people actually own Watches. Anyway – don’t let anyone tell you that these drawings are dumb or juvenile. They have hearts of stone.

The battery life continues to be perfectly fine. The more I think about it, the more irrelevant the complaints seem. The Watch can’t really function with the iPhone, which you have to charge daily. Now that we’re all accustomed to that ritual, adding another device on is not a huge burden. I usually end the day with 30-40% charge, which suggests that there is room for Apple to give users the option to keep the display on for longer, especially if they can improve power consumption in other areas.

Other quick observations:

  • The Uber app is no good for summoning cars since it’ll only use your precise location, rather than letting you change it to, say, the corner at the end of the street. But it is useful to keep track of a trip in process.
  • It’s fun to play around with the different watchfaces. I favour the ‘Color’ face, which I change to match my clothes.
  • I’ve uninstalled practically every third-party app. I think this is a major failure for Apple, and it’s going to take some persuading for me to reinstall them. What’s the point of having 3000 apps on launch day when they’re poorly designed and no-one wants to use them? Everyone loses out.
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Apple Watch First Reactions

Speed

It’s annoyingly slow. Apps that display information from the internet (social apps, news apps, transport apps, maps; i.e. most of them) can take a few seconds to open, and then a few more seconds to display your desired data. I’ve already installed and deleted entire swathes of apps that suffer from this issue; the NY Times app, BBC News, Twitter, Twitterific, Foursquare, etc.

Compared against the very first iPhone, the Watch is very impressive in its capabilities and speed. Compared against the iPhone 6, it’s hard to justify using the watch at all for these apps. The good news is that any performance improvements Apple engineers can eke out of the hardware will have a knock-on positive effect on the entire watch experience – and I trust that they will have every motivation to succeed.

In contrast, apps that communicate solely with the phone (e.g. Music, Overcast, Calendar) or on the watch (Stopwatch, Timer) are reasonably responsive and useful.

Display

The screen is gorgeous, but small. It’s baffling and laughable that there are so many news apps on the watch. I suppose news junkies may find it entertaining to look at headlines, but the experience is so slow and poor compared to reading a screen of text on the iPhone that I expect few people will bother.

The screen size also makes it difficult to understand and use complex apps, like Maps, Citymapper or Transit. Apple and third-party developers are clearly trying to address this through tricks like Force Touch and by simplifying interfaces and use cases, but they need to do much more work to make the apps useful.

Fitness

The fitness tracking, on the other hand, is excellent. It counts my steps and distance accurately enough that my Fitbit is not long for this world. The built-in Activity app is also really quite well-designed and motivating, to the point that I fear for the future of third-party fitness tracker app developers. Consider the advantages that Apple has over them:

  1. Apple’s fitness tracking app is pre-installed, both on the watch and on the iPhone.
  2. It has access to private APIs and sensors; third-party apps can’t yet track heart rate, operate independently of the phone, or function in the background quite as well.
  3. It can be added to watchfaces as a ‘complication’. That alone is enough to elevate it over any third-party app, and I doubt we will see that capability opened up within the next 2-3 years.

Day 1

I received the watch yesterday morning and proceeded to fiddle with it throughout the day. I initially blamed its slowness on our poor office internet, but it became clear later in the day that it was just slow, period. Tried a lot of third party apps, and deleted almost all of them.

Day 2

Went to the British Library to see the Magna Carta exhibition. Didn’t fiddle with the watch much at all, except to:

  • Play music and podcasts
  • Occasionally look at my step count
  • Let a kid play around with it (he’d been staring at it for ages, his mum was amused)

Battery was still at ~80% by 4pm – very respectable. Then went for a 1 hour run, tracking it as an ‘Outdoor Run’, which took the battery down to ~60%. The watch was initially very distracting and reminded me why I stopped wearing GPS watches – frankly, I don’t need to know my distance or calories in real time. Plus I only realised afterwards how to change the distance units to km (it’s by a force touch on the ‘start run’ screen, obviously).

When I run, I wear my iPhone on an armband so it’s really inconvenient to switch between music and podcasts, or to select specific tracks. The watch – despite its slowness and small screen – made doing those things perfectly easy, which was delightful. For me, that alone is practically worth the purchase price, given how frequently I run and how much I enjoy listening to podcasts and music.

I expect that other people won’t care about that stuff at all (maybe they only listen to a set music playlist, or they keep their phone in their pocket while running, or they don’t run at all) but perhaps there will be other things that they really appreciate. The ability to see the weather or read tweets on my watch isn’t a big deal to me if I have my phone in my pocket; but if you don’t have pockets, it’s a much bigger deal.

So, we’ll see.

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Too Much Information

Eight years ago, I lamented to a friend that I was spending too much time keeping up with my RSS feeds. RSS feeds are generated by websites and they tell you when they’ve published new content; the feeds, and feed-readers like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon, and eventually Google Reader, became popular partly as a way to follow the posts from the then-nascent world of blogs. So, a little like a proto-Twitter, except with no limit on the amount of characters a post might contain.

I had subscribed to around 150 websites. This was not a large number by the standards of the time; many bloggers followed hundreds of feeds. But I wanted to read every posts from every website I subscribed to, which was the equivalent of half a book every day. Like a lot of people, I have a compulsive desire to ‘finish’ things and get numbers down to zero (emails, to-do lists, washing up, etc.), even if it’s not really that useful or interesting.

My friend told me that he followed precisely zero RSS feeds and what’s more, didn’t read the news that much either. “Most of it isn’t important,” he said, invoking his decades-longer experience of the internet. Inspired, I cut out two thirds of my feeds and got on with my life. RSS feeds no longer ruled my reading.

But now I have a different problem. Today, it’s easier than ever to find and read (for free) world-class long-form articles about all sorts of interesting subjects, and if you’re willing to pay a small amount for magazines like The New Yorker, you’ll have more piling up in your inbox every week. I love reading these long-form articles; they’re much easier to get through than books, and so you can learn about a much wider variety of topics in a more timely manner. Indeed, many long-form articles are better than the books that they occasional beget due to lean, unpadded nature (I’m looking at you, Malcolm Gladwell).

Unlike my blog RSS feeds, it’s not as easy to cull my long-form article sources. After all, surely as a responsible citizen, I’m practically obliged to read a 9,000 word article about drone warfare, or a 5,000 word article investigating how a future King Charles III might reign, or another 9,000 word article on the tests one must pass to become London cab driver — along with the threats from Uber? It takes up almost all of my reading time.

And when I’m not reading, I’m listening to 17 podcasts. I was actually shocked by the number when I just counted them now – 17! To keep the ‘unlistened’ count to zero, I find myself listening on my walk to work, while I’m running, on the tube, doing cleaning, any spare moment. At first I saw this as a wonderfully productive use of empty time, but I’ve belatedly realised that some amount of empty time is valuable in and of itself.

Articles, blogs, podcasts – these things are a great source for ideas and inspiration, and for learning about the world. Yet there’s such a thing as too much inspiration and too much knowledge if you don’t have enough time to process them. Cutting out some publications and podcasts will help, but as with my RSS feeds before, it’s not a long-term solution.

A while back, I became interested in the idea of a ‘secular sabbath’ where you unplug from the internet for a day a week. I don’t know if that model is perfect because, ideally, it relies on you having lots of friends who live nearby to talk to, whereas a lot of my friends are now scattered around the world, but there’s something to imposing a structure on your time in a way that quietens the world’s ceaseless demands for your attention. A very interesting problem to explore.