Doing a bunch of different things you don’t like is not variety
Doing a bunch of different things you don’t like is not an experience of variety.
Why? Because those different things share one common feature, which is that you don’t like them. In a sense, they weren’t even a bunch of different things, since you felt the same way the whole time.
If you had felt a variety of different ways when doing those variety of different things, then you’d be getting somewhere!
Jeni Norton are discussing. 
Variety People 
Jeni Norton 6:35 am on January 21, 2013 Permalink |
Now, THIS is some mighty astute logic. At first I was like, “Oh, come on. SURE it is. They’re different, which means varied, which is the root of variety.” And then you got me. With the part that starts with “because.” You also answered a “why” question. That in itself is somewhat heroic. Thank you.
This makes me think, too… Perhaps I am not a variety person. Or perhaps I experience variety in a variety of ways. And maybe my ways are sort of “cheating.” But maybe not, as this is my first venture toward your philosophy as outlined in your blog. So… you tell me, if you want.
As a kid, I started making up games just to get through the chores of life. Clearing the table after dinner became a mental exercise, a visualization game. I would see the table, memorize where everything was, focus and burn it into my imagination. Then I would remove two or three items, turn from the table and take them to the kitchen; then go back to the altered table and reconstruct it. In my brain. I think you may be the first person to have heard this; I thought people would make fun of me for it. Well… for this and about a billion other ways I qualified for the goober award I was sure existed among junior high kids (and maybe teachers, who knows.)
As a grown up, I have sometimes gone to my job knowing I would do the same exact thing all day long. It has taken everything from placing slight emphasis on certain things and allowing others to remain in the background, to using all different colors of highlighters and writing pens and post-it note papers just to make my eyeballs happy, to volunteering for those head-stretching spreadsheet design tasks (with ghastly deadlines) to get past the tedium while keeping the paychecks (and the benefits) streaming in.
I still play the visual games – especially when cleaning kitchens and bathrooms, or dusting my largest pieces of furniture – but also when doing laundry, and even on some of the most mundane reports at work. For which I also check back the work with a rainbow of ballpoints.
OMG. What if there’s a goober award for adults, too…?
David Loughry 11:09 pm on March 8, 2013 Permalink |
I’ll take somewhat heroic! You are most welcome.
It seems to me you often take situations with low variety and turn them into ones with much more variety. You’re not sticking with the dreaded feeling of “I hate this, I hate this, I hate this” when doing boring things which, without your games, probably would be doing a bunch of different things you don’t like. You’ve found ways to like them!
This reminds me of when I used to mow the lawn after coming home from the first year of college, which included some design courses that loosened me up. Going straight back and forth? Boring! I would make all kinds of lines and designs with the mower that would slowly disappear as I finished. I decided, so I mow some grass twice, so what?? So it’s a little inefficient, so what?
Which leads, with your talk about your job, to two other points. One point is, while our society is not ONLY focused on efficiency, it may often be OVERLY focused on efficiency. Which may often lead to boring jobs. And I think many people may be often bored by their work. I think there are at least good two angles of approach in changing this. One is at the more micro level of putting the idea of more variety out there and then supporting people in their efforts to value, allow, seek and manage variety in their lives. The other angle is at the more macro level of treating environments, contexts and proximities as living things in a sense, that we can make efforts to keep alive, and when those environments, contexts and proximities are more the focus, individual people may be able to have more variety in their lives. It’s like by doing one thing you also get another thing you want. I also think networks allow treating environments, contexts and proximities as living things more than we are currently leveraging.
The other point is about the evolution of computers. (I know, pretty gooberish!) Did you know there came a time when there were so many extra computing cycles (excess capacity) in their machines, they realized they didn’t have to write the most efficient code anymore, and could start doing extravagant things like creating the graphical user interfaces we are surrounded by now? Similarly, I think the ability of networks to let us monitor and relate to environments, contexts and proximities is currently a kind of excess capacity. What if wherever you went, you could not only just know about where you were, or be entertained by or buy things related to where you were, both of which current technology allows, but also if you chose you could join in to help create, sustain and enhance wherever you were, because you could easily see what was going on and what needed to be done? Wouldn’t that enhance the variety in your life? I think this is totally doable and I’m looking for people to collaborate with who are either already building it or want to build it.
Thanks for your comment Jeni! Sorry it took me a while to respond. I think part of what I’m saying is your ways are NOT sort of “cheating” but you may sometimes be constrained by circumstances. And changing those circumstances may involve, to some degree, changing the mental, physical and software infrastructures we operate within.
Also, responding to you resulted in some writing I may have to elevate to a post of its own! These are ideas I’ve had and sometimes written about, but replying to you helped me put them into a good, compact form. Thank you for that! I’ll give you credit and perhaps some other proxri for triggering it! Of course for your proxri it would help to know more about what is important to you via your ProxMonitor …