Uncommitted time I anticipate with pleasure, but planned time I often anticipate with a low level of discontent, even if it’s time I planned for pleasure. Why is that?
[edit, 8/13/24]: I think it’s planned social time that evokes the mild discontent—and I think it’s because I still hold an idolatrous candle for solo productive time. After all these years, GTD is still my god. Sigh.
Productivity slash peace of mind hack #372: Use a custom stylesheet to hide all but the first item in any list on the web version of the to-do list app I use. Now the endless to-do list, so important to this man’s reliable participation in modern life but sometimes so very peace-ruffling by its sheer volume, presents itself to me just one task at a time.
Today I am taking Focus up a notch: For 100% of day—morning, afternoon, evening, and night—I am allowing zero Messages and WhatsApp notifications to come through from anyone other than my immediate family, people with whom I have appointments in the next two days and, during the workday, my workmates. I am coupling this with a morning clearing and an evening clearing, rendering how I handle my instant messages more like how I handle my email. This experiment will last either forever or until I observe it’s unloving.
So folks will still get text replies from me twice a day. If that’s not fast enough and they need my attention more urgently, let them place a good, old-fashioned phone call. It’ll be like time travel back to 1993 (minus the coiled cords and dial tones)!
Note to self: When you find yourself reflecting unhappily about your job being helping make truck bed covers when you wish automobiles had never been invented, remember that these words of Paul were addressed to slaves: “Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord” (Colossians 3:23). Whatever you do. And besides, DiamondBack is easily the best manufacturing company (and one of the best companies period) to work for in central Pennsylvania. Everything about working there pretty much couldn’t better.
An elaborated 1 John 2:15-16 with some eye toward Ecclesiastes 11:9: Have desires of the flesh, but do not love those desires. Have desires of the eyes, but do not love those desires. Possess things, but do not love the pride of possession or estate.
Have desires of the flesh. Have desires of the eyes. Possess things. But do so lightly. Instead of loving them, love YHWH your god, and love your neighbor as yourself. 🧘♂️
The first chapter of Judges is all about how most of the tribes of Israel failed to drive out the Canaanites and other non-Israelite peoples from their inherited land. It’s just like yesterday and Civilization VI.
Step one in any anti-racist agenda: Refuse to speak in terms of race. Skin color? Pigment? Melanin? Yes. But “‘[r]ace’ itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem” (Ta-Nehisi Coates).
Living unanxiously mindful of your own certain death is probably salutary. Living unanxiously mindful of the certain death of those you love might be even more so.
On the subject of the solo satisfaction of biological and psychological drives (e.g., eating, masturbating, sightseeing): As long as they are not harmful and they are undertaken with thanksgiving, they are done in love, and are thus good.