What you really need to get by

For nearly three years now, my wife and I have tried to be 'location independent people.' No apartments with long term leases. We move from place to place, seeing if we can make this mode work.

Repeatedly settling in and winding down over and over seems to be instructive. It has forced us to be efficient, to examine and rethink each of our possessions. (As an aside, here's my suggestion for anyone looking to de-clutter – Move houses)

So after nearly three years of doing this, here's my whittled down list of what I really need to get by: One big suitcase of sensible clothes, a sturdy set of multi-purpose pots and pans, a reliable car, and the very best electronic gadgets that I can afford to buy.



Everything else is only 'nice to have.'

A Few Quick posts

I haven't been posting here much lately. Many reasons. Among them are the "rules" that I have created for myself. Rules on what to post, how to write it, how to not sound arrogant, what it should convey, and most important, my worries about who might misinterpret what I say.

All of that has stifled my output.

So I am attempting to break free. For the next few days, I will post a few short quick posts. I'll call them as I see them, not worry about my rules. If I offend, it is only a by-product, not the goal.

So take the next few posts with a grain of salt. All of them, for that matter.

Now is the time

Even in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto – Basho

On paper, I have all the free time I can handle. And yet I don’t have enough of it.

This summer, my wife and I rented a condo in downtown Chicago for three months. We wanted to enjoy the city. The idea was to take leisurely walks and explore whatever caught our fancy. A summer vacation in our own city.

As soon as we moved in, we started discovering more things to do. Music concerts, festivals, library talks, author lectures, performances, new places to eat. I took on some consulting work. Thanks to Twitter, we discovered that there was great music every Thursday night, a neighborhood tour on Tuesdays, a foreign film festival every Wed, and jazz at lunch and lots more things. Friends and family came over to visit and stay. Pretty soon, we had so many engagements that we had to pick and choose.

In no time, my calendar was so full that I was just as busy as when I had a full time job. But this post is not about the numerous things to do in Chicago.

My main point is that there is never going to be enough time in life to do the things we want to. Each day, all of us are offered such an assortment of pleasurable diversions to choose from that we'll never have the kind of time in future that we secretly hope we will. Lennon was spot on when he reminded us to pay attention 'when we are busy making other plans.' No matter how many times we hear the cliché, this journey is the destination. This is it.

I am now convinced that our thinking is flawed when we say "Some day I am going to …" or when we tell ourselves "After I am done with this, I am going to get to the things I really want to." That's not quite the way things will unfold.

The real trick for each of us is to figure out how to do the soul-enriching things that we love and enjoy even as we do the things that occupy us day to day. Because this is it.

Emphasizing Mind over Material

Discussions around the concept of time versus money interest me. I recently came across a couple of articles that discuss wealthy people's non-conventional approaches to spending their money.

The first one is an article in the LA Times (by Jessica Guynn) wherein she writes about how the new Silicon Valley millionaires who are shunning the traditional materialism of the affluent. They make up their own minds about what makes sense for them. "I have pictured myself owning expensive things and easily came to the conclusion that I would not have a materially more meaningful life because of them," says Moskovitz, one of the neo-millionaires mentioned in the article.

As Jessica writes:

It's not that this new generation of tech entrepreneurs doesn't seek status, Marwick said. They just seek it in different ways.

"This is not a community that values good looks, visible wealth or having a hot body. Those are not the ways that they distinguish high status from low status," Marwick said. "Technology millionaires don't hobnob with celebrities or buy a fancy car. They travel to Thailand or they fund an incubator. These things are just as expensive, but that's the classic hacker ethos that prizes the mind, not materials."

Read the full article here.

The second one is by Barry Ritholtz, a columnist for the Washington Post titled "7 life lessons from the very wealthy." At some level all of us know these lessons, but it is always good to be reminded.

One of Barry's lessons is:

Don’t become “cash rich” and “time poor.”
Work is the process of exchanging your time for money. Remember: What you do with your time is far more meaningful than the goods you accumulate with your money. If you are working so much to become rich but you ignore your spouse and miss seeing your kids grow up, you are actually poorer than you realize.

Barry Rithotz runs a blog called "The Big Picture." Read the full article here.

Assorted Links - Living deliberately

A few quick assorted links for today. All of the following mostly deal with the idea of spending the limited time we have available thoughtfully and deliberately.

1. Merlin Mann of 43 folders on "Cranking."
Mann's day job is to write about time management. He posts about it and is writing a book on “how to reclaim your email, your attention, and your life." He wants us all to find the time and attention to do our best creative work. In the process though, he finds that he is not following his own suggestions. This post is in reaction to that realization.

2. Is a Well-Lived Life Worth Anything? (HBR)
Umair Haque laments the loss of "Eudaimonia" and says that we have replaced it with "Opulence" and materialistic pursuits. Some of the phrases he uses are worth thinking about: hedonic opulence vs. seeking eudaimonic prosperity. Let's hope that the Eudaimonic Revolution which he predicts does indeed happen, where everyone tries to "master the the art of living meaningfully well."

3. PenMachine's (Derek Miller) Last post.
Derek Miller's very last post. In this poignant read, he writes about everything he will miss, his family having to cope without him, and reminds us that we live in a "wondrous place."

Geoff Dyer - Otherwise Known As The Human Condition

It takes a bit of getting used to, the idea that spending 365 days a year doing exactly as you please might be a viable proposition. – Geoff Dyer


I spent the better part of last week reading Geoff Dyer's latest book, "Otherwise Known as the Human Condition." The book, which is a collection of his reviews and essays on a wide range of subjects (essays about photos, book reviews and synopses about authors, about World War I, pieces about jazz and its music-makers and a number of "personal" articles that are category-defying), is an exhilarating read.

To label Dyer a polymath is inadequate. He writes with confidence and intimate knowledge on a very wide range of topics, sharing his candid opinions without holding back.

I learned about Geoff Dyer from a review by Lonely Planet's Tony Wheeler. I am not reading much fiction these days (my attempt at "culling") and so I didn't read his "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi."

However, when I came across his Human Condition book, I picked it up. I have found that reading an author's "journalism in book form" is actually a very good way to get introduced to authors I have not read before. These types of books give us the option to read just a few articles to see if they resonate. If we like them, we can go on to read more of the author's books.

In this collection there were a number of articles that were often too literary for my taste. I was happy to abandon them and move on to the next article. I must add that this book is not for everyone. But I also discovered authors I should read –Rebecca West (her Black lamb and Grey Falcon) and Ryszard Kapuzcinski's (his real life adventures) and it was illuminating to read about what Dyer thinks of writers I admire—Cheever and James Salter.

I don’t think I have consciously thought about the difference between ambition and aspiration, not quite in the way Geoff makes them distinct, while also giving us a hint of what it takes to make it as a writer or an artist.

It is possible to have aspirations without having ambition – and vice versa. […] I had aspirations but was not ambitious. I liked the idea of writing because that was a way of not having a career. […] And though many of my friends aspired to be artists, not many of them had the will, talent, luck, or stamina to stick at it. Some of them were just too lazy.

In many of his nostalgic pieces there is an undercurrent of melancholy. Consider this section from his essay "On the Roof" where he wonders about what must have happened to all the people that he used to hang out with in the early 80's, the friends that he no longer kept in touch with:

The same things that happen to everyone: home ownership, marriage, a kid or two, disappointment, divorce, cancer scares, worsening hangovers, death of a parent or two, qualified success, school fees, depression, sudden rejuvenation following the discovery of Ecstacy, holidays in India or Ibiza, telly watching, coming out (as homosexuals), coming in (as heterosexuals), going to the gym, more telly watching, new computers, bad knees, less squash, more squash, more tennis, rewriting (and downplaying) of earlier ambitions to diminish scale of disappointment, fatal breast cancer, less sleep, less beer, more wine, more cocaine, hardly any acid, frightening ketamine overdose, total breakdown, more money, discreet tattoos, baldness, stopping going to the gym, yoga, even more telly watching…

The book has five sections, titled Visuals, Verbals, Muscials, Variables and Personals. After wowing the reader with his breadth of expertise, in the section titled "Personals" is where he becomes himself, descending from the super-human perch I had placed him on after reading the earlier sections of the book. He writes about growing up in the UK in a middle-class family with its economizing ways, and how he found a way out by becoming a "scholarship boy."

Geoff is very humorous and often self-deprecating in a confident way. Here he shares an exchange with a librarian at the exalted Institute of Jazz Studies in Rutgers, NJ, where the librarian gets to wondering about Geoff's audacity at writing a jazz book.

"So what are your credentials for writing a book about jazz?"
"I don't have any," I said. "Except I like listening to it."

Given where I am, there are many sentences and sentiments in the book that resonated.

[On his thoughts on getting a Ph.D as opposed to being interested in everything]: "Post-graduate work takes you down a path of greater and greater specialization (culminating in the supreme pointlessness of a Ph.D.)"

[On acquiring a taste for idleness]: "If Oxford had given me a taste for idleness, living on the dole in Brixton refined it still further."

[On choosing autonomy]: I have done pretty much as I pleased, letting life find it's own rhythm, working when I felt like it, not working when I didn't. I've not always been happy – far from it—but I have always felt responsible for my happiness and liable for my unhappiness.


In short, Geoff Dyer's Otherwise Known as the Human Condition delighted me while also making me ponder about many things that I haven't thought deeply about.

Sparked: Micro-volunteering for busy people

Micro-volunteering. I admire the creativity of the marketing team that thought up this concept. Even though each one of us probably wishes to volunteer our time to causes we believe in, our schedules simply don't permit it. With so many little things that need taking care of, and errands to run, it is near impossible to even set aside (say) 4 hours on any given Saturday for volunteering efforts. These days, we are all overburdened sherpas teetering under the load of our personal and professional to-do's.

Which is where the genius of a site like Sparked.com comes in. By allowing us to "micro-volunteer" they are able to remove that barrier to entry. Not too long ago, I found a mention of Sparked.com, an online micro-volunteering site. I was intrigued enough to investigate and I am so glad that I did.

The sign up process is a cinch – you can use your Facebook login (if you like). 100s of non-profits submit their "challenges." We (the volunteers) can click on 2-3 causes from a list of 12 (education and poverty where the ones I selected) and then the "skills" that we have to offer. (Again, from 12 choices I selected IT, Design and Copywriting.) And that was it. I was enrolled and in.


I was immediately presented with dozens of challenges for my causes that could use my skills. Each challenge is a task that takes just a few minutes. Probably because I chose Design and Copywriting, I was offered the chance to review a fund-raising appeal letter, and to critique non-profit websites. I completed a couple of challenges and it was as easy as adding comments to blogs.

A side benefit for me was that I got to find out about so many neat non-profit efforts that I didn't even know existed. In 30-45 minutes, I was able to respond to a 3-4 challenges.

Sparked.com also sends me reminder emails (if I have not visited the site in 7-10 days) and sends me a teaser challenge or two, asking if I would help out. So I go back and oblige if I have a few minutes.

Please note that I have only tried out Sparked for a few weeks. Normally, I would try out a site for a few months before posting about it. But it occurs to me that perhaps the best way I can assist Sparked is to help get the word out.

Each time I help out on a challenge, I get a buzz that is sweet and pure. Be sure to try this out and see if micro-volunteering is for you.