In case you were wondering where I’ve been, this has been a killer of a week. Grading, multiple committees and meetings, registration advising, lots of late nights at work, little sleep, and getting ready for finals in a few weeks…and yesterday was just peak awful. I was just focused on classes all day, trying to get everything in shape.
So today I have resolved not to do my job at all. No classwork. No cell biology prep. Nothin’. I’m going to go for a walk in the snow, and then kick back and relax all day by, for a change, forgetting that I’m employed at all. I’ll think of something fun to do…although, I’m also thinking of maybe cleaning up my home office desk. Cables are taking over everything.
Good for you, Dr. Myers. I used to think that “quiet quitting” was just a newer term for burnout (which I experienced after 37 years of work), but the working world is far different today given the likes of Elon Musk as taskmasters.
One of the most valuable skills to avoid burnout is the skill to say “no”.
The vampires in the Sookie Stackhouse novels (but not in the True Blood TV series) could just chill out and stand like statues as long as they wanted. I envy that ability (but don’t tell Herschel Walker).
I would love to quit my boring, meaningless, call center job where I have to constantly deal with morons and getting less-than a living wage in return. Sadly, I’m 48 and have a useless college degree so finding anything more lucrative or interesting is right out. At this stage, I’m just waiting to die so I don’t have put up with this soul-crushing stupidity any longer.
“Quiet quitting” has got to win some sort of award for most misleading term of the year if not ages.
Doing your job ain’t quitting.
@ 2
Sadly, that’s not an option for many of us. Telling an employer “no” will put you on an instant track to living in a cardboard box behind a seedy dive bar.
@2
Indeed, and I’m trying to teach that skill to my minions at work.
Sure, I do occasionally need them to do extra work. More often than I’m comfortable with. But I also want them to know that they don’t owe me anything after the end of their shift. And I don’t want them to burn out on me. I want them to know that what I’m asking for is a favour and it’s ok to say no. I don’t need an explanation, I need an answer I can plan with.
@4 Akira MacKenzie and others that feel life has been reduced to an abusive treadmill. Please, do not give in to despair. There are always fulfilling opportunities outside of ‘the job’. Find something creative or rejuvenating whether it is a physical activity or mind/body soothing relaxation while learning and pondering things intellectually. We are caught in the jaws of the Crapitallist machine in our jobs and as consumers. These are, indeed, times that assault our sanity. Your contributions here can be a worthwhile contribution, find others to refresh your mind.
Not to rub it in but it’s really pleasant here in the Orwellian “free state” of Florida. I took advantage of the coolness to cut back foliage in my backyard so the internet tech can get to the pole in a few days as my internet mysteriously went out yesterday. I think there’s something loose at the power pole. Weirdly, shaking the line after cutting back a branch that was touching it on the way in to the house must have restored the connection. Still gonna keep the service call. Weird it survived two recent hurricanes and picked a calm cool morning to fail. I thought low temperature may have impacted whatever iffy tolerance it was relying upon. It is a bit fickle.
I have lately toyed with dropping Speculum for T-Mobile Home Internet since my cellular connection is pretty good at 5G and I’ve gotten all those COVID shots to boost signal. They give you some cellular modem/“router” thing that lacks NAT, but I could kill the SSID radios and use my current router (possibly needing to match the MTUs).
Anyway it might be cool for you PZ to post a quick playing hooky from the blog today note as people might get concerned if you go dark too long. We recall some of your health related stuff that kept you away and start biting our nails from anxiety.
@9 hemidactylus — If you can, you might want to shake your connection loose again before the tech shows up. Intermittent failures are very difficult to troubleshoot and if the connection is working, he may say, ‘see, it’s working fine, no problem’ and do nothing to make sure it is reliable. Network Address Translation is a good idea. One other thing I’ve recommended to our computer clinics is power down your modem for a few minutes every few days. When it is powered back up, it will probably connect to a different I.P. address and this helps some in anonymizing. If your phone can create an internet ‘hot spot’ you could test the 5G T-mobile connection to your computer that way. However, one caution, there have been a lot of warnings about T-mobile being cracked/hacked and all the user data being stolen a number of times. Good luck.
Also, PZ, remember the old saying, “All work and no spiders makes PZ a dull boy” You are important to all us ‘lurkers’, so, we do applaud your efforts to maintain your mental and physical health.
So when you get back to work, you’re gonna tell the kids how you had to walk through three feet of snow to quiet-quit, and then had to mess with a bunch of old-timey cables? I hope the generation that grew up with wi-fi everything are suitably impressed…
Cables or the web of a giant spider?
Personally…I prefer wired connections. More reliable and more secure than wireless. Does help to have some spares on hand, though.
For what it’s worth, have a good one. Also avoid the news for a day or so. It’s not doing my blood pressure any good, I doubt it’ll be any different for you.
A day off!
One of the advantages of being in work. :)
@ 8
I try. I really do. However, after a day of dealing with some very, very stupid people being forced upon me in a constant stream, I seldom have the motivation or desire to do anything other than crawl into bed and sleep. Even though I spend my day sitting at a desk and talking to morons, I’m exhausted. Even the things that used to give me joy can’t rouse me.
Yes, I’m taking my anti-depressants, but those just aren’t cutting it.
Akira, have you read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich?
100% support this, PZ. Academia has been rife with exploitative arrangments, and getting worse over the last decade.
Just last week, the subject I teach had some examiners pull out just before one of the most important exams of the entire course. These are OSCEs, so the marking has to be done face-to-face at a set time. I was invited to step in and mark students for the morning (starting at 7:30 btw), and although not as critical, could I also do the afternoon session as well? The email ended with a note that this was an honorary role, so there would be zero pay for it. So yeah, saving our butts would be greatly appreciated, but not appreciated enough to give any recompense.
I can’t even justify a “swings and roundabouts” perspective because, as a casual appointment, the uni gives me no roundabouts. I already put in many hours of free work for them doing things like mandatory training (most of which I agree is important, but if I must to do these courses to work then I should be paid for the time it takes to do them) and staff meetings (not covered by the contract).
I have decided not to help out this time despite the fact that it will disadvantage students, colleagues, and the local admin staff (whom I admire greatly — our problem is entirely central) on the principle that the institution has to learn to stop its years-long dive into increasingly exploitative treatment of teaching staff, and the only way it will learn is if the disasters its policies cause stop being bailed out at great cost to the rescuers and zero cost to them.
This is becoming increasingly typical in universities. It must be resisted.
Yours in solidarity.
@ 18
I tend to steer clear of Solzhenitsyn since his whining about the USSR made him a darling of the fascists.
Akira, I see. That’s a ‘no’.
So. Have you read The People of the Abyss by Jack London?
PZ,
1. Never feel you have to explain to your peanut gallery about kickin’ back.
2. Doing your job 40 hours per week is NOT “quitting”. It is DOING YOUR JOB!
3. Giving the middle finger to any or all obligations from time to time is as necessary to mammalian life as is breathing.
@ 21
Correct, it’s a no on both counts.
Look, if you’ve got a point, please just make it.
BTW PZ,
If you are looking for about a 5 minute diversion, let me recommend #1foralldnd on youtube. Hilarious!
I hate the phrase “quiet quitting”. It sounds like something executives made up when they noticed people weren’t putting in as much unpaid overtime as before. How about we call it “preventing personal wage theft” because it’s a more accurate term.
I think I’ve made my point, Akira.
Alverant #25
👍
@ 26
Let me guess: Other people have it far worse; therefore, I have nothing to complain about? If so, the last time I read someone on this blog making that point his post started with “Dear Muslima.”
Close, Akira.
More like perspective.
That’s the spirit!
(I know, I know. Hard to take a day off self-pity)
@ ^ & 18, 21, & 26 John Morales : Have you heard this song before?
WARNING : A gendered slur repeated including in song title and swearing but seems pretty apt here still.
I do not think you are helping or being empathic or kind here – quite the reverse. That reflects badly on you. Please desist.
StevoR, you really could do better. Not that I expected that.
First, since you bothered to actually type “this song”, surely it would have been better to just copypaste the title: “Bowling For Soup – “Don’t Be a Dick” – Official Video”, so as to save me looking at the link.
Incidentally, you clearly haven’t noticed how I routinely put the text attribute in my links, with a description of what it is to which I link so that vision-impaired people can use the alt-text to be able to garner info about the link without actually following it and consuming the content.
(I’m not that much of a dick!)
Second, you are entitled to your opinion, ignorant and clueless as it may be.
Third, if you want to support Akira’s self-loathing and whining, why not do so directly?
Fourth, I shan’t bother with the song itself, but a second or two brings up the lyrics:
“Don’t be a dick
Don’t be an asshole
Just be nice”.
(You think that’s what you’re doing?)
Clueless, you are. Those comments were not intended for you.
(This one is)
@ ^ John Morales : “You think that’s what you’re doing?”
It’s what I’m advising you to do.
You think I was unaware of that?
You were getting stuck into Akira responding nastily to him venting about his personal situation and I thought – still think – you are being a jerk and was thus saying so.
If you want to show some empathy and be kind to another regular commenter here who is suffering and make that suffering less rather than more then you are going about it in the wrong way.
Yes, its always worse on Jupiter but I don’t think your attempt to add “perspective” here is helping or showing much empathy as is already clear. So why don’t you, y’know just let it be and not continue to annoy someone who (as far as I’m aware) hasn’t hurt you or attacked you in any way. Certainly not in this thread which you are derailing here.
No I hadn’t noticed that nor is it something I know how to do.
StevoR:
Right. “Do as I say, not as I do”. Got it.
Yes, I get that’s what you thought I was doing. Because you’re clueless.
In your estimation, sure. In reality, no.
(For example, did you notice I made it clear that, in my estimation, Akira is smart enough to work out what my point was? Because I don’t share his own opinion as to his worthlessness!)
Well, that’s exactly what I was doing, until you pushed yourself in.
Now I’m responding to you.
(Why don’t you, y’know just let it be and not continue to try to patronise me? ;) )
You think I’m derailing it by actually responding to comments therein?
(Think about it: if I’m the one derailing, what do you think you’re doing?
You respond to me, I respond back, and nothing has to do with PZ’s day off any more than Akira’s #4, and subsequent)
I suspected as much. Have a look at any of my hyperlinks.
So. I found an explanatory link, but I think that you are sufficiently competent to find one for yourself, should you care about such stuff.
(Look for text attribute of anchor tag in HTML)
person who routinely insults other people, is puzzled as to why some other person felt insulted by their vaguely insulting comment…
I don’t post a lot, but I frequently read through a lot of these comments, and this person used to pepper their insults and take-downs with some relevant information, but lately, from my perspective, they’ve been more about nit-picking, semantics, one-up-man-ship, and generally “being a dick”, than in actually contributing anything positive to the discussion.
This person lowers the overall atmosphere of the comment section, and a lot of interesting and informative comments are going to be missed, because the people who would otherwise make them, don’t want to interact with “a dick”
When reading Akira’s @4 I can kinda relate. Often it comes down to Sartre’s “hell is other people” mixed with mission creep and wondering if I’ll make it past the finish line of retirement. On that goal, there’s Metallica’s “soothing light at the end of my tunnel a freight train coming my way”. Yeah “retirement”. Until then there’s Camus’ daily rock rolling uphill grind of absurdity. [I do ponder Camus’ clash with Sartre over the USSR.]
I fantasize cathartically about real quitting often enough:
Yardwork was therapeutic. Gave me a sense of control which contrasts with work related futility and despair. I gouged myself on branches and cussed loudly though. Blood was lost. The foliage will grow back soon enough. Control is an illusion.
John Morales — You think Akira’s comments reflect self-loathing? Really? That’s your go-to here? He can, and should, blame capitalism for the problems he’s describing. Still exhausting dealing with that shit, though, and doing something about it alone is impossible. Organizing while utterly drained of energy is also a ludicrous thing to demand. Show some damned compassion. Yeesh.
@ Akira #4
Hi, Akira!
This isn’t advice I’m giving you because I know next to nothing about your situation or possibilities. I’ll just tell you something I did, and maybe that will give you some ideas.
At one point of my life, I got more or less to the stage you’re at. My university degree was useless to me, I was raising my child on my own, and I wasn’t sure where in the world I was. For a while I took on some “community work”. I was caretaking a school and a cemetery. That got me into all sorts of menial labor that didn’t pay much of anything. (I.e., the community wanted the work done. They just didn’t really want to pay for it.)
But I wasn’t terribly unhappy. I find just being active, being up and about, helps my morale tremendously. Sometimes you need to get away from a desk. Working at a call centre is something I couldn’t imagine myself doing. I think a job like that would finish me in two days.
Eventually I got back to my desk. I took on free-lance work as a translator, something that I personally find quite rewarding. When all we’re doing is just getting by for a while, we do the best we can. There are better and worse ways of just getting by.
Don’t give up hope. Look around and see if you can find some better way of getting by until you can possibly find some way of actually living.
Good luck! You’ve got a sympathizer here.
Totally OT, but right up PZ’s alley!
zefrank – True Facts: Tarantulas
https://youtu.be/EhJYtmZuhV4
# 33 John Morales
Not for the first time I ask why has this vile troll not been banned yet – others got banned for much less. I mean just look at the fucking state of this. This is what Pharyngula commenters are expected to put up with?, simply because Morales is some old bloke who’s been around since BBSs were a thing. Can we not finally flush this shit down the potty?
[meta]
Actually, Bob the not-Silent, both Akira and I have been commenting on this blog since before it was FTB — back in SB days. In fact, I was around back before SB.
(As have you, as I recall)
—
Hey, how many times by now on this very blog alone have you burst into the thread to accuse me of trolling and (only often) call for my banning?
(Wanna hazard a number? Or have you lost track?)
The invention of quiet quitting:
Quiet quitting is great. I’ve quiet quit life, and hard. I do exactly what I have to to not freeze or starve to death.
Ladies, Gentlemen, People Who Identify As Neither Ladies Nor Gentlemen,
Whilst it is always entertaining to see Pharyngula being Pharyngula (I was here earlier than everyone and hated/loved everyone first, so there. I was on Talk.Origins. I know who Ray is. Don’t fuck with me ;-) ), I think the things Akira has described are genuine, unpleasant, and deserving of nothing but empathy and support. Quite seriously.
John’s “other people have it worse” style comments could be seen as tin eared and unsympathetic…
…Or are they something else?
Why get upset with each other when what John has generously provided us all with is a cracking opportunity to enact a pun run/Pharyngula episode of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch?
I believe that the internet has lost its way. Too many echo chambers and divisive cesspits of erroneously self-corroborating falsehoods and fallacies. We should return to the original value of the internet: Cat macros and taking the piss.
Rather than curse John’s insensitivity, reignite old feuds, or minimise Akira’s serious situation we could discuss the fact that I had to work 28 hours a day at mill, pay mill owner for permission to come to work and when I got home I could not even has cheezburger.
Louis
https://icanhas.cheezburger.com/
@36 Can we maybe not blame capitalism for Akira’s situation, which is a lot of people’s situations, for what is really the fault of a governing system with no interest in reigning in oligarchs or big business? And for the record, if you think capitalism sucks, communism is the steaming pile of shit that you do not want to wade through. I have extended family who lived in the Soviet Union. Communism makes the current economic situation here look like rainbows and roses.
“Twitter doesn’t need 7,500 employees all it needs is 150 H1B workers who are willing to code in goblin mode”
is the REAL problem. 40 years of Republican tax code mismanagement and servile billionaire bootlicking is the problem.
Capitalism works GREAT when leavened generously with socialism and a government that cracks down on bad actors. Right now, what we have is “anything goes”, the Republican annihilation of the social safety net and a race to the bottom. See the Twitter comment above.
The problems with capitalism are too many to number and capitalism is all about quantification and valuation. There’s the initial enclosure booting people off the land forcing them toward the satanic mills. There’s primitive accumulation. There’s disenchantment and desacralization. Everything becomes commodified. We can parcel people out as monetized units for insurance purposes or greatest good valuations. How much utility or use value have I left? Exchange value? Via instrumentality people are not ends in themselves but merely means for someone else’s bottom line, their fiduciary duty to maximize profit for shareholders…social costs or third party externalities be damned.
But yeah TINA (there is no alternative), right? With market driven triumphs in the late 80s history ended. Market ideology triumphs as a…marketing campaign.
And I forgot the ultimate specter of privatization. Eliminate public goods altogether. The market decides.
I can certainly sympathize with Akira, having spent 2014-2020 working in a call center doing surveys, mostly political, mostly with Republican voters. Physical limitations left me mostly without options.
Not only was it a low-paying dead-end job talking to morons, I was talking to Republican morons who offered up such gems as “Donald Trump is the greatest president this country ever had” and “Obamacare killed my wife” and “they need to stop taking land away from America and putting it into parks.” If I believed in a soul I would call it soul-crushing.
It was so bad I welcomed the pandemic. Lockdown was totally fine with me.
Now I’m retired and hoping those same idiots don’t steal my social security and force me to go back to work. I think about the dumbest things people said to me on the phone, and imagine asking them about Covid-19 or January 6. Yeesh.
Sorry, Akira. I have no advice and nothing really comforting to say. But I do get it and would never dismiss it by recommending a book about somebody who has it worse. My useless college education was in music, and if there’s one thing I’m not, it’s tone deaf.
Dealing with morons daily is bad enough, but when those morons are not only making things unpleasant for you but actively fucking up an entire planet, yeah, that’s exhausting.
@ Akira, Silent Bob: I think John Morales’ point is to not call someone who lived in what was virtually a living hell a “whiner.” Incidentally, the term “whiner” has become nothing more than a cheap shot, it’s been overused too much. And if you’ve never been in a Russian prison, don’t criticize Solzhenitsyn for complaining about it. (No, I haven’t spent time in a Russian prison either, but I’m pretty sure it sucks.)
The Scandinavian countries (and probably Germany and many other West European countries) have shown not only is it possible to have a mixed economy with a strong public sector- it is a winning combination.
I think Sweden is (among non-OPEC countries) the place with the most billionaires per capita, and yet – the health care is overwhelmingly public owned, the education free and so on.
This is not parochial nationalism on my part- I want to point out what works.
You will never learn that from Fox News, Wall Street Journal or Daily Mail.
I would add the battle for a better world starts with fighting the propaganda we are immersed in, like a fish is immersed in water.
@ christoph : “No, I haven’t spent time in a Russian prison either, but I’m pretty sure it sucks.
Do you think being in prison ever in any country doesn’t suck?
Of course, these things are relative and depend on individuals and some prisons are a hugely amount of unquantifiables worse than others but still.
FWIW, I have read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich many years – even yikes decades – ago. It is very griman d depressing reading and I would not wish it upon my worst enemies.
But just because things could be a lot worse doesn’t excuse them being bad or make that bad acceptable.
I’m pretty sure Akira MacKenzie was & is already well aware that other people have things worse and that doesn’t give him much consolation given his own sitution is horrible but less bad. Scant consolation is the phrase that springs to mind. Unhelpful is aword that also springs to mind.
@45 “Can we maybe not blame capitalism for Akira’s situation, which is a lot of people’s situations, for what is really the fault of a governing system with no interest in reigning in oligarchs or big business?”
No. If your car is stolen, do you blame the thief or the cops who didn’t stop the thief? Capitalism is completely to blame. Businesses have a choice. They choose to abuse their employees. While the government should stop them, it should never take one iota of blame away from those who made the choice to do something bad.
silvrhalide @45 — No, we cannot not blame capitalism. It is quite literally directly responsible for the creation and perpetuation of the precise systems and mechanisms that Akira is dealing with. Your “well communism equals the USSR” comment has no merit, and even if it did, “communism” and capitalism are not our only two options. The USSR was a state capitalist society with a centrally planned economy designed to reach communism based on Lenin’s overconfident assumptions about what would necessarily get there. However, the idea of a communist state is an odd one, because while a state can be communist in its ideology, it cannot be communist in the sense of having communism as its mode of production. Communism, as understood by communists, is stateless, as well as classless and moneyless, and its primary principle of distribution was summarized by none other than Marx himself as being “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” and by Peter Kropotkin, who I am more inclined to side with in general as an anarcho-communist rather than a Marxist, as the “right to wellbeing.” With this in mind — the USSR had quite clearly not achieved communism’s end goal, nor the end goal of the revolutionaries who initially created it. While I would blame Lenin’s arrogance for many of the failings of the USSR, I think it nearly goes without saying that even he would be horrified at the state the USSR was in even under Stalin. In fact, his final letter to the other party leaders while he was ill and dying warned, among other things, of Stalin’s excessive lust for power as a major problem. This narrative of how impossibly vile and evil and unthinkable communism is, just look at the state of the USSR, is little more than propaganda. Leninism failed, yes, but that is not proof that nothing else is possible. It’s barely even evidence.
birgerjohansson @50 — It is undoubtedly preferable to what the rest of us are suffering with now. However, true as that may be, our global economic system of capitalism still requires losers. Much as it pains me to say this, Scandinavian social democracy would not be possible in its current form without the emiseration of the global south. You are not isolated from that global economy; you are one piece of it. You have not ended exploitation, merely exported it. It is not enough. It’s better than the rest of us have, but it’s still not enough.
@46 Pure unalloyed capitalism is nothing more than a race to the bottom. As far as “booting [people] off the land [and] booting them towards the satanic mills”, yes, that’s what pure capitalism looks like. I would like to point out, however, that taking away land from landowners and giving it to “the people” (don’t make me laugh) to work as a (disastrous) farming collective while forcing people out of the cities didn’t work out real well either. It led to insufficient (and shoddy) manufactured goods, satanic mills (still! so much for the workers’ paradise!) and far too many people forced into farming on insufficient land, which led to famine and starvation (because the USSR’s solution was to tell the forced farmers to work harder and then they’d have more food. Uh, no, agriculture doesn’t work that way.)
I’d also like to point out that the “workers’ paradise” government was just as corrupt and horrible as the worst capitalist companies (looking at you, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, etc.)
should have been “reining in”. Stupid autocorrect.
@49:
Actually, I hear these days it comes with plenty of opportunities for fresh air and foreign travel.
@52 I’d blame the cops and the thief. The thief had choices too, and made the choice to steal.
And yes, companies who abuse their employees are absolutely responsible for the abuse. At no time did I ever state that they weren’t. Capitalism, as such, wasn’t the issue so much as the increasingly tilted playing field. The real problem is that the US government, mostly under Republican regimes, eliminated the social safety net and oh so carefully declined to prosecute the bad actors. More to the point, they frequently rescued the bad actors from their bad decisions (TARP anyone?) Republicans simultaneously eliminated the social safety net AND moral hazard. If there had been prosecution and crackdown on the bad actors (aka crappy companies) there’d be fewer crappy companies and better working conditions and pay. That’s what happed in post WWII US capitalism, and, for far too briefly, during the pandemic. The one silver lining from the pandemic, actually, is that a lot of people decided that a shitty $9/hour job wasn’t worth dying for and quit. It forced companies to offer more money and better working conditions. Every time I heard people pissing and moaning about how “no one wants to work anymore” I’d ask “have you tried throwing money at the problem?” Try paying people a living wage, see where that takes you. And start cracking the whip with the anti-trust laws to level the playing field. Let’s see how many companies would pull an Elon if they know the government isn’t riding to their rescue. For that matter, what if we stopped outsourcing everything to crappy private companies and had a robust government employment sector as a rival to private business? (Dismantling the government services and replacing them with outsourced private companies was a Republican mantra too. It decidedly did not result in better goods and services, contrary to Republican fantasies. Witness SpaceX and Blue Origins replacing NASA. NOT an improvement.)
Quiet quitting? Yeah, na.
I have a colleague who is ‘quiet quitting’ over the completely ‘unreasonable demands’ of our boss that we collect and collate all the required information for the business to operate efficiently.
The thing is, over the past 10 years, the boss has introduced new platforms with which the data can be collated, platforms my ‘quiet quitting’ colleague refuses to use. So his quiet quitting isn’t even meeting the minimum required for the job, and the rest of us have to pick up his slack.
And here in Oz you can’t just fire someone without due process which in this case is writing KPIs that he has to meet, and having frequent performance reviews to see how well he is meeting them.
Meanwhile my job is impacted by the quiet quitter because I have to fill the gaps he leaves.
He is a great guy. I get on pretty well with him, but now I wish he either sucked it up and did what is reasonably expected, or fuck off (loudly quit)!
@ StevoR, #51: My only objection was Akira calling Solzhenitsyn a whiner. That was shallow and cheap. I’m not putting Akira down for his situation or complaining about it, he has a right to do that. When Akira criticizes Solzhenitsyn for whining about having it much worse than he does, he’s just kicking down. No need for that.
Since things seem to have calmed down, I’ll elaborate somewhat.
You know I wrote how I wrote @16: “A day off!
One of the advantages of being in work. :)”?
Similar sentiment when advocating the first and the second book.
Perspective; reading that sort of stuff makes me appreciate the things — the mundane and basic things — that I have. I appreciate having it when I learn about (entirely real situations) where people appreciate them, or at least I’m reminded I appreciate them.
Like PZ appreciating a day off, with no commitments or chores (well, more-or-less) — not the same if one is retired and every day is like that.
Anyway. Those books are about people who make the endure circumstances, who appreciate as luxuries the things we take for granted, and who carry on nonetheless. And they remind me of what I do have, and that it is to be appreciated. And, I suppose, that we social apes judge ourselves by our relative status and circumstances to our immediate fellow-apes.
—
In passing, wife has taken a casual job (tutoring in English) and made a comment to that effect; that is, that now she is back working, she appreciates days off that much more. Something kinda luxurious and special, like PZ’s weekend.
And, seriously, I really think I’m lucky as fuck. I have the life those protagonists in books seek — the quiet, relaxed, maybe not rich but comfortable life with no particular danger or crises to overcome. And, because I read those books (and have seen multiple ethnographic doccos about life in less-developed places) I do very much appreciate that.
But, of course, everyone is different.
@ 59 John Morales
Dude, for you, quiet quitting is a sensational idea – go ahead, make our day.
UnsilentBob: can’t. I’m retired.
(Any progress on how many decrials you have accrued?)
—
Also, I very much notice you use the royal ‘we’ a shitload.
(That, and you earnestly avoid contesting the substance of my comments)
(Any comment about the concept being sad about what you don’t have and glad about what you do have?)
(To be clear, I meant stop trolling Pharyngula. I realized my #60 could be misinterpreted after posting.)
NoisyBob, basic logic for you: to stop, I’d have to have started.
(I can’t achieve logical impossibilities, much as you try to build me up)
—
You know, you’ve been at this endeavour for (literally) months.
Here’s around the time I first became irritated at your foolishness:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2022/09/19/good-god-when-will-this-end/#comment-2150171
You’ve done exactly the same elseblog. Told you much the same, there.
I know, I know. A quest to quash the snark. Tilting at windmills you think are giants. That sort of thing.
An obsession, from all the evidence at hand.
The first few times? Meh.
The next ten or twenty times? Wow.
Now? Pellucid, your obsession is.
Not that the how or why of it matters much, but you should realise you’re doing exactly that which you accuse me of doing. Told you that, already, but…
Anyway.
In the early days, I kept pointing out to you that every fucking reader of the comments can make their own determination, and that the various blog hosts are undoubtedly aware of me. For over a decade now. Didn’t change a thing.
So, right now, I put it to you that at least 4/5ths of your comments over the last few months are purely made to call me a troll — that’s your entire purpose.
What do you say? Care to dispute that? Offer evidence otherwise?
[Ah, I miss the ol’ pitbull with lipstick]
John Morales #65
me, too
I’m just staggered that given the opportunity to fix all things with a pun run none of you went for it. None of you.
You’ve changed.
Louis
Nah, no punnish punishment for you, Louis.
BASTARDO!
Louis
@64 John Morales
Apparently it might only be 80÷ of the purpose.
:)
:>