Musings Report #24 06-9-12 I'm Quitting!
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The Positive Aspects of Pondering Quitting
When the email piles up and the criticism is running particularly heavy, I indulge the same fantasy as a paid worker: quitting the blog and escaping from the treadmill of never catching up no matter how hard I work or how many hours I devote.
Running a weblog with an audience and revenues is betwixt and between: the income makes it a "real business" (at least to the IRS) but there's no boss (authority) or paycheck (income security). It's a hybrid enterprise, similar to many other one-person businesses: it requires a lot of work yet only a relative handful of people make a Corporate-America-level wage from it.
The trade-off in any one-person business is flexibility and freedom: the client is the "boss," and if you don't like the client you can always forego the income and refuse the work.
But people tire of their own enterprise just like they tire of working for someone else. They don't resign, they just close their business.
The process of pondering quitting something, from a job to a business to a relationship to membership in a group, offers a useful recalibration of what has meaning in our lives. Asking if we'd be be happier and more fulfilled doing something else, if done with an eye on the practical, helps us either re-discover what we find rewarding about our present work/locale or helps us conclude we are shriveling away to nothing under the dull sun of sameness.
While it's natural to fantasize about moving to some exotic locale, what we're generally pining for is an escape from the stifling routine of daily life. If you actually stay in an exotic locale for a few weeks, you soon find there is a routine to daily life regardless of where you live.
The question boils down to: is the initial pleasure in establishing a routine in (insert exotic locale of choice) deep-seated enough to last longer then the honeymoon phase? Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes no. The answer often depends on how well the new locale/work aligns with our elusive and evolving "true nature."
Then there's the question of making a living, or if that is not an issue, then of doing something that generates fulfillment with your time. If we quit our current work, what exactly will we do with ourselves?
What makes this question so tedious is that it's often difficult to persuade someone to pay money for some good or service that you actually enjoy providing/making. There is an abundance of goods and services in most places, and so competition for sales/cash is often keen.
The daily work of making that good or providing that service is thus key: if the process isn't fulfilling, we are unlikely to press on long enough to succeed.
Is something easy or difficult? I don't mean is the task difficult or easy--is it difficult to press on or easy to press on? Our consumerist culture places a premium on status, ownership of things and media visibility, and so people toil away at a job or enterprise not just for an income but for a sense of self and identity. The alternative is social defeat: obscurity, failure, invisibility.
Failure often clarifies what's actually worth working for. People facing bankruptcy are often haggard, depleted, crushed by the sense that financial failure will rob them of their value and identity. After the bankruptcy, they are often much happier--the burden of expectations they could never meet has been lifted. They can finally taste freedom, not just from crushing financial obligations but from their own misguided expectations.
What should be easy is playing to our strengths. The more strengths we have, the more difficult it is to decide which strengths we should play first. Our sense of fulfillment is our guide: if we have accomplished something but feel little satisfaction in the accomplishment, that suggests we're not doing what's easy, i.e. aligning our enterprise to our strengths and inner nature.
In investing our time and capital, it seems to me that it should be easy to do so. If it requires flogging oneself daily to press on, then it isn't easy, and that should raise red flags. Asking if we'd be happier saying "I quit!" is a useful thought experiment.
For myself, writing the blog is "easy," answering hundreds of emails is difficult. Quitting the blog would deprive me of something easy and relieve me of something difficult. Every enterprise/job requires trade-offs, and thinking about quitting helps us make a realistic assessment of what we gain and what we forego in pressing on. If the relief of being away and the sense of dread upon return is strong, our daily endeavors may no longer be aligned with our true nature and strengths.
Quitting may or may not be a good idea, but thinking about it realistically is a useful thought experiment.
Centralization and Deflation
Quick thought: centralization seems to pay dividends in economic expansion, but not in contraction. Centralized powers respond to having less to redistribute by becoming increasingly coercive, which robs them of legitimacy and effectiveness. The selective advantages in era of deflation and contraction are those of decentralization, not centralization. No wonder highly centralized States and Empires implode when deflation/contraction begin their phase of the debt cycle.
A Market Thought
I have been researching the moving parts of recession and the stock market for my next series on CM.com (chrismartenson.com), and it seems increasingly evident that the global economy is sliding into a deep and deflationary recession. The stock market is acting like 2008 and 2011, in my view, meaning the current rally will power much higher in one last gasp of euphoria befor reality intrudes.
The stock market is often a lagging indicator; in many cases, the economy has already entered recession even as the market continues acting bullish. It wouldn't surprise me if the S&P 500 rose to the 1,360 level, paused for refreshment and then powered on to 1,400 and the annual high of 1,422. A new high for the year is not out of the question if the Eurozone leaders announce "Spain is saved," which of course they are obligated to do at some point.
The rescue will be illusory, nothing will actually be fixed, and when the artificial sheen wears off in late July, then a long-cycle downtrend becomes likely.
From Left Field
In Era of Cheap Money, Consumers Are Shut Out: As interest rates have been dropping to new lows, American companies have been taking advantage of the cheap borrowing costs, but consumers have been largely left on the sidelines. (via Joel M.) (Household incomes down 10% since 2008, more leveraging is no longer possible.)
Uncle Ray’s Dystopia (via Maoxian) "Most of all, Mr. Bradbury knew how the future would feel: louder, faster, stupider, meaner, increasingly inane and violent. Collective cultural amnesia, anhedonia, isolation. The hysterical censoriousness of political correctness. Grown-ups reading comic books. A postliterate populace."
Rooftop solar panels overloading electricity grid: good explanation of why utilities are limiting solar panels that feed electricity back to the grid: Distributed alternative energy has its own infrastructure costs. Doesn't mean we should invest in it, but it's not just a matter of wiring up a few panels on a million homes.
"Crime once exposed has no refuge but in audacity." (Via Prudens Speculari)
Thanks for reading--
charles
