america: a nation founded on genocide and trauma that is afraid to acknowledge death and grief

back in july, i listened to the pauline boss episode of on being. i can’t remember exactly what she studies but below is a paraphrase of a comment she made:

we [america] are a nation founded on trauma and genocide. of course we don’t want to and are afraid societally to acknowledge death and grief. if we did, it would never end because it’s baked into every institution we have.

to be honest, i’m struggling to remember the exact context of what she was discussing, but it had something to do with the myth of closure. what i do remember is how true i thought her statement was.

i’ve specifically been thinking about this in the context of police. in america, so many people respect and trust in the police. however, the roots of the police are racist as fuck. the roots of the modern police forces we have today are people (often poor, white, and immigrant) that rich white people paid to “enforce order” among slaves, free black people, and people who agitated against the wage-labor systems enmeshed in slavery and indentured servanthood. this strategy (as is often employed by rich people) gave poor white people a stake in the systemic status quo. even though the extractive labor systems of slavery were bad for them and they should have been aligned with people trying to change the system, the police forces gave them incentive (jobs) to keep things as they were.

but we don’t talk about that. we talk about guns and police brutality and black-on-black crime (which isn’t real) body cameras and “good cops” and reforming police.

what we really need to do is re-imagine how communities stay safe. safety is almost definitely not possible when one community pays another to protect it from a third community. even if people don’t understand the roots of the system, the effects of its foundation reverberate throughout it. for a while i didn’t understand why people (especially some black lives matter activists) were calling for an end to police. i get it now.

if we stopped to truly acknowledge and move productively through the death and grief caused by our systems, we could no longer avoid the question “where is all this death coming from?” if we looked at the roots of almost all of our systems, we would be forced to face the fact that this whole thing is based on genocide and trauma (eradication of the native american people who were here first, slavery, farm labor, factory labor related to clothing and technology production, etc).

hm.

open question on internalized oppression

what do you do when someone who has internalized oppression says something that is oppressive to their own group? 

last week i was talking to a friend (woman) who called her boss a bitch. now, i fully believe that gendered derogatory terms are sexist and never to be used. had my friend identified as a man, i would have had no problem calling out that behavior. however, given that this friend was a woman (member of oppressed group) and i am man (member of oppressor group), i really wasn’t sure what to do. can someone in an oppressor group address oppression in the corresponding oppressed group?

this situation has presented itself a number of times. a different friend called her boyfriend a pussy because of his low work ethic. a third friend, who identifies as half-black (but still black), told me i was unqualified for something because i was a dark-skinned nigger.

how does one intervene in those moments?

managing your todo list: make lists by context, the weekly review, and the annual purge

a few weeks ago, i was talking to my friend miriam about some tips on managing todo lists. i realized i hadn’t written these down so here they are.

separate your todo lists by context

this is a tip i learned from getting things done. putting all your todos on the same list creates clutter and overwhelm. dividing them by context helps cut down on the size of each list. this helps them feel manageable (to a point).

additionally, you should only be looking at tasks in the place where you can make progress on them. this isn’t a hard and fast rule, but it can definitely help. miriam can attest to it.

the weekly review

this is also getting things done thinking. your todo list(s) is only as useful as your brain trusts it (i wrote a full post about this over here). if your brain knows that you add things to your list only for them to never get done, your todo list is no longer a useful tool. this type of system failure looks like (a) your brain beginning to remind you again to do things that are already on your list or (b) you have the same task on your list multiple times.

the remedy for this is the weekly review. once a week, you should be going through everything in your personal system. david allen has a very specific order and routine for this (shared over here). i basically just go through my tasks (parking lot, todos, and doings) and make sure they all make sense or (re)move them if they don’t. knowing that you’re going to do this every week puts your brain at ease. this allows your todo list return to become a functional tool again.

the annual purge

i can’t remember exactly where this came from. i think it’s a mix of a few things, at least one of which is several of my friends who occasionally just delete all their emails. the parallel to the todo list is exactly same and follows the same logic.

basically, once a year, usually right before or right after the new year, i delete (archive on trello) all my todos. at a certain point, the lists just get too long. there are things that are great ideas that you will just never move. and the really important things either your brain will prompt you with again or they’ll come up again in some other way.

this really matters for two reasons. first, it keeps your lists manageable over time. second, it is really important to (viscerally and practically) remember that letting go is the best thing to do sometimes. you can’t do everything, no matter how much you want to. realizing that (really, not just mentally) and then implementing practices based on that knowledge actually feels amazing, too. the freedom to start over is truly liberating.

the paradox of church and state in the u.k. versus the u.s.

another interesting point alain de botton made in his recent on being interview was about church and state in the u.s. versus in the u.k. there is a quite a curious paradox when you take a step back and really analyze what’s going on. 

in legal terms, the u.k., church and state are literally joined. every citizen of england is a member of the national church of england. in america, church and state are cleaved.

in practice, churches and religion in england are miniscule. few people are religious and never do politicians discuss or invoke their faith. in america, it’s hard to imagine a politician not being explicit about their religion. religion is a major social and political issue.

now here’s the irony.

in impact, the u.k., the public services are amazing. they actually care for their poor. for example, check out this data discussing how the number of poor households is going down in england. or here’s an interesting snippet taken from an actual u.k. government website:

Poverty, as measured by a household’s income relative to the national average, is often a symptom of deeper, more complex problems. Many of these problems are passed on from one generation to the next… We want to make a real and lasting difference, to help people change the course of their lives. To do this, we need to deal with the problems that cause people to end up living in poverty, rather than dealing with people’s incomes in isolation.

in america, in spite of our individually “strong” religious piety, our public services are terrible. our economic inequality is rising. we hardly have any services to truly take care of the poor. in fact, more often than not, we discriminate against and penalize the poor just for being poor.

so what does this mean? does the atomization of faith in america actually weaken it (something i’ve written about before)? does this have to do with the age of the countries? maybe england has just had more time to develop socially just services and such. or maybe it’s random?

who knows, but it’s definitely interesting. especially from an institution-building perspective… maybe embedded religion/faith/spirituality in the bones of an institution is better than leaving it up to the individuals in the system to implement on their own. and in the case of england, that can happen while not forcing the religion on the individual people.

pomodoro brilliance: part 2 (maximum value)

now that part 1 has explained how and why pomodoros work, here’s part 2.

pomodoros are absolutely the most helpful when you have a consistent/constant type of work to power through. for many knowledge workers, the expectation is to switch between different types of tasks often. in those cases, pomodoros are still helpful for focus. but in the case where the work is consistent, pomodoros gain an additional value.

i’ve written several times about how the process of writing my master’s thesis changed my life. it’s a perfect example (writing a long document) of the type of work for which pomodoros deliver the most value. other types of work like this include ideating, doing graphic design, reading, thinking, etc.

anyway, here are the layers of value that pomodoros provided during my thesis process (of course, in addition to the things listed in part 1).

• writing in pomodoros helped make clear how much work i could do in a given time. after a few weeks, it became clear to me that i could write 300-500 words in 25 minutes. more and better sleep meant more words, as did having exercised and having coffee.
• knowing my writing pace helped me created a writing schedule. once i knew i could consistently plan on 300 words per 25 minutes, i knew i could get 600 words/hr. that’s about two (double spaced) pages/hr. i could then make predictions like “if i need ten pages by the end of the week so i need five hours of pomodoroing.“
• over time, i learned how long i could pomodoro before losing steam. near the end of our sessions, annemarie and i would notice increased difficulty focusing and a diminished word count. eventually, we discovered that we could write for about 3 hours before needing to tap out.
  
• knowing how much i could write in a given span of time before reaching fatigue helped me (imperfectly) plan out my entire thesis process. ex: if i knew i had a full draft (80 pages) due on april 30th, i could say “at 3h a day i can, conservatively, write 1800 words a day which is 7 pages. if i need 80 pages, i should give myself 11 days.” i rearranged my schedule to make sure i could hit my deadline (i gave myself a few days of cushion, too).
  

the dope thing was that i actually finished EARLY based on this planning and data (which 100% came from me). none of this included my editing process (which ended up being longer and harder than i expected), but still, finishing early felt dope. it also gave me some time to design the document for my final client.

the dream is real!