stressing out (plants) and strength

the phenomenon i’m about to describe has been a part of farmer knowledge for centuries (probably). it turns out that certain types of stress improves certain aspects of plants and crops.

examples that i’ve heard of:

• apples that go through one or two hard freezes get sweeter
  
• some veggies (carrots, kale, beets) get sweeter with light front
• tomato plants that are starved for water put more nutrients into their fruit (which means more delicious tomatoes)

the knowledge of this has been spreading (even to tech-farmers like the ones at mit)!

why does this happen? protection. here’s how it works in the freeze examples. when water freezes inside of plants, it creates ice crystals. ice crystals slice through plant cells and cause damage to the plant, sometimes killing it. however, plants have learned (yes, plants learn, it’s just slower than humans) that converting water to sugar prevents crystals from forming. so now at signs of cold, some plants create sugar to protect themselves and live a little longer.

not only do i love this phenomenon, but i know (from experience) that it has some direct implications on human development. thich nhat hanh said something similiar in a recent onbeing episode:

“It’s like growing lotus flowers. You cannot grow lotus flowers on marble. You have to grow them on the mud. Without mud, you cannot have a lotus flower. Without suffering, you have no ways in order to learn how to be understanding and compassionate… Suffering and happiness, they are both organic, like a flower and garbage. If the flower is on her way to become a piece of garbage, the garbage can be on her way to becoming a flower… That is why you are not afraid of garbage. I think we have suffered a lot during the 20th century. We have created a lot of garbage. There was a lot of violence and hatred and separation. And we have not handled — we don’t know how to handle the garbage that we have created. And then we would have a sense to create a new century for peace. That is why now is very important for us to learn how to transform the garbage we have created into flowers.”
— thich nhat hanh, onbeing: being peace in a world of trauma

of course, one shouldn’t seek struggle. but when it comes (and it will come because suffering is the way of the world says buddhism), know that it’s possible that it will make you stronger.

on the importance of personal branding

the other day i had a conversation about a new project with my friend, allentza. at one point during the conversation, i was explaining why i’m so interested in personal branding. she stopped me and said “have you written about this?” i said, “nope, but i will soon!” so here we are:

in my opinion, branding is the aesthetic manifestation of systems thinking.

however, many folks in (social) change circles feel like branding (and more acutely, marketing) is pretty skeezy. the perception is that branding creates positive spin in dishonest ways. it’s also typically framed as “this will bring in more money.”

of course, it may bring in more money (and other resources), but i have a different perspective on why it’s important.

for one, i think (unconfirmed) i have a stronger passion for personal branding than any other scale. developing personal brands doesn’t happen much because most individuals can’t pay branding firms the rates it would take for that work to make the firm money.

still, i think personal branding is only going to become more important.

why?

because in order to contribute effectively to… well… anything… you have to know what you’re good at. the process of developing a brand, imo, is really about exploring core values, shaping them into an identity, and then experimenting with how to express that identity in the world.

so, in line with the snap assessments that i think we are all going to need, by understanding your brand, you are able to be clear about your skills and passions. this allows you to understand how to create value that helps you get your needs met. and i mean needs in the broadest sense (imo, people have many needs and money isn’t actually one of them [counter-cultural, i know, i know]. we use money to help us meet our needs [except for those of us that chase money for the sake of money], but money is a just convention and it’s not even always a helpful one).

ok, so the other big reason i believe personal branding is important is because having a clear brand helps you understand how to give to your community. and in a world that i think needs more and more generosity, i believe that knowing and then contributing what you’re good at can trigger cycles of giving that strengthen your community in ways that far surpass your own bottom line and make your community more resilient. and when you live in a resilient community, even when shit gets rough for you, your community is there to provide support.

so. yea. personal branding. into it.

ps - thanks, allentza, for the nudge to write about this!

overwork undermines love and is collapsing our soceity

hypothesis: working too much actually undermines our society’s capacity to be loving. this makes our individual problems at odds with our collective problems and make the whole system unsolvable.

how to test that? unclear. but here’s the thinking that lead me here:

industrial capitalism with its hourly wages connects livelihood to amount of work done. in theory, the more hours you work, the more money you’ll make and the better you’ll be able to economically support yourself and/or your family. so, this means that the path to a better life is seen as working more and also getting a higher wage.

the trouble with over-prioritizing money is, well, money isn’t actual wealth. this quote from alan w. watts explains this really well. 

“What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money. Money gets rid of the inconveniences of barter. But it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth, because it will do you no good to eat it or wear it for clothing. Money is more or less static, for gold, silver, strong paper, or a bank balance can “stay put” for a long time. But real wealth, such as food, is perishable. Thus a community may posses all the gold in the world, but if it does not farm its drops it will starve.”
— alan w. watts, the wisdom of insecurity

loving takes real time and energy. and the more people work, the less time they have to love.

“The practice of love takes time. Without a doubt, the way we work in this society leaves individuals with little time when they are not physically and emotionally tired to work on the art of loving.”
— bell hooks, all about love, chapter title: mutuality: the heart of love

without time to learn how to love and be loving (to yourself and to others), individuals fail to develop their capacity to love. without this capacity, self-love, familial love, community love, and societal love are all out of reach.

and since loving means taking actions that encourage the growth and well-being of others, this lacking capacity means we will never make good collective decsions about our soceity (healthcare, policing, financial policy, etc.).

there’s more to this, but the more i think about this, the more i believe that overwork undermines a functional world.

if i’m honest, this is part of why i’m so excited about ross’s #5to9 concept. it’s not a new idea (juliet schor has written several books on why working less is better for societies, most especially the overworked american), but it’s a necessary one. supporting/encouraging people to work differently (less) and do other things with their time may actually encourage repair in our societies. if people have more time to learn how to love and then act on it, maybe we will be more compassionate to ourselves, our families, our communities, our nation, our society, our fellow humans, our world.

:O

relevant recent articles from colleagues

• on love and justice by aisha shillingford
• net work: “soft” tools for real change by curtis ogden
  

turns out academia is a crock

i think this is the last post in what has evolved into a four-part alain de botton series (at least until i read one of his books). alain was responding to a question (starts around 6:30) about why he dropped out of his phd program and he shared this thought:

“Like many young people with a kind of cultural and aesthetic interests, I imagine that academia was going to be nirvana because these guys were gonna pay you to do the stuff that was lovely to do anyway: reading books, writing, et cetera. And then I quickly realized there was a mass deception going on and that academia had gotten together collectively to try and make this supposedly lovely thing as unpleasant as possible simply because they had a problem with massive oversubscription. So the way they dealt with the oversubscription was to make you jump through so many hoops and make those hoops so unpleasant that only the most determined survive.”

as he said it, my mouth dropped open. during grad school i had started to realize the same thing. not only was getting a master’s degree more of a sham than i expected, i had started to notice some terrible patterns among the phd candidates.

i went to the same school (mit) for undergrad and grad school so i got to know more people than the average student. i spanned the undergrad/grad divide and was there over the course of seven years. and what i observed was pretty sad. almost all of the master’s students realized that writing their master’s thesis was more of a chore than a joy. they found that in order to “contribute to the body of knowledge,” they had to dissect and shoehorn the subject in which they were interested into this terrible place between existing knowledge. and then they weren’t given enough time or support to usually produce a good product anyways.

and for the phd’s it was worse. because they had more time, sometimes they got to write about what they actually wanted. but not always. and many of them realized that the deeper they got into it, the less they wanted to be subject matter expert at this tiny little slice of the world. of course, they didn’t enter academia to do that anyways, but that’s the path that had been laid out (see above quote) in order to land an academic job. not only that, but the writing process was isolating and the academic journal publishing process was grueling.

so what’s my takeaway? fuck academia.

on getting married in america

continuining the theme from alain de botton’s interview on design matters, marriage is a beautiful and difficult thing. so how is it that we see so many bad marriages? alain lays out a few points that i think are brilliant (my favorite parts are around the 32:00 mark, but the points really are scattered throughout).

for starters, we really want it to work! most of us have been socialized to believe that marriage is one of the primary goals of life. to go without it, for better or worse, is observed as cultural failure. we have been given SO much societal pressure to couple that when a good enough opportunity presents itself, we take it. people rarely stop and really pull the lid off their relationship before getting married because they’re often afraid of what they might find. being so close to achieving success (being married), the fear that a deep assessment might result in them not getting married is too great.

and so people rush in, hoping that it’s right enough.

but obviously that’s bad.

so, not only do many marriages here get off to a rigorously examined beginning, we also don’t have good training on how to do it well. the closest examples we have, our parents, don’t often really let us in to deep truths of their marriages until we’re older. and even those aren’t often good example. and then the other examples, friends and tv, are often particularly bad.

all of alain’s thinking on this stuff lines up really well with many of the lessons in all about love, one of my favorite books of all time. here’s just a few relevant quotes:

“When we see love as the will to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of love in our life is the same. There is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners. Genuine love is the foundation of our engagement with ourselves, with family, with friends, with partners, with everyone we choose to love. While we necessarily behave differently depending on the nature of a relationship, or have varying degrees of commitment, the values that inform our behavior, when rooted in a love ethic, are always the same for any interaction.”

“I had been raised conventionally to believe this relationship was “special” and should be revered above all. Most women and men born in the fifties or earlier were socialized to believe that marriages and/or committed romantic bonds of any kind should take precedence over all other relationships. Had I been evaluating my relationship from a standpoint that emphasized growth rather than duty and obligation, I would have understood that abuse irreparably undermines bonds. All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly, we know that the healthy, love response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way. Even though I was a committed feminist as a young woman, all that I knew and believed in politically about equality was, for a time, overshadowed by a religious and familial upbringing that had socialized me to believe everything must be done to save “the relationship.”

“In retrospect, I see how ignorance about the art of loving placed the relationship at risk from the start. in the more than fourteen years we were together we were too busy repeating old patterns learned in childhood, acting on misguided information about the nature of love, to appreciate the changes we needed to make in ourselves to be able to love someone else. Importantly, like many other woman and men (irrespective of sexual preference) who are in relationships where they are the objects of intimate terrorism, I would have been able to leave this relationship sooner or recover myself within it had I brought to this bound the level of respect, care, knowledge, and responsibility I brought to friendships. Women who would no more tolerate a friendship in which they were emotionally and physically abused stay in romantic relationships where these violations occur regularly. Had they brought to these bonds the same standards they bring to friendship they would not accept victimization.”

“To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds. I know individuals who accept dishonesty in their primary relationships, or who themselves are dishonest, when they would never accept it in friendships. Satisfying friendships in which we share mutual love provides a guide for behavior in other relationships, including romantic ones. They provide us all with a way to know community.”