This is simply a thought exercise. Obviously I’m not in charge of anything. I’ve been thinking about the vaccine distribution quite a lot lately, and it seems to me that maybe people would be less stressed about it if they realized there are so many different models, so many different ways of getting things done.
I also realize that people tend to have mightily irrational yet deep-seated feelings about things that have a logical answer, like boarding planes or late merge, and that queuing lights up a nasty part of our brains. MINE Jealousy is so much worse than envy - when we’re not just envious of something that someone else has, that we want for ourselves, but on top of that, we also think we have more of a claim on it. Envy plus possessiveness. Things get icky. Anyway. The first thing I would want would be for the vaccine to be distributed as quickly as possible, and the second priority would be zero waste. It seems like a higher priority in the US is to make sure the distribution is perceived as not being corrupt. That nobody is taking cuts. This is where I would put it out there that there are other ways to frame this thing ethically, and that there are even multiple ways to frame what constitutes “fairness” in this context. I think the first people to get the vaccine should have been every single person who works in any vaccine production facility. For some mysterious reason, this probably strikes that note of corruption that so bothers Americans. For me, though, it’s a question of sanitation. I like the idea that everyone making the vaccine is already vaccinated themselves. Second, I would say anyone who works in a facility where people go *to get* vaccinated, they also should get theirs first. That way, there is this bubble of cleanliness. If I pull up to Kaiser or the pharmacy across the street, and I have to stand in line to get my shot, I would really like to feel that I’m not going to risk getting COVID from an employee who is forced to wait until last. If there were extra doses left at the end of the day? I would give dibs to the housemates of employees of either the production facility or the pharmacy or clinic or wherever. The bubble of cleanliness expands outwards from there. How long could that possibly take? It’s weird to me that stores are putting out the message that they are not giving preferential treatment to their employees. I rather wish they would! I have a more controversial idea, one that I absolutely know most people won’t agree with, and honestly the ship has sailed. It’s too late to put my weird plan into effect. I think it would have been a smart idea to auction off doses to the highest bidder for the first week. Then - surprise! - a million dollars a dose to anyone who can afford it for the second week. Then maybe drop to $100k a dose the third week, then $10k a dose to anyone who can pay it for the remainder. There are two reasons why I think this would have been smart. Neither of them is that I could pay a million dollars for a shot, because indeed I could not. I’m patiently waiting my turn in my county where I am approximately 7 millionth in line. The first reason I think it would have been good to auction shots off to the highest bidder is that COVID-19 was spread, first and foremost, by wealthy public figures. The jet-setters. If all those people had been broke, stayed home and watched Netflix like the rest of us, there are entire continents that would have remained COVID-free. Therefore it seems only fair to extract massive amounts of funds from these people, these disease-spreading party animals. I think most or all of them would have gotten themselves the shot, and also paid to get it for their household staff out of pure squeamishness. A lot of nannies, cooks, drivers, cleaning crew, maybe even landscapers would have gotten their shots early. I find that satisfying. The first reason I said I thought it would be a good idea to ream rich people for their COVID-19 vaccines is that they are top-level spreaders. They don’t seem to have stopped traveling, or started wearing masks, so we might as well snuff out the results of their dirty habits. The second reason is that the high prices that could have been extracted could have gone a very long way toward subsidizing vaccine programs for poorer parts of the world. Nobody understands as well as the denizens of yachts and private jets that the world will never be safe from COVID as long as it still exists in places where people travel. That means everywhere, from Antarctica to the North Pole and back around the other side again. Somebody, somehow, is going to have to fund at least two billion people’s vaccines for them. But what about the elderly and those with health conditions? To that I say, yes, and what about that same portion of the population in the developing world? A choice had to be made, due to the rate of vaccine production, to focus on either lowering the death rate or slowing the spread. We chose death rate. Time will tell whether this was actually the most effective strategy. Another way to go about it would have been to start with grocery clerks and delivery drivers, and does anyone have any statistics on how many people fill those jobs? Gorillas at the zoo have already gotten their shots before me, and that’s okay. I’ll be among the last to get my turn in a very densely populated area. I can wait. I work from home and we get our groceries delivered. Honestly I could make it another year or two. It’s boring and annoying, not unsafe. I think it’s interesting to do this type of thought exercise, partly because I have very little else to do these days, but mostly because this won’t be our last pandemic. The more we all get in the habit of thinking about fast, effective vaccination programs, the better organized and the better funded they will be the next time around. Time to spring clean! This year should be much more exciting than other years, because it’s entirely possible that we’ll all be able to get our COVID-19 vaccines soon and commence socializing in person.
If you don’t like hosting at your place, maybe you can get excited about going to someone else’s freshly spring-cleaned place? Or maybe the prospect strikes dread in your heart because you have no idea what ‘spring cleaning’ means or how to do it? Or maybe you know full well, and it just seems like when you finally start, it will take three years? That’s okay. You don’t have to actually do anything this year, or any year. You can just eat snacks and read this and imagine it, the same way I used to watch Richard Simmons workouts from the comfort of my couch when I was a little kid. What’s unfailingly interesting to me about helping others clean house is what their homes reveal about how they spend their time. Clean houses are all pretty similar - you can find the forks, you can find the laundry soap, you can find the spare towels, you can find a pen - yet messy houses are all messy in their own particular way. To an outsider, there are always immediate questions: How long has it been since you could use this door? Why is there a pot on the floor? You didn’t know about this leak, did you? But where do you sleep?? I’d like to remind everybody that our homes are supposed to serve *us*. We are not their servants. What we do, we do to make ourselves more comfortable and to make our lives easier. One day robots will do it all and we won’t even realize how much effort went into it, just like I have no idea what is involved in getting electrical current into my outlets. Beds are for sleeping. Bathrooms are for personal hygiene. Kitchens are for preparing food. Living rooms are for relaxing. When you are no longer able to do these functions, something has taken over, and that is either clutter, deferred maintenance, or a problematic roommate. Physical bottlenecks are easy to spot. A door that can’t be opened, a table or countertop that is unusable, a bed that is buried under piles of stuff, an area where someone has to turn sideways to get through. Sometimes the bottleneck is being unaware of your surroundings. Not just clutter blindness, but a blind spot about relationships and power dynamics. Sometimes the bottleneck is fear of calling the landlord or a repair person. Sometimes it’s shame. Sometimes the bottleneck is lack of money, coupled with a lack of knowledge of how to solve problems without money, which usually involves at least rudimentary negotiation skills. Usually, though, a bottleneck has to do with a routine - or lack of routine - and the way that stuff tends to accumulate in certain parts of the home. These bottlenecks often have to do with tight schedules and multiple people. For reference, I would say that only about 10% of people keep their homes staged and photo-ready most of the time, 80% of people are basically at least a little messy, and about 20% of people are at least at first-degree squalor. It’s more common than you would think. Let’s cover a few areas that tend to be full of clutter, not just in my clients’ homes, but in most people’s. The car. When I meet someone with kids, I’m willing to bet a flat green American dollar that their vehicle is messy. Most people have junk in their cars. Why? Because when they get home, all they want to do is go inside. Also, a lot of the time, when they are exiting the car it is dark outside. Area around the front door. (Or whichever door people are using, sometimes the door between the kitchen and garage). This is where people dump their stuff when they come in, and there it stays, usually because there’s nowhere else for it to go. Most homes do not accommodate a landing station. Dining table. Also kitchen counter. This tends to be overflow for mail, kids’ school papers, menus, coupons, and any other papers that come in. This tends to be an extension of two other problems: 1. If there is a desk, it’s also covered with papers, magazines, catalogues, books, packages that need to be returned, bills, tax documents, and whatever else. 2. The lack of a designated place to dump stuff after coming home. I can fix all of these problems basically by waving my hand. This is because I’ve found the bottleneck, which is the transition between coming home from wherever, and settling in to relax. Once awareness is brought to this, a person who is highly fed up with a clutter-filled life can make a simple change. THIS IS A TRANSITION One of my clients solved several clutter problems by hanging a reusable shopping bag on his doorknob. He kept having to buy these shopping bags, his house and car were full of them, each bag was partly full of mail, and they were also getting expensive. We talked through his new habit. He would bring one bag out to the car with him in the morning, he would put his mail and whatever needed to come back into the house in the bag as he went through his day, and then he would carry the bag back in. He would call a friend and spend five minutes emptying the bag while he chatted, and then he would hang the empty bag back on the doorknob. (The phone call to a friend is the most important part of this; Obliger types will do anything if they can hear a friendly voice and basically nothing if they are lonely). If you think to yourself, Right now I am spending the five minutes that will stop my annoying problem, it can give you a sense of purpose. It also starts to pay off quickly so that you can see how well it is working. Okay, so here are some of the most common habits that lead to bottlenecks: Going from the car to the house basically empty-handed Opening the door and setting stuff down “for later” - especially mail Going back out to the car basically empty-handed Wandering away from the kitchen after eating Those habits alone can quickly lead to a cluttered car, a dirty kitchen, and mail and papers on every flat surface in the house. If you’re ambitious you can do this in just days. The exact reason why someone suddenly decides to make a change will vary from person to person. (For me it’s usually doing a photo consult with a client or watching a hoarder show). Not just the reason for change will be unique, but the exact spot where someone starts will be unique too. One person will be motivated to start with their bedside table. Another will start with the medicine cabinet. Someone else will clear out the trunk of their car and presto, there’s enough room to start hauling off bags of donations. Where will you start? Where will your spring cleaning begin? Don’t overthink it - just start somewhere! It’s always a good idea to think a little bit before making a big decision, although unfortunately I think it’s common to use those transitional moments to avoid the choice. Most people tend to talk themselves out of stuff.
I don’t think the stress of making a decision is all that big a deal. I think transitions are interesting. The stress I’m worried about is the unknown attitudinal changes that will be required after making the change. If ‘then’ is going to be different than ‘now’ - then how? What information will I have then that I don’t have yet? What will Post-Decision Me wish I’d known? Is there anything useful I can find out from anyone else who has already done this? Is being in the new place going to affect the way I make decisions from that point forward? I hear a lot of people talking themselves into making some kind of big change by saying, “I’ll still be the same person.” This has always seemed very strange to me. What is the point of making a change if you’re going to be the same person afterward? Isn’t the entire point to become someone new, at least in a small way? Someone better in some sense - stronger, braver, more experienced, more skilled, more interesting? One of the worst things I can think of is to always be the same person, forever. I mean. What if we were all still stuck with the musical tastes we had at age twelve and the culinary preferences we had at age four? The driving skills we had at fifteen? I don’t particularly think that my listening skills, ethical framework, or storytelling abilities were better at any earlier age than they are now, so why would I want to be stuck at that point of development? This is what it sounds like when I try to talk myself into something. I think what some people want to hang onto is actually a certain skeptical outlook, which is all well and good. It’s good to be rational when making choices and doing research. Personally, though, I’d rather be swept away and smitten by something when I’m exploring something new. That is how it happens for me - that I get a mental crush on something and throw myself at it, learning as much as I can, until I develop a certain level of competence or knowledge. Then it generally becomes something that I follow on more of a maintenance level. This is the feeling that I’m hoping to generate as I contemplate going to grad school. There are other things I’m contemplating, one of which is the possibility of moving up a level at work. Okay, maybe not right this minute - but I have a solid twenty years of career arc left ahead of me on the traditional timeline. That is plenty of time to work one’s way into a leadership position. It isn’t wrong to declare an intent in that direction. That would be one of the main points of getting a doctorate as well - some sort of role as a thought leader. I’ve never had a true profession. It staggers my imagination that I am still in a clerical role at 45, although it’s something that I chose and chased down for myself, believing it to be a foot in the door of an organization that has captured my attention. One way or another, I will vault myself up and out at some point. What I am starting to realize is that there are mindset shifts that must occur between one level and the next. “What got you here won’t get you there.” Yet there’s sometimes a Catch-22, in that you can’t really know what you need to know until you’re able to find it out. I often feel that I finally know enough to start whatever it was that I’m doing, six months or a year later. For instance, it was only after six months of Krav Maga that I felt physically fit enough to start taking the classes. If only I’d known to start doing fifty push-ups before I came here... The question is always, What is the ‘fifty push-ups’ of this discipline going to be? I hope it’s public speaking, since I already trained on that. But what if it’s statistics, or pivot tables, or calculus?? I’ve always been a grind, and it never really bothers me to have to grit my way through something. When I think about competing with kids twenty years younger, I laugh. Not a single one of them can out-read me. There is no way anyone in their twenties can possibly compete with the discipline and focus of someone in their forties. Sorry, kiddos. There are other advantages of mid-life, few of which would be apparent to a younger person. For instance, a lot of major decisions have been crossed off my list that can still completely derail them. I know where I want to live, whether I want to get married (yes) and have kids (no), and I know how to cook and manage a household. I know there’s no reason to go to late-night parties, at least for me; it turns out the same people exist at 8 PM as exist at 2 AM. So many of the temptations of youth haven’t panned out. I’m at a stage of life when that feels satisfying rather than disappointing. When I think about going back to school “at my age” it is, in many ways, a relief. I have gained so many competencies that were not in my arsenal 25 years ago. In other ways, I remember how tired I was after studying all night, and I wonder whether I really have even one all-nighter left in me. What I look for is the person I will be on the other side, the career she will have, and the outlook on life that she will have earned. That is not a tired woman who pulls all-nighters. What I try to do is to put on her insights as an imaginary thinking cap. What attitude would she have toward these decisions, Future Me? What advice would she give me? How would she respond to the situations that currently stress me out? This is what makes me think that it’s a fair trade. The stress of today, the decisions and the transitions that lie before me, in a transaction that buys me the comparatively stress-free position that Future Me will have earned. I heard that an asteroid is going to smash into the Earth. Just like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Fine with me.
Obviously it’s God’s plan. Yes, I read the Bible. Yes, I remember that part about the rainbow being God’s covenant that he would never try to wipe out humanity or destroy the Earth again. I don’t buy it. I choose to emphasize the parts that I want to and ignore the parts that don’t fit my argument. I know they have some big scientific plan to divert this asteroid, send it off into space so it doesn’t smash into the Earth. But nobody asked me for my permission. I am not okay with other people getting together without my consent and trying to use science on things. I don’t understand it and I object to anyone doing a process that big and expensive without making it totally clear what’s going on. What if this asteroid gets smashed into tiny particles that get into my lungs? What if it’s radioactive? What if it causes respiratory conditions in people? What about my pets? I don’t want anyone doing anything irreversible until we know more about the long-term effects. What if trying to get rid of the asteroid that is going to smash into the Earth causes worse problems than an asteroid smashing into the Earth? We can’t possibly know that! I mean, okay, almost all living creatures on Earth became extinct the last time this happened, but maybe we’re better off. The dinosaurs are gone and now we’re here. Maybe now we’re the dinosaurs and we’re supposed to be erased to make room for whatever comes next. All part of God’s plan, right? I don’t know, I’m just speculating. All I know is this whole scenario is stressing me out. I need a break. I need there to be a few no-news months so I can find some peace of mind. It’s so unfair for there to constantly be one problem after another. I’m still not over the last one. Stupid coronavirus. I heard that 54 million Americans have had the COVID-19 vaccine. They’re trying to claim that all those people are fine and cases are dropping. It’s like they’re trying to make us believe that vaccines are safe and effective and that there’s actually a chance we can be vaccinated into herd immunity. They’re winning! This upsets me so much. Now what are we going to do? They’re never going to stop. They’re going to keep trying to convince people to get the flu shut, and the measles vaccine, and shingles, and who knows what else? Malaria? Lyme disease? It makes me so crazy. Like they can somehow eliminate every disease on Earth. Pfft. Whatever. Someone was trying to make this connection between vitamins and vaccines, like the same scientific processes that proved that we need vitamins are also used to test vaccine efficacy. Okay, no way. If it’s an established fact then it does’t count as science anymore. Just stop. Stop trying to convince me that science is capable of doing good things and helping people. I don’t trust it and I never will. Now bring on the asteroid. I could sure use a break. At least an asteroid colliding with the Earth is something I can understand. A pattern has become evident. I know it isn’t just me because there is this term “Sunday scaries” that indicates that many of us have mood issues on Sundays in general. I can only assume that I’m not the only person who consistently has trouble sleeping on Sunday nights.
There isn’t any particular reason for this, at least not on paper. I’m not being kept up by money worries, or relationship problems, or even loud neighbors. Our building is remarkably quiet at night. OTHER THAN BEING IN A GLOBAL PANDEMIC EVERYTHING IS FINE It’s fine I wake up at basically the same time every morning, with or without an alarm, thanks to the little bird who sleeps in my bedroom, affectionately known as Beeps Peeps. She likes to mimic electronic sounds, including the travel alarm that she has not heard in years. This can be a useful trait - she has actually kept me from being late to work once or twice - but on three-day weekends and holidays it’s hard to remember how cute it is. So it isn’t sleeping in too late on Sunday either. I’ve spent quite a bit of time this year trying to figure out what it is that wakes me throughout the night on Sundays, messing up my track record and leaving me bleary and distracted each Monday. I like my job, I work with really nice people, I have interesting things to do, I get a lot of autonomy, I don’t even have a dress code. There is a long list of things that other people can claim as legitimate grievances, reasons to be stressed out by their jobs. I don’t have any of those things - not that I haven’t in the past. It seems to be simply the gear shift between my utterly formless, lounging weekends and the staccato pace of my weekday life. Part of my brain pops up and starts thinking, “Get up early tomorrow, lots to do” and it just never shuts up. It’s like one of those toy monkeys in every horror film. Its eyes glow red and it starts running around and clapping its cymbals together. These are the sorts of things that happen on Sunday nights: I wake up every twenty minutes and check the clock I have nightmares that seem to go on for three hours I have literal night terrors and jump out of bed, waking my poor husband, who has been dealing with that whole thing for ten years I wake up at 5:30 am for no apparent reason and lie there like a sea lion I go to bed extra-early and lie awake until 2:00 am like I’m jet lagged A distinction about my sleep issues is that I take an OTC sleep aid. It works fine every other night. I can drift off in minutes. Same dose, Sunday night, about as useful as a breath mint. Parasomnia issues have been a part of my life in one form or another since pre-kindergarten. I remember that it became a serious issue for me when I was about seven. So I have a lot of experience coming up with things to do at night, and different approaches to try. I’ve read thousands of pages of books and journal articles about sleep research and I’m determined to Try Everything. Sleeplessness isn’t the worst thing that can befall someone, of course! I try to take it in a matter-of-fact way. Oh well, another one of these. Perhaps an approach that I try will help someone else. Maybe this will be the only night that this particular, individual distinct reason will come along and mess up my sleep. Cross it off. I do occasionally have lovely, restful nights of sleep. I also often have fantastic three-hour naps. It’s getting easier. So what’s up with Sunday nights? What have I tried? Well, I can say with great certitude that there are some things that will keep me awake, me and probably any other person who tries them. One is eating a large portion of Mexican food followed by birthday cake earlier in the evening. Another is eating sweets too close to bedtime, something that I have confirmed and that I yet continue to do to myself from time to time. Another is arguing with someone, another is reading politics at bedtime. Obviously another is lying awake quite deliberately, reading when it’s past bedtime. I have finally gotten smart enough in midlife to quit tormenting myself in this way, and it does help to feel more rested. Those are things to definitely avoid. What have I tried to fall asleep more deeply? Showering before bed Same, but also drying my hair afterward Aromatherapy diffuser White noise (waterfall variety) Subliminal affirmations Going to bed an hour early and making sure everything is orderly first Guided visualization (leaf drifting downstream, triggering for some reason) Breathing exercises Heated mattress pad / no heated mattress pad Weighted blanket, the worst! Not for me Drinking hot herbal tea earlier in the evening Maybe it’s the sense of “Doing Something” that is not helping. Maybe I’m too conscious that I want this to work, in the same way that you can jinx yourself out of sneezing. Have you ever tried to focus your attention on tying your shoes, remembering each loop step by step, and then found yourself unable to succeed until you looked away and went back to doing it by feel? The situation is that I am finally at a time in my life when I can usually fall asleep right away six nights a week. About 80% of the time I sleep the night through without any issues. I’m between 7 and 8 hours most weeknights, and 10 or 11 hours on the weekends. It’s just this one particular night, when I seem to be too revved up to get down and stay down. I am not done with my explorations. I’m not much of a creature of routine, and sooner or later some element of my lifestyle will change, either due to external circumstance or intentional experimentation. At some point, this blip in my life will quit blipping. My goal for the time being is to increase my overall level of chillaxation. I seek to be a person of gravitas, a calming presence, to start winding down my tightly wound watch and maybe be less revved. Even if it doesn’t do anything for whatever is sucking away my sleep on Sunday nights, that attitude still feels worth cultivating. Today we were all looking at the floor plan of the building where I nominally work. I’ve been to the building, coincidentally, but I haven’t been within miles of the place since the day I was hired. I don’t have a security badge and there is no computer on my desk. I might not even have a chair - I don’t actually know.
My name is on the map, though. Might as well take this as a sign that the world is going to be more or less back to normal in the near future. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone. I know a few happily retired people whose lifestyles haven’t changed much at all since the pandemic. I also know several people who have driven to work every morning without a hitch, the only differences being the masks, the sanitizing, and the distancing requirements. Statistics show, though, that only 34% of people can now claim they never work from home, and 44% are working from home all the time now. That means a lot of us are going to need to shift gears pretty radically when we start going back in to the office. Predictably, there are probably going to be a lot of long lines and wait lists for things like haircuts. (I’ve been fine cutting my own hair, and my big headphones are graciously covering a lot of… transition… in my hair coloring… but I would rather make my debut with one consistent shade than a giant ledge in the middle of my head). I know I won’t be going into the office in person for at least another four months. That might sound like a long time. If I think of it in terms of wearing the mask and being cooped up in our dinky apartment, it’s crazy-making. Then when I think of it in the context of everything I have to do, it sounds like the blink of an eye. Time to start making a backlog. Cut and color - I can do that in the same appointment. What else do I need to do in that end of town? (Haha, just kidding, I get my hair cut in the building next door). Work clothes - alas! I can’t wear my beloved “work pajamas” to the office and I know I don’t fit in any of my office-type clothes from 3-4 years ago. This gives me four months to either put together a new capsule wardrobe or drop a few pounds, something I have been trying to do for the past year with little success. Shoes - same. Whatever clothes I wind up wearing, coordinating shoes are on the same list. Work bag - I can use what I have. Do I need to clean it out? What’s in there, anyway? Lunches - I haven’t had to pack a lunch to take to work since 2009. What am I going to eat?? I don’t even know what this place has in terms of a break room. This brings back so many memories of having food stolen from the communal fridge, the reason I used to bring ugly melted containers for my leftovers. The commute! - I haven’t had to commute in over a decade, either. How am I going to get there?? It is out of walking range and I’m not sure I will ever feel brave enough to board a public bus again. Last time, last summer, I wound up with bacterial pneumonia and I’m not sure whether that was a coincidence or an unfortunate consequence of sharing space with Other People. This is a non-trivial problem that I hope is resolved by the decision that everyone may continue merrily working from home. But - just in case - plan I must. I read that in the before-times, a lot of people worked from home at least occasionally. In those types of offices, it appears that the people who come into the office are the ones who get promoted. This is obviously a factor in this type of decision. On my team, I also happen to live the closest to campus. If one of us were to be called upon to commute in, I would feel stingy if I kept wheedling or positioning myself so that Someone Else had to go in instead of me. Thus I am facing the prospect of going in, working in person, and sitting at a desk with a mixture of excitement, curiosity, resignation, and of course a healthy dollop of mortal terror. It turns out that we don’t have a legal basis for requiring people to get vaccinated before they can come to work. What we have here is a raging case of Uncertainty, and being in the Place of Uncertainty is a phenomenally strong motivation to attempt more planning and preparedness exercises. This is what I do. I visualize myself getting up, getting dressed, grabbing my lunch and my work bag, and making my way to work. As opposed to putting on my “work pajamas” and wandering twenty feet to my desk, where I can work barefoot or bundled in a blanket and nobody even knows. There are other things that we can all consider before the world goes back to normal. These are the things that Today Me has not felt like doing, but that Future Me is going to be too busy to do once that hour a day or more is lost to commuting. Cleaning out the car? Trying on work clothes and sorting out whether they fit, whether they need repairs, or whether they should get recycled Sorting through all the various bottles, jars, and potions in the bathroom Practicing all the hair and makeup styling tricks I have completely forgotten how to do The stuff I wish everyone else would do, to wit, learning to write a decent email subject header and figure out when to reply-all or not And, honestly, the stuff most of us are more likely to do once we realize that WFH is almost over and may never return: Staying up as late as possible idly scrolling on our phones Binge-watching a few last shows Suddenly feeling premature nostalgia for this time that we all hated so much, until we realized it was almost gone. All right then. Assuming you can have literally anything you ask for, that someone else will do all the associated remodeling, cleanup, installation, and furniture moves at your direction, what do you actually want?
This is where we are right now at my work, imagining what we want work to look like. We’re stuck in the imagination stage because the majority of us still don’t know when we can get our vaccines. We’re on mandatory work-from-home. Want to know something funny? I designed a survey and built in a “no preference” response and about 10% of the respondents chose that. No preference, really? You have no preference whether you commute or not, or whether you have your own office or not? I believe there are people like this in the world, people whose least favorite thing is to have to choose something. I am not one of these people. Maybe what we need is a benevolent AI that keeps track of decisionless people and randomly assigns them to things. Further, I think almost everyone is so hung up on all the annoyances and things that we dislike about working that it hasn’t occurred to us to wonder what we actually DO want. Personally I like variety. I like to be able to get up and work in different places, maybe outside, maybe on the bus, maybe in a cafe, maybe even on the library stairs or something. All of that has been extracted from my life by the pandemic. The best I can do is to occasionally work on my blog from an inflatable chair at the park. Right now I am sitting at my desk, which I normally reserve for work-work, because I dropped my phone on my iPad and it’s in the shop. Note, shouldn’t all Apple products be immune to each other? Why is it possible for me to do $330 worth of damage to one of my products with another one of my products?? (At least I didn’t shatter both of them at once…) I’m willing to bet that a lot of people are leaning toward working from home because we have become accustomed to the convenience of doing household chores while in meetings. (I do a lot of mine either while I’m waiting for my computer to warm up or while I’m in the process of making my lunch). Okay, let’s think bigger. What if our homes are modernized as quickly as the office? What if algorithms and robots are reliably taking care of more of our bandwidth and we’re actually able to do the fun, creative, intellectually stimulating stuff ourselves? What does THAT look like? I’m still waiting for an AI that can work as a companion, listening genially as I ramble on and on, ideating and shifting between completely unrelated projects, circling back, changing the subject with no warning, the way that my human friends have come to expect and OH, that reminds me By the time an AI can keep up with a creative, non-neurotypical person such as myself, it will be able to do virtually anything. The only way that will ever happen is if we keep dreaming bigger, learning to hand off more and more mental tasks, and thus incrementally training this concept of an artificial brain. From experience working with the chronically disorganized, I can say that problems at work are similar to problems at home, which is, the routine parts are too boring to get done, but the non-routine parts are often too confusing. Who do I call to handle this? How do I describe it? What actually needs to get done? How much of it am I expected to do myself and how much can I delegate to someone else? What order do the steps go? I used to have a social services job in which, every day, I would get calls from people looking for a completely different department or a completely different branch of government. If I didn’t help them myself they would just call me again. Almost nobody on Earth will actually Google something on their own, even if it was faster and easier and came with cute photos. They’d rather Talk to a Real Person (TM) so they don’t have to engage System 2 thinking. This is why I am torn between thinking that AI will never happen, or that AI will eventually save us all. What if AI convincingly sounded like that proverbial “real person”? An endlessly patient and useful person, who knew every answer, never asked you to repeat yourself, and read your mood perfectly? What if that “real person” was always available and you never had to wait on hold? I think it’s possible. Because, even though many of us carry incredibly powerful computers with vast search engines in our pockets round the clock, we aren’t using them to further our knowledge or understanding of the world. Instead we use them to spy on each other, argue with each other, and look at video clips. If we genuinely had this helpful and eager “customer service rep” waiting there to do more of the steps for us, maybe we would take advantage of that opportunity? Or is it more like, the more things are automated for us, the more things will feel like “work” even though they are less work than what came before? I have a desk job, but I know a lot of people who don’t. They are gradually adopting more and more automation, from power tools to GPS to digital levels, etc. Who doesn’t enjoy using a pressure washer? That’s what I’m personally looking for, a work experience that feels more like playing with a toy or having a fascinating conversation. Does that feel possible? Or do we really all just want to go back to commuting, honking at each other, rushing to stand in line to buy coffee in disposable cups, scrolling through hundreds of emails, and tapping our pens in endless meetings? Do we miss normality so much that it actually looks like it was ever a good idea? |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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