Here are five links to get your brain going for a weekend of rest and creativity:
- Anne Helen Peterson on How Our System Revenges Rest:
This is not a white paper with policy suggestions about the future of automation and UBI (although I am interviewing someone for the newsletter soon about how UBI has and could work!) It is a newsletter inviting you think about why it’s so enduringly hard to take even a day, let alone a week, away from work and everyday life — and why individual or even company policies are inadequate solutions to the structural problem of we should ideally be robots. It is asking you to think about why all of our technological advances have meant less rest, not more.
- 10 lessons in productivity and brainstorming from The Beatles by Tom Whitwell:
5. Embrace happy accidents
In All Things Must Pass, George wrote the line “A wind can blow those clouds away” but John misreads his handwriting as a “A mind can blow…” which stuck.
- 12 Rules for Living by Nate Meyvis:
1. Whenever possible, ask: “should I do this same thing again and again?” Getting compound returns is great. Getting diminishing returns is bad. Doing more and more of the same thing tends to get you one or the other, and figuring out which situation you’re in is often very tricky. Work at it.
- How to do nothing: the new guide to refocusing on the real world - Ellie Shechet in conversation with Jenny Odell in The Guardian:
What is the benefit of not saying things all the time?
I think interiority is really underrated right now. That could just be my own bias. I seem to spend a lot of time trying to figure out ways to get away from other people. [Laughs] I think that there is a lot to be said for being alone with your thoughts for an extended period of time. Yesterday I spent all day by myself walking around thinking about stuff, and then I had drinks with a friend and we talked about the stuff that I was thinking about. But I didn’t tweet about it. I just don’t think that a bunch of strangers belong in that thought process, and I don’t want to apply the metrics of success to a budding idea.
- Thirst and Quenching, a short work for violin solo by Kati Agócs played by Rebecca Whitling:
(Image courtesy of ruedi häberli on Unsplash)