And this was my initial reaction when I started reading his presentation. I made that "Huh?" face. I kept reading, but half-way through, I skipped portions of it.
My problem: his presentation sounds too contrived. My background is in literature; meaning, I am obsessed with literature and reading and its where most of my knowledge rests.
I love Thoreau. I'm a hiker. I'm learning to program. I really like computers and technology. But I rarely, if ever try to unite the two. Sorry, it just doesn't work.
One things computers try to do is make things scale, as I understand it; understand and organise things with massive computer power. I'm not saying this is a bad thing.
But Thoreau wanted the opposite.
I'm sure the presenter meant well, and his heart was in the right place, but have a close look at the words he uses. They're buzzwords to try to relate to an audience who is further apart from Thoreau's ideology than he might've wished.
He is "rebranding" Thoreau. Thoreau is not a 'content creator', because that word has certain connotations nowadays, which do not apply to him. Yes, this might be semantics, but this type of updated/21st century diction to try to relate/appeal to a new audience sounds contrived.
I applaud his efforts, because at least Thoreau serves as a way to balance out technologists' lives.
But because he was so extreme, all this sounds like yoga instructors talking about living a better life sipping on their Starbucks coffee and buying expensive Yoga mats.
I mean, sure, it's really good that you have recognised the worth of many nonmaterialistic things, but you're not really helping if most of your life is materialistic. Note I'm not forcing anyone into doing away with their material- and technology-driven lives.
All I'm saying is Thoreau's ideology and the modern person are not compatible, unfortunately. And because of that, all we can do is sit around and study his writings conceptually, abstractly, without gaining the experience he wanted everyone to have. Few of us could stand 2 years of living the way he did, yet the presenter actually feels the need to tell his audience, (I'm paraphrasing), "Sure! Thoreau ONLY did it for 2 years, and he had mom and sister come out once a week to help!" Um...how long would the average person be able to stand it?
The OP says it is easy to take Thoreau out of context, because he is so quotable, yet continues to do this very thing!
"Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered, 'Here is his library, his study is out of doors.'"
He doesn't mean that you need to go and collect data electronically on people or go on a Google car and photograph every single major street to store it, analyse it, and show it to the world on a computer. If you believe this is what he is saying, this is called "reappropriation".
Lastly, let me quote again from his book titled Walking--a recommended read because it is short, yet illustrates his ideology.
"In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet."
Stop trying to tame Thoreau's ideas. Let's not try to make ourselves feel better by saying we have some things in common with him or stretching his ideas.
I go into nature to get away from my computers and society and everyone else. It is my own personal struggle or inner conflict. I don't need to try to convince others of how good we can have it if we just adopted Thoreau's ideas, because by our current standards, he would be considered an extremist.
In that same passage above, Thoreau goes on to talk about how domesticated animals need to reassert themselves.
Please, let's not dilute Thoreau just to make us feel better, because (1) most people who don't agree with him will not feel better about it; and (2) most people who want to agree with him will find that they cannot adopt his ideas or lifestyle. I think the HN crowd is too smart to adopt some half-assed idea. They'd rather come up with their own idea or take on how to find a balance between technology, nature, and tackling startup culture.
> I kept reading, but half-way through, I skipped portions of it.
If you're going to take the time to write such a long essay disagreeing with someone, the very least you should bother to do is read what they wrote.
You're less likely to make a fool of yourself that way.
> The OP says it is easy to take Thoreau out of context, because he is so quotable, yet continues to do this very thing!
See, there you go. If you'd read the talk, you'd understand how silly you sound. I'll reduce it down for you:
Walden is a layered work. You can't just go in and strip-mine it for a bunch of Tim Ferriss-style life hacks, or inspirational quotes, without missing the entire point of the book.
Since we have limited time, though, I've gone and picked out some Tim Ferriss-style lifehacks and inspirational quotes, which I will present as a set of bullet points.
I'm reading this as a sarcastic riff on parent, but parent is right. Seriously, follow Maciej on Twitter. He'd die before seriously referring to someone -- especially Thoreau -- as a content creator.
That's the problem with irony, it can be difficult to be sure, unless you have out-of-band info about the speaker. As in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
I wasn't being sarcastic. I was agreeing with the comment I replied to (by forsaken, which pointed out a joke), and disagreeing with the long comment it replied to (by kafkaesque). You might think I'm being sarcastic now, but I can't do anything more than tell you I'm not.
Wait... I can show you I wasn't sarcastic, by noting the signal that Maciej Ceglowski was joking: he longwindedly repeated (almost) verbatim a long phrase describing the thing that he deplored, and that he would do.
Tim Ferriss-style lifehacks and inspirational quotes
I'm not sure exactly how this is a signal, but it is unusually redundant (making it a signal); and I perhaps part of the humour is that by repeating it, it's presented as if a new thing, unrelated to the previous duplication. Ah, the joys of dissecting humour.
Another signal is the general tone is jokey (and he was even explicit about trolling the audience with Ayn Rand).
Not sure why I'm going to such trouble to clarify. I guess I just don't like being misunderstood. Also, it happened to me once before that someone thought I was being sarcastic online when I wasn't, and I didn't correct it (which I later felt was wrong of me).
I agree with your point for what it's worth!! I also think it's easy to tell Maciej is kidding solely from his writing, but I figured I was biased since I follow him.
I love Thoreau. I'm a hiker. I'm learning to program. I really like computers and technology. But I rarely, if ever try to unite the two. Sorry, it just doesn't work.
One things computers try to do is make things scale, as I understand it; understand and organise things with massive computer power. I'm not saying this is a bad thing.
But Thoreau wanted the opposite.
I'm interested in how you paint yourself as a complex, multifaceted person (rightfully so!), but disagree with suggestions to apply lessons across facets. For example, one could also say that computers facilitate the act of "abstract[ing] away complexity," which seems very Thoreau-esque. One could say that, but I wouldn't -- at least seriously -- because it sounds ridiculously pretentious.
Anyway.
It's worth pointing out that Maciej is a very, very strong critic of Silicon Valley culture so I think you're missing context for his talk (hint: the "content curator" bit is complete sarcasm). Follow @Pinboard or @baconmeteor on Twitter to see what I mean.
If you liked Maciej's talk, you should definitely check out his blog: http://idlewords.com
Warning: kiss the next several hours goodbye because he's simply an outstandingly interesting and funny writer - imagine something like a cross between Bill Bryson and Douglas Adams and you wouldn't be too far off the mark.
"""
He was obsessed with how complexity can creep into unexpected corners of your life, disguised as necessity. He gives the example of a farmer who convinces himself he must eat meat in order to stay strong. Since meat is expensive, the farmer tills more land in order to afford it. And the harder he works, the hungrier he gets, in a vicious spiral.
[...] What I had thought was a convenience had actually been the foundation for a little pyramid of anxieties.
[...] I'm intrigued by this idea of complexity being something adversarial, that sneaks into your life, like a cockroach, and you have to fight to eradicate.
"""
Doesn't just apply to life, but also to software and startups.
I've been running a tech startup about as long as Maciej (though with a very different path / business), and I sometimes wonder about the complexities we now take for granted, 4 years in.
Not just complexities of our business, but also the infrastructure we've re-built, re-factored, re-architected, etc. over the years and our own understanding of the problem space we've "mastered".
We've assembled this tapestry of tools, technologies, processes, cultural practices, customers, partners, etc. And as software engineers, we have "simply accepted" a certain level of complexity.
When the company first started in 2009, it was just two guys sending keystrokes into a fresh vim buffer. No "funding", no "process", no "brand" -- just creation. I think this is what creates nostalgia for the early days of a company's life -- it's the purity and simplicity of it.
I wish I had gotten Maciej's advice earlier and kept a journal.
> This is a picture of me in 2009, right around when I started Pinboard. I'm standing on a balcony in Botosani county, Romania, in the poorest county in the European Union.
I had no idea (based on his name) that Maciej started Pinboard in Romania.
A Polish immigrant to America starts a one-man business while traveling (staying? working?) in Romania, gives it an Indian TLD, and moves back to America to work on it full-time. And only a short while ago I'd been reading his blog about Argentinian cuisine. 50 years ago, people would have found this mind-boggling. The Internet truly is global.
Bulgaria didn't have as high a standard of living as Romania at the time, 2009, but Botosani county on Romania's Moldovan border was the poorest county in the EU. Whether or not it still is, I do not now.
The argument has been that by specifying what each URL part is, you can build a link to https://pinboard.in/t:minimalism in the first place. Is delicious.com/minimalism the tag minimalism or the user minimalism? And what is delicious.com/settings? In practice, delicious gets around this by making all-user tags accessible at http://delicious.com/tag/iphone, but then you can't have a user named "tag". Or "tools", or "help", or "about", or "terms", and there's probably more and they might change every now and then.
As a long time pinboard user, I devoutly hope not. It's a great service for antisocial people like me, and I'd be disappointed were it to develop that "social" layer of oily mucus.
You can already subscribe to tags. It's not social in a sense that you can interact directly with others, but it does have a secret feature of sharing your bookmarks with others by making them public.
> Is the Thoreau in the Thoreau 2.0 picture wearing Google Glass glasses? As I understand Thoreau, he would today look exactly as he looked then. He surrounded himself with vegetables, beans, trees, critters, and such. Maybe a t-shirt or other more casual clothing than the high-collared stuff in his photograph, but I don't see him using any latest technology. Rather I see him shunning it. I would expect Thoreau would look and act the same if her lived a thousand years from now or a thousand years ago -- connecting with and valuing bean fields, ponds, winter animals, farms, and other parts of nature where people live harmoniously with it.
I use Sublime. I prefer an editor over dedicated software or a blog mainly because of the indenting; it's also the most powerful text-manipulation tool I know. I have a certain indented writing style that helps structure my thoughts -- I flesh out thoughts in indented paragraphs (the more detailed a thought, the more nested it is). This helps me read a bit faster as I can easily skim by reading the outer most paragraphs and only diving into the details when necessary.
I organize my journals by keeping each month in its own file <month yyyy> (e.g., "jan 2013", "aug 2011"). And in each file I write the date (mm/dd) as the outer most indentation, then write the entry (indented) underneath it. So a typical file might look like:
09/27
Some notes here.
An idea here.
A particularly good idea here.
So I flesh it out here.
And add more details as I go.
Some things I learned..
09/28
Today's entry...
I use software over paper for two reasons -- it's much faster to get my thoughts down and I can easily search through my thoughts later (a simple matter of Ctrl+Shift+F). Getting your thoughts down quicker helps with brain dumps which tend to be more useful than refined sentences later on as they capture more of the state that you happened to be in.
I actually use a nice paper journal (with awesome leather Portal cover sleeve, so I can replace the book inside) and a fountain pen, in general. As well as just starting to adopt this system (which was on HN recently): http://www.bulletjournal.com/
The main things I've learned is that indexing is incredibly important. Number your pages, and keep at least one page in the front of the journal for referencing what pages belong to what category. Don't overthink the categories, sometimes broad is good. Most often I just use "Random thoughts/writing" or "programming".
It might seem odd to keep an actual, physical paper journal in this day and age. But for some reason, the tactile nature of it just feels right. I have more motivation to pop open my paper journal and physically write some things than I do to pop open VIM, or Evernote, or Simplenote, or whatever. Even on a phone or a tablet. (especially so, in fact) On top of that, there's less of a chance of a paper journal being stolen, you never have to worry about internet connectivity (Evernote, non-premium), or battery life, or having to fight a multitasking system... the list goes on. I've had times where I just want to take a quick note and I end up fighting something auto-opening, or already being open, or waiting for a new note, that I just get frustrated and end up back with real paper. I haven't found anything that is as flexible or works as well to date. (I also HEARTILY recommend you get either blank paper, or graph paper. particularly graph paper. I have a huge notebook I carry around of graph paper, and it has proven invaluable for so many things. from diagramming software code flow, to diagramming an interface, or even just plain writing notes. this is what I use: http://www.jetpens.com/Maruman-Mnemosyne-Imagination-Noteboo... It's good for carrying in a bag/backpack for serious needs, not as great for a journal. I tend to have both with me)
I've recently tried adopting the http://www.bulletjournal.com/ system, but using Evernote. Unfortunately I wasn't able to make it work for me.
After just a few days I've found myself not being able to figure out at a glance what's next and having to go back and forth the notes. That even if I've spent the time to inter-link things. But at this point I should also mention that in my role (product manager) I have quite a few projects on my plate at all time and a month long list of things is usually in the high tens/hundred items (and doesn't include meetings).
I was really attracted by the BulletJournal system as it felt in a way similar to what I've been using, but with a nicer/cleaner visual representation. Basically I have my long list of things in a tool. Every Monday I spend a bit of time extracting what's the focus for the week into a separate file. In this file I also log daily activity. At the end of the week there's a short review and then I'm archiving the week.
I'm sorry you weren't able to make it work. That kind of workload sounds like a lot for anything. You might consider using something like Omnifocus or Things in order to keep track of all of that. (among other solutions for tracking all of that kind of data) They're a bit more tailor-made for something like that. Evernote is less of a heavy task-management system as it is a place to dump a lot of information. (such as the entire web page with a brownie recipe I have saved. perfect for that, less for managing 10 complicated projects)
Honestly though, it sounds like you have a system already in place that works well for you. Why switch away? The only thing you might do is use a notebook to dump all the stuff from one week into, then have your short review on a separate page(s), then start over. (using indices in the front of the notebook to keep an easy reference to start of each section. start of week 1, start of week 1 review, start of week 2, etc.) But I suppose one size does not fit all. Do what works and helps you keep track of things!
1. Don't get into a situation where you don't have a journal :) Seriously though, there are a couple solutions. One is to have a simple note-taking app on a smart phone (assuming you have one) that you can quickly tap something into. Transfer it to paper later, or leave it on the phone, your choice. The other is to get something like this: http://shop.moleskine.com/en-us/notebooks-journals/reporter/ and just keep it in a back pocket at all times. It isn't your main journal, but it's at least a place to jot some stuff down into.
2. Kinda hard to answer, as I don't know the company that made the cover for my journal. (I got it while at MAGFest last January, so they're likely to be there again if you're an attendee) It looks somewhat like this though: http://photoguy42.deviantart.com/art/My-take-on-the-river-so... except black leather with a blue portal on one side, orange on the other. It's a 5 1/2" by 8" size journal, (http://www.art-alternatives.com/products/items/sketch-books.... the AA75121 one) which for me is a good size to be able to write whatever without feeling too constrained. Your mileage may vary. However, the cover is fantastic because it's definitely very tough, and keeps the journal safe from damage. (the Bullet Journal website recommends this so that it doesn't fall apart over the year or so you're supposed to keep a book) You could get away with something else though. I personally don't want to buy a journal which can only be used once, and prefer nice covers where I can swap out the paper. If you want to just buy a single book, no fancy cover, that's fine. You should look up Rhodia for that, as they have very nice paper. Or you could get what I'm using, which absorbs fountain pen ink very nicely without bleeding. A very rare quality in paper :)
3. Thoughts on various topics. Whatever I feel like is worth writing down. A game idea, ideas for a game engine, poetry, tasks, etc. A daily journal is a great idea though, if you feel like you can keep it up. And I always have whatever I write in a category, which I have in my index. Do I want to review my notes on the Scala course I'm taking? Index says page 34-35. Handy!
Moleskine or typewriter, because they change how you approach writing, since you can just delete five paragraphs at every whim. You both think more and less about what you write that way.
I say Moleskine specifically, because there are a lot of shitty notebooks where the writing might even fade over time.
I'm not trying to be snarky, but, "Being an Entrepreneur", and, "Be very much like Thoreau"are two very disparate goals.
I would very much like everyone to read Walden - it's a wonderful, incredible, life-changing book. But the feeling I get at the end is not, "Man, I should start a business, where people can post up images of things they want! And then other people can see if they want them! And then, then! We can advertise!"
The feeling you get, after reading the book - well, the feeling I got was more, "I'm still in this system, I want out, I can't, the world is truly monstrous". We can all live in our own little cabins in the woods for a little while, we can all do our own little civil disobedience - but like young adults, most of us grow out of it, because to hold this course is very hard and greed is a very easy trap to fall into.
If you like Thoreau, one of the most obvious path to take would then be Emerson and his essays. They're all wonderful, but I don't know what lessons you learn from them can be applied to "start a business with someone elses money that hopefully goes public", except that that itself is a fool's errand. I don't know what either would say about social media or whatever it's called know, execept that it's simply abstracts the real nature of actual interaction, into something that's lost the important parts of it. What would Thoreau say about working so long hours typing away at a keyboard? He would say that's the worst thing at all: work only as much as you want, and no more. That's a whole chapter in Walden. How many people here, truly do that?
Things to think about.
and also, what a lame title for a talk - there already WAS a Walden Two, and, for a sci-fi book, it's not half bad. Kinda weak, but worth a read [0]
And it itself was a take on how to bring Thoreau idea into a community setting. It's a little more than, "Write journals!", and "Know Yourself!". This talk - trying to take a masterpiece book, and apply it to your life, and trying to talk about it in bite-sized chunks.... it's not working for me. Show me, don't tell me.
"Being an Entrepreneur", and, "Be very much like Thoreau" are two very disparate goals.
But it sounds like Maciej's goal was not to be an entrepreneur, but to be able to support himself running a one-man business. Being self-reliant that way instead of depending on a job in someone else's company might be quite in agreement with the simple life that Thoreau advocated.
As a Romanian I feel compelled to say that we're far from the poorest economy in EU/Europe. Romania is still a standard Eastern European/post-communist hellhole (although slowly improving), but not _that_ poor.
He did say "county" not "country", although it seems a typo. However based on Wikipedia data (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union) Romania and Bulgaria are the poorest countries in Europe by GDP per capita at only 2% difference(47% vs 49% of EU GDP - 12,100 vs 12,600 euro respectively). Compared to Hungary (14,700 euro), I'd say we're (I'm also Romanian) not far, but rather close to being the poorest economy in EU and we're also the 9th poorest in Europe (http://www.techscio.com/the-poorest-country-in-europe/).
That being said, I didn't know Maciej built Pinboard in Romania, that's pretty cool, I'd say. I wonder what was he doing in Botosani :)
Very nicely written. Funny and interesting. I liked the mention of the slightly less scrupulous side of Thoreau too - he also mentions dining with friends quite a lot; his financial figures don't add up; and his attitude toward the poor was not as enlightened as one would expect from an intelligent, educated, clever man.
https://blog.pinboard.in/2013/09/xoxo_talk_notes/