Aging (2019 in Review)
2019 didn't feel like a particularly eventful year until I started listing down the monthly highlights. There weren't any high highs, or any low lows. It was a steady rhythm, an alternation between periods of intensity and then none. In retrospect, it taught me a lot about where I fall short and where I could excel. And in hindsight, it seems there's even a coherent narrative. Here are some of the topics I frequented the last 12 months.
Long form
Freedom and free
The year was marked by the transition from one volunteer gig to another. Victor Papanek's 10 percent keeps popping up in my head along the way.
The word is kymmenykset. It means the same thing as the medieval church word tithe. A tithe was something one paid: the peasant would set aside 10 percent of his crop for the poor, the rich man would give up 10 percent of his income at the end of the year to feed those in need. Being designers, we don't have to pay money in the form of kymmenykset or a tithe. Being designers, we can pay by giving 10 percent of our crop of ideas and talents to the 75 percent of mankind in need.
— Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World
I think it was in Ruined by Design that Mike Monteiro disagreed with the notion noting that there isn't an ethical offset or a net positive of "saving 10 percent of the world while destroying 90 percent of it". He strongly calls out designers who work for Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc... to quit. The internet echos Monteiro's sentiment though a few raised the question of privilege. Choice is a freedom enjoyed and preached by those already in possession of it.
Coincidentally around the same time, I received in my inbox Kai Brach's weekly newsletter Dense Discovery, and in the often personable, thoughtful opening note, Kai gave his view when a freelancer asked him about "saying 'no' to bad money" while they're in a position where they can't be too picky. I find these points particularly pertinent:
As someone just getting started, your work probably won’t yet lead to serious consequences. The people above you (team leaders, supervisors, managers) get paid, in part, for making those difficult decisions. Since they are in a position of power, which is often interlinked with a certain amount of privilege, we should scrutinise their decision-making much more closely. And the higher we go (leaders, founders, investors), the more scrutiny we ought to exert.
— Kai Brach, Dense Discovery
Source: https://findnewsletters.com/n/dense-discovery/
In a recent debate, Andrew Yang put forth a point that hopefully will help tie this incessant rambling of mine together. He stated that the reason why there weren't more people of color on the Dem debate stage was because of the lack of 'disposable income' or as elaborated, that extra money that could go into shaping the society they want to live in. Hence the system persists.
In short, the more privilege, the more moolah, the more power, the more freedom but also the more responsibilities. And of course, the less privilege, the less moolah, less power, less freedom to make choices that can significantly alter the course of our own lives or others.
My parents worked their whole lives to give me a childhood filled with the freedom to choose my own path despite not being materially abundant; from religion to career, to where and how I want to live so I never feel like I was and am lacking. Perhaps it's this privilege to choose that forms the belief that monetary rewards are only the means to an end – only to gain the freedom of choice, one that I also recognised in my brother when we caught up recently. We were coincidentally in the same city at the same time (another privilege, that of mobility but more on this later). He wants to live a life devoid of the pulls of society altogether, with its people and material needs. I, on the other hand, want to be around people; not many, but just enough.
I'm at a point in my career, if this term is still relevant in this time and age, where apart from the modest 'disposable income', I also have 'disposable time', the time that can be freely used for leisure or any other things I so wish to do. I have yet to pick a cause, you know, to give back or fight for, to change, shift, shape the system or to help the "75 percent of mankind in need". But I know the more moolah I earn and the more time I get back, the more "free" work I want to do. Whether or not this work benefits others, I can only hope. My ten percent is now spent on bringing folks together. They're not life changing, big issues tackling work. To be honest, sometimes, they feel drenched in "first-world problems" and they are. The saving grace perhaps is that I am learning more about the kind of "free" work I want to do, by doing the work.
Why free you may ask? I don't have a thoughtful answer for this, only that I can, can afford to, and want to. There's something about the open source aspect of sharing knowledge, and other resources, for free that's enticing to me as well. I do believe in the collective power of communities and their ability to build upon each other's knowledge to create a better tomorrow for everyone (and the planet). And then there's the fact that I get to where I am because some people decided to share their learnings, tips, tricks and lessons on the internet, for free.
People positive and the infinite game
In Brave New Work, Aaron Dignan stresses on the People Positive and Complexity Conscious mindsets that Evolutionary Organisations – the fast, more innovative and more human companies – possess.
To be People Positive is to assume and expect the best of everyone.
The Open Source community is probably one that most embraces this idea in the Tech circle. Decentralised governance places the power in the hands of a wise, well-intentioned and self-organised public. Makes me wonder why more organisations don't "organise" this way.
I spent a chunk of 2019 reading about companies and work. Having been in several organisations since starting out, I see a pattern emerged. Bureaucracy has been spoken about and against like a broken record so I'll not speak of it here again. What I do want to visit though, is the race towards instant gratification and profit maximisation, the pursuit of which results in the dehumanisation of the workplace. I see companies raising funds and scaling fast to achieve "growth at all costs", hiring massive amount of people only to mass fire them when the sales pitch falls short to investors who seek quick returns. Then there's the gig economy that promises flexibility, in exchange for no health care plans and hey, zero organisation's accountability.
It seems we all buy into the technocrat's saviour complex. Every company has a grand vision. Every leaders speak of changing the world. Yet, in our own backyard, we still don't really know how to treat our people right. Maybe I've seen the more extreme version of it – the screaming, the punishing, the slamming the table bit or the let me help you learn accountability by over working you to death bit. I do hope these are the exceptions and that most companies, which are built by people, are also built for people. Most of us don't get to choose where to work, I hope no one has to pee in a bottle in between shifts to "hit KPIs".
The 2018's scepticism seems to have carried itself over to 2019.
I am amongst the lucky. I've had several great managers and leaders who showed me that it is possible, and meaningful, to build a company that wants to survive for the next decades, not just for quick returns, without stripping away the human part of work. Not just for branding purpose either. And just as there are patterns in the organisations that don't serve us, there are things I've learned from those that do, too.
The people that I am indebted to learn to become better people and build companies that learn to become better companies. It starts with the individuals who model their behaviours for the rest of us. We make mistakes and learn from those too. We don't blame it on others but raise our hands to take responsibilities: "Here's where I went wrong, here's what I've learned and how I will fix it." Don't get me wrong, I am terrified of making mistakes. It's driven me crazy in the middle of the night knowing I'd accidentally sent out a canned email without editing all of the placeholder texts. But then I learn to highlight those {insert name} better, and to double check my messages before hitting that much dreaded 'Send' button. I'm better for it. And when I share those silly mistakes with others, and others share their silly mistakes with me, we're better for it. In my simple and limited understanding of organisations, when behaviours like that are modelled and then reinforced through communication (appreciation and feedback), it spreads throughout the human network and the faceless, limbless entity that's called a company, becomes a learning organism.
Another trait that I found in my mentors, coaches, managers is how much they care about the work and the people. I'm not naturally organised or detail-oriented, but I've been trained to be a little better at it. I remember being "micro-managed" into mortal fear of making grammatical mistakes in the articles and captions I was writing for the co. It was annoying then but it is worth it now. Reminds me of this passage that I always, always come back to come year end.
We all bask in the presence of beauty, because there is a magical aura to high craft. It says, “Here is all we’ve got. This is what humankind is capable of doing, with every ounce of care and attention wrung out into what’s before you.” Craft is a love letter from the work’s maker, and here in my hands is that note enveloped in stone.
— Frank Chimero, The Shape of Design
Source: The Shape of Design
"It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important." – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry puts it beautifully. There can be a thousand roses, or companies, or jobs, or people out there to pick and choose from. Only the ones we invest in become what matters to us. Only the ones we truly put "every ounce of care and attention" into can become something worthwhile. It pains me to hear when people are reduced to "head counts" and "resources", disposable and without care. Not surprising that folks are disengaged at work, organisations waste thousands of invisible dollars due to high turnover rates and teams collectively produce subpar and even low quality work.
My favorite thing that Y often says, and makes my heart warm when founders commit to it, is that he wants to build a sustainable company which will survive for the next decades. Sustainable here means profitable, environmentally friendly (like Stripe's commitment to becoming carbon-neutral), but also sustainable for the people in the company. I'm not a big fan of Basecamp as a product but I love the "It doesn't have to be crazy at work" type of company building. Increasingly, I'm buying into the infinite game i.e. playing the game to play, not to win. I want to commit to this type of work and organisation and people for the next decade.
Making friends, micro-communities and building a home
2019 felt like a weird combination of both retreating from the public and me opening myself up to the possibility of a lifetime partnership. I am somewhat comfortable carrying myself in a room full of people, but would rather stay home with a cup of tea surrounded by the things I love. If not curling up next to T, or when T goes on a trip, I litter the bed with books I have yet opened like a security blanket. I am happy with this simplicity but something is still missing. It comes up often in our weekly checkins: "I need to get out there and meet people".
My circle of friends has this joke that we tell each other whenever we say goodbye, that "I'll see you in 3 to 6 months." It's strange going into adulthood and admitting that the cadence of hanging out for "close" friends is every quarter or half a year instead of every week, every month. It is however not unusual that even though we don't talk often, I love every minute we spend together and would get over myself to attend their weddings or baby showers or whatever they want me to show up for. What's bugging me is the lack of meeting new peeps and being in public spaces.
Sure, the older one gets, the harder it is to make new friends. But I am of the belief that a diversity of people can help one grow; be it by exposing, challenging you to differences in opinions, or by inspiring you to get off your lazy ass and go do something fun/meaningful/weird/cool over the weekends or even with your life. I've recently started following my new interests, with the goal of hearing more about the local issues in the communities here. The side effect of that is that I am actually meeting new people whom I can speak to about these topics – real people. Though smaller than the vast internet world, micro-communities that are born out of some common interests, causes, skills, industries allow for a different kind of discourse. It's nicer, less "virality-inducing", less "hot-takey", it allows for folks to open up more authentically, more earnestly. In all honesty though, I was just happy to make a new friend.
If anything, merely allowing myself to be in the presence of others already helps with my occasional social anxiety.
In a world where we spend ever more of our time staring at screens, blocking out even our most intimate and proximate human contacts, public institutions with open-door policies compel us to pay close attention to people nearby. After all, places like libraries are saturated with strangers, people whose bodies are different, whose styles are different, who make different sounds, speak different languages, give off different, sometimes noxious, smells. Spending time in public social infrastructures requires learning to deal with these differences in a civil manner.
— Eric Klinenberg, Palaces for the People
I worry I will become intolerant towards differences or bitter towards the world. I didn't use to be. After all, one of the things I love most about backpacking solo, besides being able to do whatever the hell I want in my own time, is the warmth that comes from knowing the kindness of strangers. Like that time our travel buddy's motorbike broke down and a very lovely group of local folks stopped in their track, went to the repair shop and came back with one of the staff to help. Or when the usual train schedules changed and I got lost in Gouda (did you know that gouda cheese came from here, like what?), the train operator not only helped point me to the right station but also gave me a stamp on my ticket to allow me to board any train until I get to where I need to go. It reminds me to be a little kinder I suppose.
It's funny to think that I used to put myself out there a lot more than I do now, then to channel all that energy into adjusting to a partnership, only to find a home which allows and pushes me to again go out into the world, albeit more sure footed this time. Maybe precisely because there is a home base that I can try even more and fail even more out there. Our relationship isn't perfect, it is however exactly the way I need it to be. One thing I learn from T is building up a strong system to address problems that surface along the way. Everything else seems to fall into place, even when it feels like the more experiences we share together, the more hurdles we need to cross. But brick by brick, we work to build a home that's ours.
Oh, another thing we did a lot of this year that we both seem to love is opening our home up to our friends. Best of both worlds I tell ya. We hosted lunches and dinners a bunch of times. It's nice to cook for the folks you care about, but also nice to not have to travel to your friends 😅. I'm aging, okay!
Systems, errrrrwhere
There's a law called The law of Instrument, most of us understands intuitively this cognitive bias through the saying: "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." I started reading about systems thinking in the later half of this year and can't help but applying the lens everywhere I look. Everything looks like a system, which makes me question my approaches to a lot of things in life.
In design, we are trained to zoom out to the entire customer journey then drill down into the details, the micro-interactions. But the "system or systems" that enable an idea to come to fruition or the right thing to be built and go to market, encompasses also the market, the organisation and the teams. Imagine if your organisation rewards only quick hacks to solve the symptomatic problems. You will more likely need to design in dark UX patterns to prevent people from unsubscribing from your newsletter or product than spending time addressing the underlying problems and improvements to the business i.e. better content that really brings values to readers or pivoting the entire business because people do not want or need your product. Or in the development cycle, if your team is encouraged to make trade-offs all. the. time. due to constant top-down pressure to build pre-solutioned features with no refactoring or paying down technical and UX debt periods, your product will start breaking down and the production line will slow, at some point, to a halt. That is to say, maybe we all need to look outside of our specialised teams and diagnose the system at large if and when we recognise a repetitive pattern in the way we work.
Source: https://thesystemsthinker.com/six-steps-to-thinking-systemically/
And then there's the larger world that we always forget about. "Eco-friendly" products feel like an excuse to perpetuate consumerism, riding on the wave of the climate change movement, only so we can buy more, consume more instead of rethinking our relationship with the physical things we own and the natural world. To see some trees now, you need to pay some money to travel hours away from the city. To go back to the place we all come from, we need to buy, one ecotourism package at a time. I like collecting books and tote bags from old bookstores, an inclination as of late when melancholia triggered by 90s movies like You've Got Mail hits me. I take flights to ultra-hipster parts of Bali for holidays. I am just as guilty as anybody else. But I'd like to also slowly move away from it. I don't litter on the street or hoard plastic bags at stores, I try to spend more time in the living room where there's no need for the AC. It's a small first step, it makes me feel good, it probably doesn't do much when the problem is much more systemic but I'll do it anyway, 'cause the guilt.
In Scale, Geoffrey West states that the superexponential growth of the human population requiring an "unlimited, ever-increasing, and eventually infinite supply of energy and resources" that puts a strain on our planet and accelerates our socioeconomic life to the point of anxiety outbreaks, will lead to our eventual collapse. He suggests that we need continuous cycles of "paradigm-shifting innovations" at a faster and faster pace to survive. In order to tackle this planetary-level problem, we need to bring together knowledges from multiple if not all disciplines that concern the “characteristics of man as a social being interacting with his environment” to develop a much clearer and more systemic view of all the nodes that we can pull at to alter system behaviour and results. Everything is interconnected and we can't see the forest for the trees because we only work within our specialised field. Soon we won't be able to see the trees, or the forests if we don't act. I'm not a scientist and I have no idea how to fix the system but I hope that together we protect our home in any small way we can, no matter how limited we feel.
–
Ooof, that took longer than expected. Those are the topics that frequented my mind and reading list in 2019. Talking about reading, onto the fun bits 😬.
Bullet lists
Books I read or reread this year
💡 ** = Books I have read > 60% but have not finished Bolded = my favorites
Systems Thinking for Social Change by David Peter Stroh
This is What Inequality Looks Like by Teo You Yenn
Political Correctness Gone Mad? by Jordan Peterson, Michael Eric Dyson, Michelle Goldberg, and Stephen Fry
Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams by Peter Merholz, Kristin Skinner
Future Ethics by Cennydd Bowles
Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design by Kat Holmes
Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink, Leif Babin**
Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace by Gordon Mackenzie
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value by Melissa Perri
Inspired by Marty Cagan
Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi
Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan **
The Trans Siberian Railway by Nina Cosford
Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares
Banker to The Poor by Muhammad Yunus, Alan Jolis **
Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West
The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter by Michael D. Watkins **
Movies, documentaries & TV series I love this year
Documentaries / Docuseries
Had the most fun this year with documentaries.
Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened
Bikram: Yogi • Guru • Pedator
13th
The Great Hack
Explained series
Broken series
The Chef Show
TV shows
These shows are consistently good.
The Good Place
Brooklyn 99
Rick & Morty
Lost in Space
Patriot Act
You
Movies
Watched lots of crappy movies this year, nothing really stood out except for these.
Avengers: Endgame
Parasite
Marriage Story
Albums I've been digging this year
I haven't really been exploring new music, so sticking to a few classics and putting some upbeat music on repeat for work.
In the Name of Love by CL
Communion by Years & Years
Expectations by Wild Child
Oh Wonder by Oh Wonder
Favorite things I own
There are a few things that I consistently use and love this year, some of them I've had for years, some are new but I'd like to show them some appreciation anyway. They're all durable, ultra multi-functional and beautiful.
Kindle Paperwhite
Lojel carry-on luggage
Jabra Elite Active 65t
Bluelounge backpack
Blackwell's toteback
Stojo collapsible cup
Uniqlo bomber jacket
Seafolly swimwear
Favorite softwares and apps
Figma
Notion
Gitbook
Webflow
The Atlantic
Habit
Nomo
Splitwise
Headspace
Spotify
The end
That's all folks. This has been fun, and a lot longer than last year's Year in Review. I hope this means I've been taking my time to live a little slower, and to reflect a little more. I intend to continue exploring "free" work, look into building micro-communities and making new friends, to work on the relationships that I already have and to live with less carbon footprints behind me. So no major resolution there, just maintenance.
If there's one thing I do need to change and make much better and faster improvements at though, it'd be my health. There was a lot of pain this year. But I'll talk about this more another time. Right now I'm feeling alright, and I am grateful.
Happy New Year you guise 😌
• Zoey
Find me at www.zoeydraws.co or check out other journal entries