2026-01-20 20:42:00
FAR BE IT for me to add to the habit discourse, a field so overgrown with weeds that we must wade in with machete in hand, but I’m going to chance it. We are in the first month of the year, in the late middle of that month, a time when habits looked upon with novelty and eager commitment begin to look a little dull or heavy, a moment when a “streak” is likely to come to an abrupt and regretful end. The problem I want to draw your attention to isn’t the interruption of the habit—which was inevitable—but the fact that the streak mentality transforms an interruption, a pause, into a failure, a score set back to zero. Now you must start over again, as if you hadn’t done something for eighteen or twenty or one hundred days, but were doing it for the first time, only now with a deficit, because you must catch up to your old score. The longer the streak, the harder the restart, the more punishing the interlude.
The theory behind a streak is that by making that break into a penalty, you will be less likely to take it. Fair enough. But you will take a break someday, because a body needs breaks. A habit isn’t built on successive days or weeks, enumerated and enumerable. A habit is built on the movement of return. It’s coming back to something, again and again, in precise rhythms or otherwise, that transforms an effort into a habit, an act of will into an act of way.
In meditation, you learn quickly that even while your body is still, your mind moves and scatters, drifts and wanders. The point in meditation isn’t to stop thinking—that’s impossible. It’s to notice that you’ve wandered off the path, and come back, again and again and again. To come back to the breath, the only habit we only ever break once.
It can seem frivolous in times like these to think of making new habits. What’s a habit against an occupation, against a genocide, against a dictatorship? What matters about journaling, or doing our art, or moving our bodies, or taking a walk in the midst of a dying empire? But if we do not make our own habits, they will be made for us, by forces who want us isolated, anesthetized, consumed, harried in our work lives and sloven in our spirits. What we do is who we are, and we remake ourselves each time we come back to the work that matters, the work of becoming free. If you’ve wandered off—when you wander off—you have only to return.
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2025-11-18 19:35:00
THERE’S A MOMENT in most work lives where we find ourselves in a place that no longer fits. Maybe we worked really hard to get here, climbing up ravines, hacking our way through thick forests, a clear idea of where we would arrive once we made it through this difficult passage. But when we got here it wasn’t at all what we thought it would be. Or maybe we wandered this way, not quite knowing where we were going, always taking the most welcoming path, following that stream or those people. But now that we’re here, it doesn’t seem like a good place to linger. Then we may feel surprise or confusion, or perhaps shame at not having made better choices. Maybe we were pushed this way, and we seethe in resentment. Always there is fear.
However we got here, we’re here, on the edge of this cliff, a rock face behind us, looking out over a valley we cannot reach. It’s a long way down, and we don’t have a rope or a net. And we can’t know what’s down there anyway. From up here, it looks like green pastures and shady forests. But we know, now, that the world is full of mirages, that light and shadow can trick the eye and heart. That what looks like a welcoming grove can just as easily turn out to be haunted.
These are moments when we begin to realize that we may have to make a big change—leave an industry, change careers, turn back or turn off the path we’ve been on. And what I’ve noticed is that those moments always seem, in retrospect, to have been foreshadowed. Somewhere back on the path that got us here we started to see the signs—the people we were walking with turned out to be competitors instead of comrades, or the weather seemed always to be beating us back, or we couldn’t stop thinking about that spur we passed by, wondering where it might have taken us. The realization arrives as something we already know, a stone that’s been in our shoe for a while and which we’re only now plucking out and taking a good long look at.
So: take a look. Sit down and really look at this place where you find yourself. Look at it as if you just got here, because in some way you have—you are seeing it anew, as someone who now realizes they cannot stay. Take stock of the local flora and fauna, the topography, the residents. Notice the other visitors, the folks who carry their bags on their shoulders, as if ready to leave; some of them might turn out to be good traveling companions. Nose around the different camps, see what’s happening, what’s changing, what people are preparing for. Ask a lot of questions of the people you encounter, and listen closely to what they have to say.
When you become someone who is contemplating moving on, the place you’re in changes. You become a pebble in its shoe, a sign that some change is underway, a portent of more to come. Alone, you may be nothing more than an irritant, but an irritant in a vulnerable place can play both havoc and peace. Join with others, and the pebble becomes a rock slide, a boulder, a cairn that shows the way to another path, a trail that leads you-know-not-where, but certainly away from here.
Even the steepest cliff has a hidden footpath or two; even the sharpest rock face contains crevices, caves, handholds. You might have to hunt around for them; you might have to venture down a few dead ends to find them. You may have to unburden yourself before you can fit through. But they’re there, ready and waiting. And the fear is there, too, of course, a messenger urging you to be careful where you place your feet, to keep a grip on your walking stick. Fear, too, is a good traveling companion on journeys such as these; it keeps you sharp and attentive, aware of all the opportunities and pitfalls that surround you. But don’t let it keep you from walking.
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2025-11-11 00:06:00
A group of tech workers wants to help you organize around AI policies in your workplace. Good resources here, including an AI workers inquiry toolkit, tips for getting started with organizing, and—my personal fave—AI workplace bingo, where you can keep track of brilliant invectives including, “You’re just not using it right,” and “We’re not paid to worry about social harms.” Don’t play alone.
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2025-10-08 19:54:00
IT’S ANNUAL REVIEW SEASON in a lot of workplaces, which means there’s a range of anxieties surfacing, both about completing the reviews themselves (which always takes way too long) and about the consequences that come with them: bonuses, warnings, raises, improvement plans—a bundle of precarity and coercive praise wrapped up with capriciousness and barely contained threats. That the ritual so often arrives at the same time as the holiday season and that most horrible of American traditions—open enrollment—is no coincidence: comply! or we will ruin your kids’ Christmas and cancel your blood pressure prescription! is as unsubtle as it is occasionally effective.
Review styles trend with the boom and bust cycle. In boom times, they become more casual, less formal. There’s an emphasis on employee growth, how a manager can help their reports succeed, on delivering feedback up the ladder. In bust times—and we are in a bust now as far as management’s attitude to labor goes, never mind what the stock market says—we see the pendulum swing back the other way. Ratings return in force and are parceled out like rations in a famine, managers made to understand that no matter how effective their team is, very few of them are fives. Quantitative measures drown out the qualitative ones, both managers’ and workers’ observations subsumed to supposedly more reliable metrics like the number of deploys. Disciplinary factors multiply, with managers asked to enforce card swipes into the office, hours spent using AI, training modules completed—all of which has the effect of saying, you’re here to do what you’re told. So do it.
Obviously, I have a preference for the boom-time style (as, I imagine, do you). But the thing I come back to here is that neither way puts people first. Companies adopt and enforce review processes not because they care about humans—whatever our wanton Supreme Court says, companies are not beings that can care—but because they need to maximize the outputs they get from their workers. They can, and will, deploy both carrot and stick in doing so, and the times when they have preferred the carrot have come about because labor conditions made the stick unlikely to succeed. When those conditions have changed—as they have, abruptly, this year—they pick up the stick with no concern for the bruises and broken bones that inevitably follow.
But we care about those bones, and we are in a position to act on that care. And there’s only one way to do that, and it’s to organize. The review itself is a chore you have to complete, an administrative burden, a kind of work requirement that must be performed in order to maintain access to your healthcare (such as it is). But you needn’t squash your working relationships into that trapped and dark little box. Fill out the paperwork, show your documents, click through the training module: this is the price of water and we are all parched. But then go talk to your peers and comrades like you are both actual humans—because you are. Ask them what they need, share your needs with them, and get creative about how you might meet some of those needs together. Tell them what you’re seeing and hearing and ask for their insights; remember that you are compatriots not competitors. Move at the speed of trust and make trust the truth you come back to.
One of the roots of the word “review” refers to reconsideration, to look at something anew. We needn’t be beholden to the received ways these processes show up; we have it within our power to reconsider how we show up in relation to them.
Because the worst effect of reviews isn’t the way they make it easier to target people for the next round of layoffs, or the slashing of confidence, or the rewarding of sycophancy. No, the worst effect is the way they come between colleagues, the wedge they drive between erstwhile collaborators. The directives to assess and evaluate, to compete with each other, are like landmines in a relationship, tools designed to make you defensive, more likely to stab a colleague in the back than lend a hand. Don’t fall for it. Whatever your company’s rating systems, you and your colleagues are all five out of fives at being human. Act like you remember that and your actions will make it true.
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2025-09-26 20:08:00
Jason Koebler reports on a study that defines “work slop” (truly a cursed phrase) as work that “masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” Predictably, the study shows that the prevalence of work slop is a torpedo to collaboration and trust: if you have to hunt around for hallucinations in your colleague’s work, how can you trust anything they say or do? And perhaps that is actually the point of this whole phenomena: in the same way that slop across our social networks makes it impossible to believe in even a semblance of reality, work slop makes it unwise to treat your coworkers as human. But who wins when we see each other as little more than faulty tools? Not us.
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2025-09-23 22:12:00
Virginia Valian has a work problem: she struggles to do the work she wants to do. In this essay from 1977 (PDF), she describes how she identified the problem and the program she used to address it—one that involves very short periods of work alongside a deepening awareness that good work is its own reward. Her program isn’t a means of doing more work for other people, but for herself; and it isn’t a productivity hack so much as a means of becoming attuned with what your work means to you and why it matters. Importantly, what she describes involves being able to do the work that matters to you even when times are difficult—the work becomes a salve, not an obligation. “For me, there are two main rewards for working,” she writes. “One is the continual discovery within myself of new ideas; the other is deeper understanding of a problem.” (Stay for the kicker.)
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