Saw this tweet yesterday:

I used to watch his show. Thought it was good. Not sure why I stopped watching, per se — I think it was the general polarization of everything. If I’m at home at 8–9pm flipping channels instead of watching a true crime I’ve seen 12 times, I will flip between him and Tucker, just to see narratives, but I’m not a fan of either.

This tweet, though, is gold. We have a knowledge consumption context right now where it’s “takes” before “news,” i.e. “I read the Op-Ed before I read the article.” You might call…

The concept of “sludge” has been getting a lot of run recently, in part because the book Nudge, which was pretty popular, just got a new revision and it talks often of “sludge.” Here would be a basic understanding:

One way to nudge people to do something is to make it easy to do. Sludge is like its sinister opposite: when institutions try to prevent people from doing something by making it hard to do. Think limiting the number of polling stations and causing big lines as a way to discourage voting. …

We have this grand narrative in some circles that COVID will change everything about friendships and relationships, and make them more powerful. These circles tend to include television commercials, thought pieces on sites like this, and talk shows. It makes sense on face that COVID would help drive up empathy, because if you lost access to a loved one for a year or so (we’ve seen those videos), you might begin to think “Oh, this stuff is what really matters. I need to focus my time and energy there.” That would be a boon for empathy. Makes sense, right?

But…

Probably the biggest justification given for culture wars stuff is that each side of a polarized contingent believes that the other side is trying to somehow “change their way of life,” either by making them socialist, making them autocratic, killing babies, killing black people in the streets, etc. This applies at work too, where resistance to change is more common than people changing socks, and the phrase “We’ve always done it that way…” is more powerful than revenue statements sometimes. (Not often, but sometimes.) A lot of work is about status, control, relevance, and protection … and people, especially high-ranking…

Here lies the Opinion Newsletter of The New York Times, promoting an article — one of many recently — on how we all need to work less, and this part stands out:

“If everyone worked less,” she writes, “it would be easier to spread the work out evenly to more people. If white-collar professionals were no longer expected or required to log 60 hours a week but 30 instead, that would be a whole extra job for someone else.”

Or as Susan Lambert, a professor of social work at the University of Chicago, puts it in the essay, the goal…

I actually was a big Mad TV fan back in the day. It’s cool that Ms. Swan became Lois on Family Guy. It’s also maddening how few people realize that. Hm.

Written before about the expectations of friendship, which is an article that oddly performs well for me, and as I’ve gazed at my life over the past six months, I feel like my expectations are generally too high, and I need to lower them.

That sounds bad on surface, so let’s try to explain what I mean and not play the victim card. It might be a tricky line…

The importance of culture

Culture has become increasingly important, even to execs, in the past decade. Some of the notable findings around culture tying back to the business include:

• 94% of executives believe that a distinct workplace culture is important to their business.
• Strong cultures are associated with 20% higher productivity and significantly less turnover.
• 13 companies have appeared on every edition of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies To Work For, and those 13 companies outperform the market by 495% annually.
• 88% of job seekers consider the culture a top priority in their search.
• An average employee is 26% more likely to leave their job…

In summer ’13, I was working for McKesson in Houston. It was largely a joke of a job — my overall supervisor was on vacation for a big part of the summer, and my direct supervisor barely talked to me — so honestly, most days I was bored as hell, created a Tumblr blog which no longer exists, and sent emails to my then in-laws, who responded periodically. I lived with a 59 year-old woman named Barb who told me about her relationship to her son often, and I sometimes walked down the street to a Kroger at 10pm to…