Right now I’m suffering from a particularly severe case of what Buddhists call the ‘monkey mind’. For Buddhists, the phrase describes the mind’s tendency during meditation to jump from thought to thought, like a monkey swinging from the branches of a tree.

For me, it means that my concentration span has gone to absolute shit – books go unfinished, DVD boxsets go unwatched and I can’t handle an entire film unless I’m in the cinema and I have to choice but to sit and watch what’s going on in front of me. I think it’s a result of the fact that I’m in the final throes of my degree and am therefore spending my days reading and absorbing more than I ever have before. My brain is so saturated with dates, facts and words that when I try to take in large amounts of non-academic information it’s almost like my brain almost rejects it. Pretty unsettling, not to mention annoying.

Given all this, it was reassuring to stumble across this article by one of my favourite authors, Alain de Botton. It made me realise that my concentration problems are not only symptomatic of what’s going on in my own life, but also probably part of a more widespread social malaise:

One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is how we can relearn to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.

The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere in the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties, something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows.

We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture – and in the process don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. We leave an auditorium vowing to reconsider our lives in the light of a film’s values. Yet by the following evening our experience is well on the way to dissolution – just like so much of what once impressed us and which we then came to discard: the ruins of Ephesus, the view from Mount Sinai, the feelings after finishing Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich.

A student following a degree in the humanities can expect to run through a thousand books before graduation day. A wealthy family in England in 1250 might have had three books in its possession: a Bible, a collection of prayers and a life of the saints – this modestly sized library nevertheless costing as much as a cottage. The painstaking craftsmanship behind a pre-Gutenberg Bible was evidence of a society that could not afford to make room for an unlimited range of works but also welcomed restriction as the basis for a proper engagement with a set of ideas.

The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulse, is something we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people and ideas. We require periods of fast in the life of our minds no less than in that of our bodies.

For obvious reasons, the line about humanities students rang particularly true. Does any of this resonate with you like it does with me?

Both the Online and Press and Publications sections of the site have been updated with a few new-ish bits and pieces. Take a peek.

I’m generally ambivalent about Terry Richardson as a photographer but I can’t deny his Diary features some pretty interesting subject matter. From the relentlessly glamorous Carine Roitfeld, to the surprisingly diminutive Christina Hendricks, to the ever-compelling Michael K. Williams aka Omar from ‘The Wire’, it’s all there. Check it out.

A largely irrelevant photo of Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak c. 1977, that I found when I searched ‘jobs’ in Google images. Haha.

To date, ‘Work It’ has been by far the most popular post I’ve written on this blog in terms of both hits and feedback. Given that so many other people also seem to be inspired by this type of thinking about jobs and work, I thought I’d share a couple more short blogs from Seth Godin’s website that really reiterate Steve Pavlina’s message. The first post is a response to a longer essay by programmer/venture capitalist Paul Graham on startups, which you might also be interested in if you’re entrepreneurial like that.

1.

Everyone’s model of work is a job

That’s is the conclusion of a very long essay on startups by Paul Graham, and it’s an insightful quote.

The reason you feel most comfortable with a job (unless, like me, you’re in the minority–a job would destroy my psyche) is that you’ve been brainwashed by many years of school, socialization and practice. I pick the word brainwashed carefully, because it’s more than training or acclimation. It’s something that’s been taught to you by people who needed you to believe it was the way things are supposed to be.

If you’re a boss, you need applicants, lots of them, to keep the wages you have to pay nice and low. And so the more people who believe they need a job, the better it is for you.

I don’t believe that everyone should be an entrepreneur or a freelancer, that everyone should quit their job and go work for themselves. I do believe this:

The less a project or task or opportunity at work feels like the sort of thing you would do if this is just a job, the more you should do it.

2.

Yourself

“Years ago, when you were about four years old, the system set out to persuade you of something that isn’t true.

Not just persuade, but drill, practice, reinforce, and yes, brainwash.

The mission: to teach you that you’re average. That compliant work is the best way to a reliable living. That creating average stuff for average people, again and again, is a safe and easy way to get what you want.

Step out of line and the system would nudge (or push) you back to the center. Show signs of real creativity, originality or even genius, and well-meaning parents, teachers and authority figures would eagerly line up to get you back in line.

Our culture needed compliant workers, people who would contribute without complaint, and we set out to create as many of them as we could.

And so generations of students turned into generations of cogs, factory workers in search of a sinecure. We were brainwashed into fitting in, and then discovered that the economy wanted people who stood out instead.

When exactly were we brainwashed into believing that the best way to earn a living is to have a job?

I think each one of us needs to start with that.”

The moral of the story? Don’t allow yourself to be brainwashed. Question everything.