Launching your civilizing campaign
To civilize:
- Find things that are hard.
- Think about those things.
- Make them simpler.
Hmm… That sounds great in theory. But it takes attention to find problems, and it takes time to decide how to simplify things, and both time and attention are in short supply. The whole reason you need hard things to be easy is because your time and attention are already used up. Simplifying takes too much effort at the end of the day. How do we even get started?
A lesson from the old school
Civilization launched with the invention of agriculture. Before that time, the only inventions were new ways to cook mammoth. But if you remember that week of basic anthropology in history class, primitive agriculture took less effort than hunting and gathering did. It left our ancestors with more time and energy to spare.
In the present day, we feel the need to extinguish our free time. Boredom is a fate worse than death. But what’s the difference between nomads and the farmers they became? Farmers slept in safe, familiar places, and they had more time to sit around and do nothing. Thanks to boredom, they invented the wheel, and writing, and law. They built Sumer, and dreamed up its Hanging Gardens. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World exist because of comfort and a surplus of free time.
How did hunter/gatherers find the time to invent farming? They probably didn’t. If you want to make your life easier, or anyone else’s for that matter, you need no more than a comfortable place and some free time. But, you have to guarantee those things to yourself, and you won’t find the time to do it. You have to make time to get started.
Base construction
First, you need a place that you control; a home base. It should be a place where you’re usually left alone and where you find yourself most days. My base is my office at work. Yours might be your garden, your studio space, your back porch, or even your parked car. It’s like picking a place to meditate: It must fit into your normal routine, and it must allow you to contemplate in peace.
Next, make your base into a good space to think. Everything unhelpful must go. My office is a temple, relatively speaking. There’s some junk in the corner, sure. But everything is set up just the way I like it, and there are no real distractions. I spent a lot of effort to get it right. It was worth it — I feel like I control it, and not the other way around.
My office is so good for me that if I sit at someone else’s computer with someone else’s books on my desk and someone else’s lamps lighting the room, I can hardly think. This is partly because I’m used to my office, but it’s also because other people’s offices are just that messy. Those bases aren’t given much love, so they’re not kind to anyone.
Anyway, get your base ship-shape. Overdo it. You can relax your standards later, but overdo it for now.
Finally, pick a time that you’re going to spend on making difficult things easy. My time is whenever I get to work, for twenty minutes or so, every work day. That sounds like a lot, but there are about 50 twenty-minute periods in a 16-hour day. 2% of my waking life is worth spending to improve the other 98%.
OK, your base is operational. Every day, for twenty minutes, you are guaranteed time and space to think. This is as good as it gets. From this seat of power you can conquer the rest of your messy, difficult, unfree life. Where do you begin?
Throw out the baby
Your life has some good parts, and it has some horrible, festering, debilitating bad parts. Stop the bleeding.
I’m not suggesting that you quit your job or your relationship or college, nor that you abandon your infant child. That would make me sad.
Just think about the things you spend time on. There are side projects, hobbies, subscriptions and compulsions that don’t pay off. Drop them like the bad habits they are.
For example, quit:
- Podcasts and RSS feeds that are not consistently rewarding.
- Webcomics that aren’t absolutely brilliant.
- Projects that you spend some time on, but never enough to achieve liftoff.
- Political news that’s irrelevant because you already know who to vote for.
Those are my worst offenders. What are yours? The easiest way to discover these things is to catch yourself doing them when you should be doing something else. Here’s my rule of thumb: If I find myself needing to go to the bathroom but not wanting to stop what I’m doing, it’s compulsive, and it might be a bad habit. Biology shouldn’t have to wait.
I need discipline, and “Practice what you preach” applies. I am still hooked on political news. I find that preaching does help me practice, though, so maybe after writing this I’ll be more resistant to it. It’s amazing how long it took me to realize it was a problem, but you live and learn, right?
We need time to think, and “Out of sight, out of mind” applies. To eliminate most bad habits, all you have to do is unsubscribe. Remove TV shows from your TiVo, or better yet, cancel cable. Delete all but the essentials from your web browser’s bookmarks. If you miss them, you can always get them back. If you forget about them forever, that means you don’t miss them. And please, please turn off alerts for new emails. You, not the alleged prince of Nigeria, should be in charge of your attention.
We need motivation, and “Time is money” applies. Let’s say you make $20 an hour at work. If you applied yourself for an hour, that’s what an hour of your time might earn you. Then, is it worth $20 to watch a one-hour TV show? Is it worth another $10 to periodically daydream about it until the next show? I used to think smoking was expensive, but I would smoke the world’s fattest, dirtiest stogies if I could trade in all my time-wasting habits. I’m not suggesting that you work overtime, but that you use this extra time for something really valuable. Do something that improves your life forever, not just this evening.
Do it, IRL
The whole point of this post is to get us started on making difficult things easy. The first thing we have to do is get out of this terrible rut and make our lives bearable. So give the above ideas a shot, and adapt them to your own style. Find your own base and ditch your own bad habits. Tell me how it goes.
In the future, we’ll be able to move forward and make our day-to-day experience into something brilliant and fascinating. Boredom will be the very least of our problems.
About this blog
Hi, you’re reading a blog called to civilize:. I’m Kevin, and I work as a software engineer in North Carolina.
I care about making difficult things easy. It’s a broad topic, known to city planners, graphic designers, farmers, grocery list writers — everyone. This topic doesn’t have a name, but it does have the distinct benefit of advancing civilization.
To simplify difficult tasks is to remove barriers and to allow easier progress. It is to civilize.
As a programmer, I could write about how to tell computers to do things for you. But as a human being, you have troubles that software won’t ease. For all my specialized knowledge, I don’t remember to take out the trash. It’s not difficult to carry a trash bag, but it is difficult to remember to do it every Wednesday. I put it on my calendar, but then I was busy, so I ignored my calendar. How can I make it foolproof?
Taking out the trash is a start, but life offers much tougher tasks. Learning to cook is difficult. Sticking to a budget is difficult. Dealing with fifty emails each day is difficult. Seeing a project through to its end is difficult. Knowing what a politician really stands for is difficult.
I can handle fifty emails, but that’s my job. I don’t know all the answers. I’m writing this because I really want those answers. So, I will present what works for me as I find it out. You might be like me or you might not, so, you’ve got to find what works for you.
Please stick around.