I’m sitting in a massage chair at my parents’ house. My usual routine when home is to tag along with my dad to the gym, but it’s closed this morning. So I’m just going to mash on the keyboard for a few minutes.
Some spoiler-free thoughts on things we watched in the past week
- Spider-Man: No Way Home: As good as everyone says it is. I’ve listened to a few podcast reviews about the movie and one of the interesting points for the future is that they absolutely nailed this movie. And they happens to still include Sony.
- Venom: Let There be Carnage: I don’t know when 2.5 hours became the standard running time for big movies, but I don’t like it. Can’t stay awake. I liked all 90 minutes of Venom: Let There be Carnage and probably would’ve hated if it were another hour.
- The Matrix: Resurrection: As good as the sequels.
And on what I’ve been reading this week
- “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman: Wonderful book about time and how skewed our view of time has become. We try to get faster at work tasks but we then fill the freed up time with more work tasks. We measure the effectiveness of leisure by how well it recharges us for work. (When the effectiveness of leisure is like the utility of art.) Even if you’ve bought into the idea of spending money on experiences over material things, it’s easy to get caught up in trying to have the most experiences. A great read heading into the new year and reflecting on how you spend time. A lot of it is probably spent on things that don’t matter.
- “Hell Yeah or No” by Derek Sivers: A collection of essays from Sivers’s blog. He seems to have figured out how to live a calm, unrushed life. Sometimes, like right now, that feels like exactly what I want. Then the new year kicks in, things start moving, and I’ll switch back over to reading stories about hustle and will get back into deferring happiness for later.
- “Dune: Messiah” by Frank Herbert: I just started this but I’m still very interested in this world.
“Growing up in Frank Herbert’s household, I did not understand his need for absolute silence so that he could concentrate, the intense desire he had to complete his important writing projects, or the confidence he had that one day his writing would be a success, despite the steady stream of rejections that he received. To my young eyes, the characters he created in Dune and his other stories were the children of his mind, and they competed with me for his affections. In the years it took him to write his magnum opus, he spent more time with Paul Atreides than he did with me.”
There might be a limit to how far you go with creating a deep work environment.
They have a better relationship later and, of course, Dune is a timeless work that has entertained millions and inspired countless other stories that came after it. So that might have been the cost.
What I don’t want to do is end up in that kind of work-before-family state without having a master work to show for it.
All these different books about time have been making me think that it’s totally fine to spend time on a solo podcast simply as a fun hobby.