The Facades at Work

One of these days I'm going to run out of cheesy puns that I put in most of these entry titles; but for now we're doing all right.

Rubin has a list of tips for being more productive at work. Happy and productive usually go together in the popular lexicon, and we certainly have jobs such as Business Consulting and Industrial Organizational Psychology, which go along with this obviously true connection.

Be productive. Be happy.


But we know from this blog that it's easy to bull shit. For example, when I worked in the library, if you simply craned your neck, you could look in and see that one of the librarians was actually just reading People magazine. She just wasn't doing anything, and she was trying to look like she was doing something.

Doing "nothing" is a job, it's just a cushy job. I've worked both kinds, where I've had to use a lot of effort for minimum wage, and I've had to work very little for minimum wage. Working at the library was closer to the latter than the former. When I worked at the Skenandoa restaurant, it was closer to working very hard with a huge amount of effort.

When I write effort, I mean strain and stress. This, too, is ambiguous. I mean scrubbing, pushing a broom, and pushing a mop. I had to race around putting dishes away. I had to talk to chefs awkwardly about exactly how much work I'm doing. If there were times for breaks, they would want me standing and scrubbing counters.

I've worked as a life guard at a ton of places at this point. I've worked at the Skenandoa Pool, the Clinton Pool, I was highered by the Hamilton College pool but I never ended up working there, I worked for the Sitrin Home Camp, I worked for the NCCU pool, and I worked for the Addison Miller Pool in Utica. I worked for the Candler Swim Club in Raleigh and at the Northwoods Mews Townhomes pool in Cary, North Carolina.

Life guarding is even more ambiguous. It's emblematic of the problem that workers and managers face. Surely it's hard work, but what kind of hard work is it? You have to be attentive, and you have to keep your mind focused and thinking, yet not bored. When I was working for the Candler Swim club, she would make us do hard labor during the breaks by mowing.

Sometimes motivating ourselves is easy, and sometimes it's hard. It might be a nice entry later to talk about why people are motivated toward fun, and how they are motivated by fun.

I've learned that many jobs are very ambiguous about how much effort and strain are involved. This is especially in the United States.

The Moderns! continued (Part II)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz

Gottfried Leibniz (1 July 1646 [OS: 21 June] – 14 November 1716) was one of the greats because of his integration of sciences, not to mention his white knuckle ability for work.

Over the course of his years he invented binary, which every computer in the world uses in the present day. He also pretty much single handedly invented Library Sciences, and it was his integration of maths that led him to invent the Calculus independently and before Newton. Americans still use Leibnizian notation.

Leibniz worked nonstop over the course of his life, often travelling as he did it. Various other contributions to sciences such as politics, geometry, geology, engineering, and even poetry were all pretty abundant. He invented one of the first calculators.

Working more than probably anyone else of his era, the extent of Leibniz's works have still not been assessed and translated 400 years later. It is possible that Leibniz has other ideas as good as some of his computer solutions lost in his papers.

As for his philosophical contributions, Leibniz re-systemized logic. This paved the way for analytic truth ventures. His Principle of Identity and Principle of Sufficient Reason are really cool. He also made some pretty good cases for Free Will being Compatible with rigid Scientific Organization, or Determinism if you will.

A tremendous leader in so many fields, Leibniz established some of the first German academies of sciences, which would forge Germany into a world power in the 19th and 20th centuries.

If I may speak freely here, I might say that Leibniz was really angry about people being unable to recognize the wonders of this world. He put the problem out there as noumena versus phenomena, whereupon we could know the real essences of things. His theory of Pre-established harmony reminded people that things happen for a reason and we can trust those reasons.

Jeff Kasser's farewell to Colby Speech

I might have to take this down, but it is available through Colby College regardless so I do not see so much harm. One damaging thing is the stalker-ness of this. Professor Kasser was my adviser for Philosophy when I first came to NC State. He did an okay job as adviser but he really didn't teach me anything. In a creepy moment, I researched him and this is what I came up with. Kasser transferred out to another job by the end of the semester. In a way, I feel this man owes me for what he did not give me, but that's all side drama. It's a good window for some thought, which is what he says he wanted from this speech.

That said, what does this have to do with anything? Well for one it's from a philosophy professor. For another it's about being honest with oneself. I'm also interested in the damaging effects of bro culture, that is, popular culture of mainstream males who seem to be unconcerned with the future. Kasser brings up two specific and eery incidents of drama. In one, students vandalize the school in a rage, which shouldn't happen in a "satisfied" small rich liberal arts school. In another, students bring beer to a professor's last day of classes. Kasser says to look at what we do in order to gauge what is important to us. Students went in to celebrate, but Kasser implies that they went in to celebrate more for the sake of celebration. The Professor who was teaching was outraged and eventually went back to work. Kasser says we have an obligation to be honest with ourselves about what we care for, and we have an obligation to not say that we take things seriously when we don't. His cry to ask students to work hard, or at least be more honest to themselves about the amount of work that they are doing is especially endearing.

I'll post more on this if I think of anything later.