take some time to do something
I’m on the tail end of my job search and by next week (hopefully), I will know where I’m spending my summer. After I received my first offer this past weekend, it felt like a massive weight had been lifted from me. When I say that I don’t just mean the metaphorical weight, I’m talking about the massive mental load that it had placed on me. In design, we often talk about reducing the mental load that we put on our users or minimizing the number of things they need to think about when using our product. For the past couple of months, I’ve always been thinking about jobs, even while doing everything else in my life - it’s been a part of my mental load consistently and made it hard to do much of anything more than the minimum. However, unlike a design problem, there wasn’t much I could do about it.
Now that I feel a little freer, I’m starting to realize how much it was affecting me. I have a lot more free time now and more time to be bored. For these past couple of months, it’s been extremely difficult for me to express myself creatively in any manner (beyond this newsletter). I created my first illustration of 2018 this past week. Despite an inner need to create something, I hadn’t had the mental capacity to think or be creative in any way.
And I think that one of the reasons I haven’t been able to fully engage with more meaningful work is because the job search is based on a lot of communication-based activities, such as filling out forms, sending emails and following up with people. This relates closely to Cal Newport’s idea of Deep Work - suggesting that “shallow work” such as meetings and email keep us from reaching the more personally satisfying and impressive “deep work” that really move us and society forward. As I move out of a period of constantly doing “shallow work”, I’m excited to have time to be bored, come up with new ideas and start working on things with intention.
Drops of the Week
where I *drop* recommendations of cool things this week
Longread
“Are We Post-Lifestyle” by Daisy Alioto - captivating read digging into the economic and philosophical aspects of the immense effect Instagram has had on our lives and the places we explore.
Magazine
The Disconnect - an interesting online magazine that you can only view if you disable your wi-fi. I love the idea and hope that it can lead me to more offline behaviors in general.
Playlist
Lo-fi House - I’m always discovering new genres of music, and right now I’m in love with lo-fi house, which is great to walk to and feel like you’re in a movie montage of some sort. It’s not as aggressive as some other electronic music but has some extremely danceable rhythms.
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:~)
Love,
Nikhil