Where are you?

How do you know where you are?

If you awoke suddenly in an unfamiliar place with no idea how you got there, you would try and orient yourself in relation to the things you see around you. Conversely, if you have been on a journey it is easy to know where you are because you know where you have come from, how far you have gone and in what direction.

I think this is why teenagers and young people (that makes me sound really old…) can be very conformist. When you are a teenager, especially pre-16, your life hasn’t yet resembled a journey, certainly not one where you have had any options. And so to find out where you are – to find out who you are – the only thing you have to go on is the landmarks of the people around you. And it’s easier to know where you are if you are closer to landmarks, hence the sometimes ruthless and unpleasant conformity of being a teenager and the ostracism of those who are different.

As time passes, your life more and more resembles a journey – you have moved onwards emotionally, socially, intellectually. This makes it easier to know where you are because you have the reference points of the journey you have made. You no longer need to rely so much on the landmarks around you. Hence the greater tendency for independent bloody-mindedness and a liberating don’t-give-a-toss-about-keeping-up-a-facade of older people.

Being in charge is scary

Now that I’m redundant and attempting to freelance, or at least be moderately productive until I get another “proper” job, I’m in charge of my days, which is quite scary.

Previously, I had to be in work at regular office hours and that was that. Now, I could stay in bed all day if I wanted. That is not a long-run solution but on any given day it is perfectly possible. It would also send me mad, although that’s another story.

Despite not being a morning person, whenever I have to schedule a meeting or appointment I make it first thing – this forces me to get up and get on with things when otherwise I would be idling away the day.

If you have a normal job and it comes with line management responsibilities, then to some extent you are in charge of other people’s days. But if you have a normal job, are you even in charge of your own day?

Why drugs should be legalised

Hat-tip to Adam Smith

Ignore what people say, see what they do

Alex Massie reports the results of a survey of the British public regarding their opinion of the Big Society. To summarise:

• Most people don’t know what it is…
• …nevertheless, most people think it is a good idea…
• …but most people think it won’t work.

So, there are a large number of people sufficiently compos mentis to answer a survey who nevertheless can confidently assert mutually exclusive opinions on a subject they admit they know little about.

My advice is to ignore these people.

So how do you know what people really think if many people can’t be trusted to answer surveys properly? Instead of looking at the stated preference (what people say they prefer, or think), look for the revealed preference. Revealed preferences are the things people give away about themselves by their actions.

Loads of people say they would prefer a return to local specialist shops, but they do all their grocery shopping in supermarkets.

People claim that they wish they could learn an instrument/another language, but they don’t. Nearly everyone could make a good fist of trying either of those, but hardly any do. I’ve given up saying that sometimes I wish I could play an instrument – because if I wanted to, I would do so. Given my revealed preference, it appears that I don’t.

This is a really useful tool for understanding something about both yourself and society. You can happily ditch the lingering feelings of guilt or regret about not taking up something you “always wanted to” – turns out you didn’t! You can also filter out pointless news items about the kind of world people claim they want. Look to what they do, the picture will be much clearer.

Finding a new approach to new year resolutions

I always make new year resolutions, and they are usually quite generic. That approach works so long as you come up with a specific way of implementing it. Two years ago I decided to join a badminton club and I’m still going and still enjoying it. In hindsight I don’t even identify it as a resolution fulfilled, just something I did. Try and make your resolutions like this – a generic goal (get fit) turned in to a specific action (join badminton club). If I had just stuck to the generic resolution I would have gone jogging for a couple of weeks and then given up. Instead, I look forward to badminton evening every week and have a whole new bunch of friends.

For this year I decided that I want to take up a team sport and go back to studying. I’ve found a local cricket team  - Kings Heath CC – that have a good training set up and will take on beginners; and I’ve signed up for an economics course (in the Austrian tradition, naturally).

The strange thing is that I know I will thoroughly enjoy both of these things, but I needed the impetus of “making resolutions” to get into gear and actually make them happen. Why is this? Some people are blessed with an inexhaustible supply of energy and enthusiasm, but I could procrastinate for my country and I think many people are the same. This means I need all the help I can get with resolutions, so I’m trying to go for resolutions that will be “good for me” but that I will also enjoy.

One resolution I make time and again is a negative one – to stop wasting so much time on the internet, reading newspapers, and generally filling up my life with activities that don’t actually inspire or enthuse me (addictive as they are). This resolution never works. Instead I’m going to try and make a conscious effort to fill my time with things I love and this should squeeze the time for time wasting out of my day. Barbara Winter has a good take on this at Joyfully Jobless.

A typical negative resolution might be to eat more healthily. It is easy to approach that by deciding to cut out junk food. But if you eat junk food it is because you like junk food, so that probably won’t stick. A better approach might be to take a cookery course, so you can feel positive and confident about making good food choices rather than feeling like you are just depriving yourself of your treats.

Looking back at last year, I did make some changes but they weren’t new year resolutions as such. Still, it’s useful to look back and see how I did:

• Four day week – This didn’t work out how I planned but nonetheless has been a good learning experience, about myself and my motivations as much as anything else.
• Swimming – I took swimming lessons (quite a few actually), and although I improved a lot I never quite nailed it. I also wasn’t able to fit it in to my week outside of lessons. I started going to the pool before badminton but my badminton suffered, and I decided I didn’t want to go the leisure centre on another evening just for swimming. However. I do have a much better grounding should I need/want to take it up again.
• Cycling to work – Love it, saves money, gets me out in the fresh(ish) air

Looking back at these (and the badminton) gave me the confidence of knowing that I can make changes to my life that do stick, even if they don’t all work out as I expected.

Is turquoise the new black?

Is turquoise the new black?

Suddenly, has everyone gone crazy for such-and-such?

Have you noticed how these days everyone is doing/wearing/reading a particular thing?

Or are all statements like those just the biased observations on their circle of very similar friends of an exceedingly tiny and homogenous group of “opinion formers” and columnists? You know the ones. If you are in the UK they think everyone lives in London, personally knows politicians, and that £50k a year puts them in the middle of the distribution of salaries.

How childhood sets the pattern for Christmas shopping

When you are a child you are growing up and changing rapidly – you will have grown out of last years clothes and grown tired of last years toys, thus it makes sense to buy children lots of presents at Christmas. But this sets the habit for life, so adults feel the need to exchange large quantities of temporary material diversions for no logical reason.

I am becoming difficult to buy presents for – I don’t want to own any more DVDs (we have LoveFilm) or CDs (Spotify); I prefer to buy my own clothes (and I haven’t grown out of anything for a while), and I don’t like owning random stuff. I do like a good hardback book though. But this means I also find it hard to buy these things for other people – I don’t keep up so I don’t know what’s hot and what’s not!

I don’t want a cupboard full of crap, and I don’t want to add to other people’s crap-cupboards either. Instead I’ve started trying to buy presents that fall into the following categories:

• experiences e.g. theatre, gig or sports tickets
• useful yet awesome things e.g. a bag but only if someone actually needs a bag
• consumables that last e.g. high quality sauces, not chocolates you’ve scoffed by New Year

What are you moaning about this week?

I was asked the other day what I had been moaning about in the last week. It took me a moment to realise I was being asked what I had been blogging about (this was an off-line, real world conversation).

I was going to call this post “Reasons to be cheerful”, and highlight the blog posts in which I am optimistic and of a sunny disposition. Turns out there aren’t many of them, so that’s that plan scratched.

But I don’t FEEL like a moany old git. I know it may not sound like it sometimes but I am actually optimistic about the big things – just like Matt Ridley. You need to think about the bad stuff in order to work out how to solve it – just like Frank. Having dreams and aspirations requires you to think about how you want your life to be, and hence how it isn’t as good as can be – just like me, here.

Things you should never ask me

When I’m drunk, I can be a bore. I know it, and other people know it too. Perhaps you are one of those who know. If so, I apologise.

I can also be a bore when sober, but I don’t think it’s so bad then. See, when I’m drunk, I even start to bore myself. I go off on a topic and talk about it too forcefully for too long. My mind suddenly realises that I’ve gone on too long, but my mouth keeps talking. My mind hears me making the same point repeatedly in only very slightly different ways, but my mouth insists I continue.

It usually only happens when I am talking to one other person. I don’t think that I bore groups particularly, mainly because I’m not conversationally dominant enough to browbeat a whole group of people into submission.

So, as thanks for reading my blog, I’d like to offer YOU some advice on how to not end up on the receiving end of my drunken monotony. If you are talking to me at a party or in the pub, discussing weighty matters, and you suspect/know I have had a few drinks, never ever bring up the following topics if you want to escape alive:

• The state of English cricket
• The European Union
• The need (or otherwise) for manned space exploration (especially with regards to Mars)
• Sanctimonious hypocritical lefties (e.g. most of Labour, Polly Toynbee)
• The smoking ban

If you do wish to discuss any of the above topics, please feel free to firmly interject if I have been going on too long. I won’t take it personally – indeed, I shall probably thank you.

Having partially wised-up to my ranting topics, I will politely refuse to engage in any conversations regarding abortion or fox hunting.

What do I wish I knew about the Real World before I started working?

This post is part of a blog series on Brazen Careerist being sponsored by JobSTART101.  They asked Brazen members to answer the question:  What do I wish I knew before I started working?  Here’s my response:

I have now started working in the Real World on three separate occasions. My first Real World job was straight after post-16 education. Then I went to university. Then I got a non-graduate job (although having a degree helped). Then I went to university again. Then I got a graduate job, and that’s the job I’m in today.

Each of those jobs was completely different, as was each job hunt.

The first job – chemistry analyst for a water company – I applied for almost on a whim. I had taken a year out before university and was doing casual work to keep me in beer. I saw the job advertised in the New Scientist and applied for it because it was the only job in there that didn’t require a degree.

The second job was as a research and information assistant for a local authority. I had graduated but for personal reasons could not move home for work, nor was commuting far an option. I had turned down a PhD because I wanted to get away from university for a while. I had reluctantly gone to the graduate careers fairs on campus, but was at a loss. I hadn’t got the idea of transferable skills into my head and looked at every stall thinking “why would they employ someone with an ecology degree?”. I always left thinking that it was only for lawyers and accountants.

My final job hunt was an entirely different affair. The masters course I studied was very industry-oriented so we had lots of companies come in and give presentations, and between Christmas and Easter the question was always “How many graduate schemes have you applied for?”. I approached this with gusto, pleased to finally be undertaking a focussed job hunt for an environmental consultancy role. Thing is, I didn’t need a masters degree to go for these jobs; it’s just that it never occurred to me that I should apply for jobs with engineering firms when I was job-hunting the previous time around.

So, all of my encounters with the Real World have been new and different. I haven’t yet moved directly from one Real World job to another, I always tend to do a degree in between which is not really a sustainable practice. If there is one thing to relate about the Real World it is that it is massive and varied, and you will probably never comprehend the existence of more than a fraction of it. I’ve seen three bits of it because I keep hopping in and out, but I was constrained each time by my limited knowledge of what the possibilities were. The Real World’s variety of landscape means that there are many opportunities, but you need to know to look. The danger of the Real World is that the soil is soft underfoot, and it is easy to get stuck in a rut that you have ploughed. From your rut, it can appear that the only way is forward in the line your rut follows. This is fine if you are ploughing in the direction you want to go, but if you aren’t then it can take a lot of effort and courage to look up and out and see what else is out there.