On Ticking Things Off Lists

This morning I finished reading a book.  This meant I could tick "finish reading book" off my list.  There's something very satisfying about ticking things off lists.  Why?

The book I finished reading was "Be More Pirate" by Sam Conniff Allende, a book about rebellion, freedom, branding, capitalism and imagination, as inspired by the actual pirates of yesteryear, whose retrospectively incongruous combinations of progressive ideas (equal pay, workers' rights even a prototypical form of same-sex marriage) and pre-modern barbarity made for the infamous "pirate codes" that challenged the status quo of so many aspects of imperialism and capitalism at its most violent and self-confident.  (A particularly striking example of this incongruity is found in the Articles of Henry Morgan and Other Buccaneers (circa 1670), which offers one of the earliest known forms of compensation for injury in the workplace: "for the lost of an arm, 600 pieces of eight, or six slaves; for a leg 500 pieces of eight, or five slaves; for an eye 100 pieces of eight, or one slave".  Needless to say; compensation good, slavery bad - and Allende takes time to articulate thoughtfully his considerations viz. moral relativism when using such practices as inspiration for any kind of contemporary behaviour.

It's a worthwhile read, I'd say, if you can stomach the somewhat sickly preoccupation with "startups" and the like, but its heart is in the right place and the author evidently has a well-calibrated bullshit detector.  Here's a couple of choice quotes from the final chapters:

"As billions more of the global population enter a consumer mindset of middle-class aspiration, and we accelerate past a planetary point of no return in a system based precariously on debt we can't afford and in a world without resources to sustain us, there's a chance the clue to survival is in how we perceive ourselves and the relationship we have with our planet and one another, and it just so happens that the name consumer may well be the signature on humanity's suicide note."

"You've inherited a system so broken that anything less than a radical alternative is suicidal; we're trying to grow in an economy and ecosystem that can barely support the size we are; we're run by an Establishment willing to sell out the biosphere to improve a budget line; and above it all we accept a global 'wisdom' that dictates this way is the only way to keep living.  The future holds an almost guaranteed major cataclysmic event in your lifetime, where the only certain truth will be that no one is coming to save you".

Obviously.  Anyway that isn't what I wanted to write about today, which makes the first of a full two weeks of one life's proletarian luxuries, annual leave.  Since making the decision always to value time more highly than money, I've found I'm developing a hyper-sensitivity the feeling of time passing without me actually getting things done.  Will I ever actually sit down once and for all to properly research and write my book?  Will I satisfactorily ever be able to pair my possessions down to the bare minimum, to the the point where I can live the streamlined, self-actualised existence of my fantasies?  Will I be able to convert my allotment into an efficient, high-yielding food forest-farm that provides for all my nutritional needs, year round?  Will I find a way to ask myself less pretentious questions?

I don't know the answers to any of these questions.  I'd like to press a button and instantly have everything I want.  On the other hand, that's exactly the opposite of what I want.

One of the things on my list today was "laundry".  So I did my laundry, and ticked that off.  I've also set a recurring item, "drink two bottles" of water, repeating daily, just to remind me to drink more water, because drinking more water is good, whatever the weather.  On Friday, my first actual day off (but it would have been anyway) I made myself an "ultimate list", where I scribbled down absolutely everything I could think of that I wanted to get done, no matter how minor, from finishing painting my shed, to fashioning a homemade siphon for transferring otherwise plug-holed bathwater into the toilet; from replenishing my wormery to clearing out my email inboxes; from cutting my hair, to digitising my stack of teenage notebooks, to scheduling a series of posts for this very blog.  Anything that came to mind, went on the list.  In essence:

To do:

1. Add "Win Nobel Prize" to to-do list ☑️

2. Win Nobel Prize

— Elliot Kruschev McMcMinty (@jonnyopinion) July 6, 2018

It feels like the right thing to do.  And there is, there really is, something very satisfying about ticking things off a to-do list, no matter how minor and unimportant they may seem.  I don't know why this is, I just thought I'd mention it.  It feels like things are coming into focus.  Equally, I might be going insane.

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A Mistake to Learn From
Twenty Milligrams
Fucking Big Wisdom
******
Please consider disabling your adblockers when reading this site.  I make every effort to ensure no inappropriate, rubbish or offensive advertising appears here, and nothing that is contrary to the spirit of this blog.  So it's really nothing to be afraid of.  Cheers.