Intro
In my hometown, Adana, summers are really hot. Which means most people do the bare minimum during the summer months and just wait for it to be over. That’s why my brain just doesn’t want to accept the fact that I’m having a really busy June — and possibly a busy summer in general — and it needs to rewire itself.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.
Mission Control
Inbox: 346
RSS Reader: 4457 🙃
Upcoming Events/Travel in Next 30 Days: 1 (+1 TBD)
- Heading to İstanbul tomorrow for a half-day invite-only workshop. Will be back home in the evening.
- Have some writing and planning for a couple of upcoming projects on my desk.
- Non-stop travel for two weeks after a big gap made me realize my work routine and habits need some serious attention and started working on it.
From Last Week
- In the latest episode of our Tuhaf Gelecek podcast, we talked about why the framing of the population aging issue matters and why we need to be careful about how we’re discussing the topic.
- Along with the workshop, I was also a panelist on a journalism conference in Ankara last week. Talked about AI, business models, and how journalists should approach this transformation. (I have no idea why they called me a “communications expert” in the news article. Which is a title I will never use.)
Check my Now page if you want to see what I’m up to in a more detailed way.
Reading Lists Can Wait
If your job is based on learning and creating in any shape or form, it can get really hard to figure out where the boundaries are between those two. Since you need to research, read, and keep track of what’s going on around the world to properly do your job, you might end up feeling like there’s always something to catch up on or one more thing to check before creating anything.
I’ve been dealing with this made-up pressure for a long time — and still do from time to time. There is always one more thing I feel like I need to read before writing anything, one more publication to check before saying something about the subject. I don’t remember how many times I fell into this hole, and when I finally got out, it felt like I was way too late to the party.
One reason behind this is self-confidence, obviously. But it’s more about overestimating other people’s knowledge than underestimating yours. I still have that perfectionist urge somewhere in my head, but seeing lots of “experts” who only know the bare minimum on the subject really helped me overcome that aspect of the problem. Besides, we always overestimate what most people know about the subjects we’re interested in.
Another part of the problem is that working in a profession like that makes it easier to mistake your reading list with your to-do list. Sure, you’ll have some reading on your to-do list when a project or a specific work requires it, but most of the time, it’s not the case. This is a part I’m still really bad at and trying to find ways to teach myself the difference between the two as we speak.
And the final big part of this problem I noticed is that most of us are made to feel like whatever we say is final and there’s no space for evolving and learning. I want to blame microblogging platforms for this, but I know that’s just a sign of a much larger cultural problem. When you end up feeling like whatever you say can and will be used against you, you end up feeling like every stupid post you make means something. This is probably why I feel this less since I minimized my use of all microblogging platforms because the real world and real work are not like that at all.
So, what’s the solution? I don’t have a silver bullet, but we can start by accepting a really simple fact that we’re just humans trying to make things with limited resources. We don’t have unlimited time or energy, we are not capable of (and we don’t have to) be aware of everything, and we’re not static—we always learn and grow. When you feel comfortable with this fact, the rest will get much easier.
Song of the Week
Destiny 2 was (and still is) one of my main games, and there are many reasons for it — which I plan to write about soon. Its music is definitely a big part of it, so I had to share a song from its last soundtrack album with you.
Reading Log
“Yet ‘Legal metamorphoses between persons/things have been recurrent in history,’ as the legal scholar Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa says, giving the examples of human rights trials in Argentina, which gave retrospective rights to people who had been disappeared by the junta, and cases where orangutans, chimpanzees and elephants have been legally declared persons. If ‘persons can become things, animals can turn into persons, and even ghosts can obtain personhood in the legal domain,’ the ‘law would work then as a form of magic, a powerful instrument to create realities that, although fictional, have very real effects.’”
Jay Owens | Rights for Gods
“One of the important learnings is that the world of the Backrooms is a “place”. Or rather, it is the minimum viable location. Yellow wallpaper, carpet, buzzing lights, and the sense that something has gone wrong with the structure of reality. Is all that’s needed for an audience with a high degree of world literacy to begin inferring the rest.”
The Backrooms as Permissive IP | Weeknotes #442 – thejaymo.net
“To put that in plain English, they’d be better off playing golf with sacks over their heads. The plethora of hits from long range — 51.4 per cent from outside the box, 29 from a distance of 24 yards or further — is ludicrous, and speaks to an element of cluelessness (or utter panic, in the end). If you ever go hunting with these lads, definitely stand behind them.”
How Turkey took 62 shots and scored no goals in World Cup’s most miserable campaign – The Athletic
Outro
And I think this is a nice start to the week. Hope you’ll have a great week. See you around!
Leave a Reply