New year, new life

I quit making New Year's resolutions a lot of New Years ago--total recipe for failure, in my book--but given that this January 1 will also be the first day of the rest of my life in a more particular way than every other day of the world, I'm giving it some thought.

The thing that has given my life its structure more or less continuously since 1970 is suddenly going to drop away. My external motivation for getting up in the morning, grooming myself, wearing decent clothes, leaving my house, and (in recent years) getting exercise will be no more.

I don't yet have a clue what will replace it. In my limited experience of unemployment, the lack of structure is not my best friend. But the key word is "limited." Will a month of do-nothing nightowl-dom be enough for a more natural structure to start appearing? Two months? How could I know? I've never tried it.

What's more, the fact of having a job has been one of a very few connections I feel to "most people," a broad if rather shallow patch of common ground. Google Plus keeps reminding me to list my workplace in my profile, because without it, I'm only 80% complete.

So, what new scaffolding will I build to keep my life from dissolving into a puddle of undifferentiated time?

I have no idea yet. I should probably be terrified. Maybe I am terrified and I just don't know it. How does one feel at an event horizon?

The Right To Be Lazy

Why the Cult of Hard Work is Counterproductive, an absolutely wonderful article by Steven Poole published in New Statesman a couple of weeks ago, goes into "why doing nothing may be the best thing for your well-being and your brain."

Though it's a British article for a British publication and doesn't even mention the word "American," it has a huge bearing on a discussion of American-versus-European concepts of work and leave time that several of us were having here on my journal a few days ago.

( Stealing sick leave and other bullshit notions )

Poole takes on the very idea of productivity (tracing the word itself right back to its first use by Coleridge in the late 18th century), and pretty well demolishes it as a moral construct. He ends on this lovely note:

...it is not necessary to abandon the notion of “productivity” altogether. We all like to feel that we have done something useful, interesting or fun with our day, even (or especially) if it has not been part of our official work, and we might harmlessly express such satisfaction by saying that our day has been productive.

This ordinary usage encodes an ordinary wisdom: that mere quantity of activity – as implied by the get-more-done mania of the productivity cult – has nothing to do with its value.

Well worth the reading, and what's more, the comments are excellent and actually add substance to the article.