Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I read every Cybertruck takedown I find, and this is easily the best.

Tesla’s baking sheet on wheels rides fast in the recall lane toward a dead end where dysfunctional men gather.

That's practically a Springsteen lyric level of vivid poetry.

But the article is really the best because it's written by an indigenous person.

Cybertrucks are sold on tribal land, but they are not in spaces that Native people, or any real truck people, go. They are simply taking our space.

My Indigenous upbringing taught me to give back to this land, which belongs to my ancestors. That value is real and spiritual for me; I remember where I came from. But these cyber-things are made of rare minerals extracted from the land. They give nothing back, only take.

It's also just a love letter to trucks in general (as a friend said, "fuck I have never seen my deep-seated 'little girl in pigtails and a tutu who wants to drive their grandparents' giant F150 that brings back incredible antiques from auctions' articulated so well...." For me, so many chores were done with my dad's and grandpa's pickups, and my first time steering a car was my grandpa putting me on his lap and letting me take the steering wheel when I'd have otherwise been too small to reach it).

I walked [my niece] in her stroller to take in the colors and sounds of classic rides. These trucks are an inheritance for people; they are works of art. Nevaeh, now 9 months old, grins when I seat her behind a white leather steering wheel in a finely crafted truck assembled 50 years earlier. “That’s something you’ve never seen before!” Marco, the truck’s owner, says, smiling at Nevaeh’s focus as a smooth bass drops on the radio.

When we leave and I return her to the car seat, I tell her that she can have her own truck one day to drive and haul things and bond with people she loves.

I've been thinking about this quote in relation to my own job since I first read it a few days ago:

Burnout, I’ve come to believe, isn’t just about time or tasks. It’s about purpose, alignment, and whether you believe the system you work in deserves your sacrifice.

(I've skimmed the rest of the piece it came from but haven't read it closely because it's about USian healthcare, so I can't speak for how sensible this person might be otherwise.)

That reminded me of something jesse_the_k shared a while ago, in a tab I also still have open. Jesse summarizes the MetaFilter quote with "The key point is: we must learn to identify pre-burnout signs. When you nurture sufficiently in advance, immolation is avoided."

Regularly lolling about and achieving nothing is vital for maintaining good health. There is no substitute for it. It's as necessary as sleep, from which it is quite distinct. We build and carry a lolling-about debt at our peril.

That panicky, squeezed, world-collapsing sensation is a super reliable symptom of a chronic lolling deficiency, as is the characteristic denial that I have no time for anything so frivolous. The correct internal response to that denial is: Bullshit! If I feel like I'm at the end of my tether then there has been something occupying my time that is less important than lolling about, and I need to identify that.

Maybe relevant because I am in the middle of a weekend where I have no plans and kinda worry about that (it turns to be both a cause and an effect of bad mental health} but also cannot think of anything I actually would want to do.

Grief has become a thing that lives with us. i've noticed the last few years that the more i name my social grief and let myself feel it, the less reactive and squabbly i am, and the more compassion and energy i have to care for others

this is the essence of Grief Therapy in Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT), along with sharing your stories w/those you share values with.

grief requires tending, a form of labor, but the advantage of social/political grief is that we have many hands to make light work -- there are millions of us on this planet to help hold it. even when we feel so alone in the absurdity of loss, we can breathe and remember how many wanted the same world as we do, and we can feel how that world is very much alive in our hearts and collective imagination

I just saw this shared on Facebook (by someone calling themselves Trauma Geek) and I feel like it's describing me pretty perfectly.

Under-stimulation contributes to burnout.

Burnout is not just about over-stimulation. It’s about missing the right kind of stimulation, the kind that brings us to coherence and flow.

Burnout is about not having access to pleasure, joy, safe connection, and rest.

Burnout comes from not having co-regulation, not having a safe home space, not having a network of people we can call on for help, not being able to fully express ourselves, not having time in nature, not having time for hobbies or art or play. Burnout comes from not having any of the numerous things that mammals need as social beings - clean air, reliable food sources, soundscapes without mechanical noise, natural water, singing, dancing, community, etc.

Not having what we need is just as stressful to the body as being over-stimulated. Not having what we need causes our nervous system to send the same danger signals and activate the same stress responses as when we encounter a significant threat in our environment. Not having what we need is perceived as a significant threat to the body.

Burnout recovery is not ONLY about avoiding too much stimulation and resting/sleeping as much as possible. It’s also about finding healthy and helpful stimulation to replace aversive stimulation.

The kinds of stimulation that tell us we are safe at an Autonomic level can be incredibly difficult to access in the modern world. Burnout is 100% not your fault. It’s a collective problem that requires a collective solution.

Burnout is often caused by the wrong kind of stimulation. Healing is often about finding the right kinds of stimulation for our nervous system to perceive deep safety. I want to work towards creating a world where the right kind of stimulation is more easily accessible by all.

I've been thinking of burnout in a work context, and I absolutely am under-stimulated there (and what stimulation I do have has been unusually likely to be negative which is also hard).

But also this fits well with my other problems about never really being able to replace what lockdowns and coincidental but poorly-timed loss of friendships, volunteering activities, and feeling part of things bigger than myself.

I think this might help explain why I'm terrible at resting too: I already get a lot of rest. Too much. Not enough other things.

The other day I was interested to read that, at least in the U.S., self-checkout machines may actually get less common in stores.

While self-checkout technology has its theoretical selling points for both consumers and businesses, it mostly isn't living up to expectations. Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them, and to service the machines.

The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it's worth...

Retailers may continue to rely on the technology, but many aren't putting all their farm-fresh eggs in the self-checkout basket. Instead, they're increasingly giving customers the option to choose between human and machine.

For the customers that do choose to do the labour themselves, there's one thing Andrews believes won't change. However ubiquitous the technology is, and however much consumers get used to using the kiosks, shoppers are likely to find themselves disappointed and frustrated most of the time.

"It was part of a larger experiment in retail in trying to socialise people into using it," he says. Simply, "customers hate it".

I am glad to hear that a mix of human and machines is likely to remain available at checkout because I know some of the customers who not only don't hate it but prefer it: Andrew was always delighted when he could get through a trip to Asda without having to interact with another person at all. The touchscreens and practically-hidden bar code scanners on those self-checkout machines mean I avoid them whenever possible, but the best accessibility comes from having options, because whatever's a nightmare for one person is going to be essential for another.

Almost as soon as I'd read this, I was reading takes on how this phenomenon could apply in other areas. Of course I was thinking about accessibility; people who work in tech were thinking about tech.

Some of those takes overlap; like number one here is "The user is always inexperienced." People who just buy groceries have never scanned groceries as much as someone who's done that job. Also, independence is a myth. They word it differently; this is how I am wording it because some disabled people and groups speaking for them emphasize "independence" and it drives me up a wall, because none of us are independent.

If you scan an item twice, select the wrong payment method, accidentally get charged for a bag when you brought your own, forget to scan your discount card at the right time, or make any other trivial mistake, you are now at the mercy of someone else. When a problem does occur, a staff member has to notice it, come to your aid, figure out what happened, and correct it. You were promised self-service when, in fact, you are so disempowered that you can't troubleshoot or correct a single thing that might go wrong.

This makes me think about the campaigning against closing almost all the train station ticket offices in England. Apart from all the ways those machines are inaccessible, machines contribute to the unnecessary expense of train fares, already a particularly complex racket that is expensive at the best of times and ensures people pay too much when they buy the tickets themselves. You have to be an expert to understand how to buy appropriate, never mind cheapest, fares, sometimes even making an journey regularly doesn't leave people confident in their ability to get the best price and not get treated like an illegal immigrant by the train guards.

The particular disempowerment of waiting for someone who looks sixteen to determine that I'm old enough to buy ibuprofen is something that occurred to me recently. The need for humans to intervene every time the machine thinks you've scanned an item twice when you haven't, doesn't think you've put it in the bagging area when you have, and vice versa means the few staff who are employed expect to be called over for false positives as much as any actual needs. I've been age-verified by people who didn't even seem to glance at me. Trying to split the checkout tasks into those that can be done by shoppers and those that must be done by staff hasn't really proven to be very effective or fun for either group, in tasks that mostly weren't all that fun to begin with at least there's a smooth process when the person who's processing the rest of my groceries is also making one extra gesture when they get to the beer.

I'm totally in love with something packbat said today:

I think if there's one thing to be learned from the commercial aviation industry, it is that "am I the asshole?" is a much less useful question than "how did the totality of habits, tools, knowledge, communication, and so forth - because it's never just one thing - result in something unfortunate happening, and what can I learn from this to avoid such things happening in the future?"

I think if there's two things to be learned from the commercial aviation industry, it's that if you've had less than 21 hours of sleep in the past 72 (numbers to be adjusted as necessary based on your own medical history, but that's the standard for pilots), you ought to bear in mind that you are at elevated risk of fatigue-driven mistakes.

I know nothing about commercial aviation but I feel those things so strongly in my own life! I said I love it so much I want to hang it on the wall, heh.

In the last couple of years I've found myself gradually collecting a lot of blogs newsletters by straight-ish USian women, somehow interested in this culture that's so familiar to me (I love Lyz Lenz's writing for that particularly, like this thing I finally read yesterday) at precisely the time that it's increasingly receding into the distance.

Today I read about the portal, “the weird spiritual / emotional / professional / transitional portal that women ages 37 to 45 are in.” It appears to be particularly hegemonic USian women, I hasten to add, and as always I found myself wondering how this applies to more marginalized groups, including ones I'm in.

The rest of Petersen's piece consists of short interviews with a number of people on the subject and I'm particularly interested in the first one.

In her work, Byock describes a broad “typology” for young people in our societal moment: there are “those who are more or less comfortable pursuing the social expectations for them, and those who are questioning too much or suffering too much to do so.” The first group she calls Stability Types; the second, Meaning Types.

It goes on:

within her work, she sees [the "midlife passage"] as the moment when “stability types, realizing they’ve climbed to the top of the ladder, see that they want more out of life. And so they search for meaning. The portal might be seen as the work of people who have participated in everything society expected of them on one level or another, and are finding themselves wanting more out of life — and want to find more purpose in life as change makers.”

Which is fine. But, as a very obvious "Meaning Type" in this framework, I immediately noticed that there was no equivalent midlife journey described here for us. I wonder if it works the other way too.

I think it always has for me: I went from "suffering too much" to "questioning too much" (while still suffering! questioning was an addition rather than a replacement!) and have spent my late 30s and now early 40s chasing stability: a bachelor's degree, a divorce and consequently a vastly improved living situation, my first white-collar 9-to-5 job... even, for all it can be destabilizing (what name will I be called at the hospital?), gender transition is in the longer term stabilizing for me too.

Gender transition (social, medical, administrative, to any extent someone pursues it) actually feels like a pretty good example of how seeking stability can be as much of an upheaval, a "portal," for us Meaning Types as seeking meaning can be for the Stability Types.

Big immigrant moods here:

The book has me thinking about what it means to have a history somewhere, not just to be known by the people around you, but to know that they know your parents and grandparents too. To have a relationship with a place that goes back not years or decades but generations. When I take my kids to the playground, we are surrounded by people who, like me, have followed various currents of migration, people who are far away from the places or cultures that birthed them. One dad is Turkish, his wife is Ukrainian. They moved here to escape the war and now they worry constantly about her family. Their son, who is two, cycles through three or four languages in a single sentence. Another dad is from Nigeria; he has twins the same age as mine and he told me, laughing, that their last flight home was so miserable they’ve decided not to go again for at least a few years. (I so get this laugh, and also the heartache behind it.)

The flight can be so miserable for me on my own. I remember once watching a young woman try to wrangle a toddler on a flight and I thought If I had kids that'd be me. Ugh. And as sad as I am that my parents aren't grandparents because they'd be excellent at it, I also realized that they'd see the babies for two weeks a year just like they saw me two weeks a year, and it would feel like so much to me and hardly anything to them. I couldn't imagine getting to decide not to make that trip for a few more years because the flight had been so miserable; I'd never hear the end of it.

I never planned to stay in Appalachia. When I was seventeen, I worked as a cashier at the local K-Mart and customers would come through my line with their gallon of milk and their bag of potting soil and their box of ammunition and their Martha Stewart brand bed sheets and I’d ask how their day was going and they’d look at me and say, “Now, where are you from?” I was so pleased by this question. “Here,” I would answer, and smile at their surprise. I learned early to tone down my accent. Because even in our very homogenous part of the world, I knew that how I spoke conveyed something about who I was—or who I wanted to be. And I wanted a life that was bigger than Appalachia.

I once got accused of being from Wisconsin when I was in college -- a small school in western Minnesota, it was almost all Minnesotans: either people from within a hundred-mile radius of it, or people from the Twin Cities (my favorites of whom hated that the rest of us called it all "the Cities" and really wanted us to care whether they were from Plymouth or Wayzata or whatever, good luck with that!) -- because I'd taught myself to say "soda" instead of "pop." I too wanted to run from how my speaking portrayed me. Joke's on me: now it hurts when people don't believe I'm from there, I can't do the accent well enough even if I try! Now I know the source of linguistic discrimination isn't inherent in us but is socially determined like so many other things, I am fierce in my speech and longing for my native accent never goes away entirely. But when I was a teenager, it was also for me a sign that I had my sights on things I thought "bigger" and "better."

What I’ve been feeling lately is not quite homesickness but it is a kind of loneliness, a kind of longing. Or maybe it is a very specific version of homesickness. The version where, even though you really like your life, you sometimes long for a part of yourself that is no longer accessible, that is, in fact, invisible to everyone around you.

My brother is invisible to everyone around me. I think a lot about that specific version of homesickness...just sickness, maybe. The kind of farm I grew up on is invisible to everyone around me. My upbringing did not share the cultural references of cartoons or toys. School was completely different -- and little or nothing like the movies and TV shows have told British people to expect school to be like in America.

Yet they elide it all together, so the fact that I'm from the rural Midwest doesn't matter, it's just "America." Someone was once disappointed that I don't say "sneakers" and she would've been even less happy if she'd known that I never did: I grew up calling them tennis shoes or tennies. And every time someone Britsplains "Now, we call this jam but you call it jelly," I want to shove the jam jar up their butt. Because I have always called that jam, I did grow up calling it jam, people in the Midwest say jam! Those making it at home might distinguish between jam, jelly, preserves, and all that, but the average person just calls it all jam same as they do here.

I don't really have a point to end on here, I just wanted to share this link and how it resonated with me.

So today I saw a link to this thing, which is more business-brain than I'd usually be interested in but this seemed so apropos for where my thoughts have been lately.

It starts with a vague anecdote about "a small group of leaders" gathering most of their people for two days of talking about "big changes to their organisation's mission."

The writer goes on, "These leaders were talkers. At the end of the second day of this, they were amped up and excited about the plans that had been hashed out." She contrasts these "talkers" with "writers":

The writers were on the whole befuddled and exhausted; they weren‘t sure what had been decided on, and when they tried to reflect on all that talking, it was a blur. They could feel the energy of the room was such that something exciting had happened but they didn‘t quite know what to think of it. They were uncertain if they had made themselves clear; they were uncertain of what they had wanted to make clear. They wondered if they were missing something, but they couldn‘t articulate what it was. They too sent thanks and thumbs up emojis, but they went home with a vague sense of dread.

I feel so seen here.

I do still think all the stuff I talked about yesterday plays a part too: disability, gender, race, class... But some of it is just personality or extro-/introversion or whatever too. There's more to it than this talker/writer binary (which the author does problematize a little too) but I do think this is a really interesting frame for me to use about work.

She says

In most orgs, talkers are overrepresented among the leadership [because] most of our models for leadership—meetings, town halls, presentations, interviews—privilege talkers...

The result is that a great many orgs have talkers at the top and writers down below, but because power obscures difference, the talkers are very rarely aware of this setup.

Power obscures difference is definitely one of the things I was fumbling around and spilling much more metaphorical ink trying and failing to say! Having such a succinct way to state something so prevalent in my life would already made this essay valuable to me, even if nothing else about it was.

The essay goes on with advice about what to do with this binary, but for me it was enough to stop here and just bask in having a situation I have been struggling to describe be explained so precisely.

What the leaders I observed did was optimize for their own mode of thinking.... In the course of that optimization, they effectively disenfranchised most of the writers among them. They left a lot of good brain power and potential alignment on the floor, and they didn‘t even realize it was there as they stepped over it on the way out the door.

I saw this because the author shared it on Mastodon, and I replied with my profuse thanks and one additional thought: I said "I'm frustrated at the ableism that's present in a talker-led society, even in groups that are for disabled people. And also, the talker ideal is less suitable without mitigations we rarely have in the ongoing global pandemic, so that's a disability justice issue as well." She called it "an astute observation," so that feels good anyway!