Why Children Need to Read, Anti-Optimization, and Corporate Commissars — 6 Ideas

Six ideas that I’ve been thinking about this past week

Here are six ideas I’ve been thinking about this past week that are helping me improve my body, mind, and spirit. I hope that they help you as well.

If this is your first time reading, subscribe here.

Two quick things:

• If there is a recent essay that has sparked your curiosity, given you a new idea, or in any way contributed positively to your daily life, let me know below in the comments. Write & Lift is a constantly evolving publication and I want to know what piques your interest. If you’re a writer, you are inclined, like me, to get lost down whatever rabbit hole you stumble upon. While I aim to vary the topics each week, I want this to remain something you look forward to reading and to do so I thrive on suggestions and feedback. So if you have a rabbit hole you think I should explore, let me know.

• Paid subscribers have access to our weekly “no-read” book club meetings on Saturday, 8:30 AM PST as well as other essays and book summaries. If you want to become a paid subscriber, upgrade your membership below. If you’re already a paid subscriber, check your email on Friday for access to the weekly book club meeting. If you’re a paid subscriber, check your email inbox Saturday morning for the Book Club meeting invitation.

---

1. Why Children Need to Read

One of the most destructive things you can take from a child is their imagination. When we’re young, the world is a swirling miasma of new sensations, opportunities, and adventure. Kids are basically on a low-level dose of hallucinogenic drugs at all times. A cardboard box is a medieval fort. A stick is a sword. A paper crown is the only prerequisite to becoming a princess.

Part of the reason why we imagine other worlds and engage in make-believe play when we’re young is to understand who we are; to mimic the behavior we see from adults, to act out the roles and fantasies that inform and structure our families and institutions. Daily reading allows children to expand this map of understanding outside of the proximity of their home environment. They become unbound by time and place.

I grew up in a quaint suburb in Anchorage, Alaska. I have memories of eating breakfast on the weekend and then being pushed outside. Memories of my mother saying: “You can come back for a quick lunch. It’s a beautiful day. Go outside and play.” I was lucky to share the neighborhood with a dozen other boys my age whose parents also valued autonomy and exploration. Screen time and video games were for rainy days and late evenings. We didn’t have the language for it, but our forts, bike rides, and snowball fights were simulations of the stories we absorbed. We were the protagonists. We embodied the archetypes of heroes, jesters, and evil villains.

Children are often smarter than we give them credit for. They surprise us with their depth of knowledge and understanding of the world. Messages and moral platitudes can be delivered in a single sentence or two, but real understanding comes from engaging with the words; tracing the character’s journey and the language and images that it accompanies. The words, setting, and images, are just as important (if not more so) to a child as the idea or theme that the story revolves around.

Storytelling is not only a mental activity. It engages the body. It engages emotion. Candy-coated moralism isn’t a story. And you can’t expect children to truly understand something if you don’t give them the freedom to explore the themes themselves. Stories that tell a child what to do will lead to a near-endless repetition of the word “why?” Stories that mirror the complexity and mystery of life give children the agency and space they need to develop — to learn deep truths slowly, as opposed to simple truths quickly.

“I wish, instead of looking for a message when we read a story, we could think, ’Here’s a door opening on a new world: what will I find there?’”

-Ursula K. Le Guin

2. What “Optimizing” Really Means

Habits, optimization, systems, frameworks...

All popular ways of saying: “I know I am not doing the work I need to be doing, and now I am inventing another pointless task because I am scared to do the work.”

Optimizers are my enemy.

They steal your time. They feed you garbage. They write shitty books. They invent sayings and ideas and fancy jargon that means nothing. They sell you snake oil. Everything you want is on the other side of work; choosing in one moment of time, to do the thing you know you need to do.

To have the same self-respect and willpower we've been able to harness for millennia without a dozen “systems”.

You don’t need a new “mental model”, you need to sit down and WORK

3. Acquainted With the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.

I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;

And further still at an unearthly height,

One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. 

I have been one acquainted with the night.

—Robert Frost

4. The Circle of Diversity

5. Workplace Commissars

Most modern American corporations function like a Soviet Politburo. Contrary to common belief, modern corporations aren’t managed by the CEO or corporate shareholders, they are managed in a court of law.

While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed real and immoral acts of segregation, it was vague enough in its language that it allowed activist judges to shape the American workplace in unprecedented ways.

As Christopher Caldwell put it in the “Age of Entitlement”:

“Civil rights thus does not temper popular sovereignty, it replaces it. What we call political correctness is the natural outcome of civil rights, which makes fighting bias a condition for the legitimacy of the state. Once bias is held to be part of the “unconscious,” of human nature, there are no areas of human life in which the state’s vigilance is not called for.”

Today, envy and hatred are the modus operandi for the modern corporation.

Specifically, the envy and hatred of males, whites, and asians. Candidates are not chosen because of their competence. And when they are — as in the case of SpaceX — the federal government levies harsh penalties and lawsuits demanding that “diversity” standards be met. Pause for a moment and think about what this means. A company that sends humans into outer space, which represents the pinnacle of engineering and human competence, is being sued for not hiring migrants and asylum seekers.

The reason why planes fly, why roads are paved, why our electrical grids function, is because of competence. For example, in the aviation industry, checks and balances known as the “swiss cheese” model prevent catastrophe.

For a plane to crash a series of catastrophic scenarios have to unfold in cascading order one after the other. Because of competent and highly skilled engineers, one small mechanical failure will fail to pass through the next “hole”. When this model is deemphasized in favor of identity and political allegiance, the entire foundation and mission of a company becomes undermined.

The increase in near-fatal incidents on Boeing planes is an example of what is already happening across corporate America. When the door of a new Boeing Dreamliner blew off at 16,000 feet in January, an NTSB investigation found that a majority of the lag bolts securing the door and other components to the airframe were loose.

This coincided with decreasing rigor and vetting in hiring practices. American corporate dynamism is now a tightly clutched boomer myth. Most large companies and corporations are slowly sawing off the branch they sit on, and there is practically nothing they can do about it. For an American corporation to thrive, they have to move a majority of its operational capacity overseas to compensate for the decreasing talent pool in the United States.

Should an American company choose to be cuckolded in its hiring practices by the US government, it commits to decelerating its growth. 90% of productive tasks are accomplished by a small handful of individuals and the rest of the company is largely staffed by modern-day commissars. When Elon Musk bought Twitter and fired 90% of the staff, the platform got better.

Most modern office work is fake and pointless.

California has spent billions of dollars to “solve” and hired hundreds of thousands of workers to solve the state’s homeless crisis, and it has only gotten worse. Administrative staff and needless bureaucratic positions have exploded in all major sectors. Does this correlate with an increase in productivity, results, or measurable growth? No.

There is no better example of this than in the modern “Human Resources” employee. A small caveat: My Mom works a high-level Human Resources job and I love her very much (Hi Mom). But her position — managing the internal affairs for a small county with many problems — is not indicative of the majority of made-up HR jobs in corporate America. The low-level corporate HR troll is a poison pill for productivity. Imagine an obese twenty-two-year-old waddling into your cubicle to tell you that you can’t have a walking pad under your desk because it’s a “liability” or that your glance at a fellow employee warrants an investigation. This is the daily workload of most HR employees: organizing pointless meetings and training, and killing the human spirit over the thick rims of prescription glasses. The Soviets placed commissars everywhere: bakeries, factories, government offices, etc, for the sole purpose of monitoring worker behavior and government allegiance. HR is almost no different.

If you’re a competent white or asian man and you choose to work at a large corporation you will be subjected to open mockery and erosion of your spirit by people who are intellectually and morally beneath you. You will be forced to engage in land acknowledgments to respect the culture of primitive basket weavers who took “their” land from a tribe before them. You will be monitored and watched with jealous contempt. You will call men women. You will be gifted a Chili’s gift card and given a 2% raise yearly. You will move up the ladder slowly, if at all.

6. The Sun-Drenched Nostalgia of Hiroshi Nagai

---

As always, thanks for reading

-Joe