There are other videos on YouTube that debunk some of the points presented here – watch them as well. It’s important to see multiple viewpoints on such an important topic.

I did – and came down on the side of the  video shown here. It’s not that I believe that every fact and the way it is presented is true, but that her conclusions are correct.

]]> http://thelessproject.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/the-story-of-stuff/feed/ 0 thelessproject http://thelessproject.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/the-paradox-of-choice-from-ted-com/ http://thelessproject.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/the-paradox-of-choice-from-ted-com/#comments Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:01:44 +0000 thelessproject http://thelessproject.wordpress.com/?p=74 ]]> This video is an amazing talk on why having more choices makes us so darn miserable. This is from TED.com, which I’ll sum up this way: take the most brilliant people alive, and give them 18 minutes to do one speech on anything. The results are amazing, they give them away on Ted, and it beats watching the news.

Think of this amazing fact: these types of talks, by these kinds of minds, were once reserved for the elite – only the rich and powerful could ever hear such things. Now it is available for free to anyone with an Internet connection – and the site ranks 2,152 by Quantcast.

Perez Hilton ranks at 270.

Are we focusing on the wrong things?

It’s made me think long and hard about what to put onto the box, and what to leave off. The notion of ‘Windows rot’ – the registry growing into one huge unfixable mess that slows the computer to a crawl – is another thing I am not looking forward to – it’s been the bane of my existence since they started using a registry.

As part of ‘Less’, I think cloud computing is one very compelling way to do this.

I think of my Gmail account. I got my invite early on and have been using the system for years. While I am not in love with the interface, nor their ‘conversation’ metaphor – and sometimes the search does NOT find what I am looking for though I know it’s there – the mail never disappears. You have to go out of your way to delete a message.

Every email before this one was tied to an ISP – you left the ISP, and there goes your mail. Yeah, you could back it up (usually), but good luck getting it into the new system.

No – Gmail is better. Not prettier. Better. I can change providers and it doesn’t matter – I’ve done so 3 times since without disruption.

There are other providers – Yahoo is another big one – but my preference is Gmail, with all it’s faults – simply because it’s not going anywhere. Cloud computing means having the faith your provider isn’t going to shut the doors tomorrow and give you 24-hours to export your data – if they give you that option at all.

Yahoo isn’t going anywhere either, but they are a bit more, shall we say radical in their changes? Google, is some ways, moves at a glacial pace. Maddening at times, but it also makes them a given – I don’t expect them to come up with some radical redesign that pisses off a large number of customers any time soon.

So that’s one less piece of software I need installed on my machine – an email client. And mine is always being updated.

You can even answer the road warrior’s concern – Google Gears – as software you DO install on your computer, backs up your stuff locally so that you can review – and even write your emails away from an Internet connection, though the notion of ‘being away from and Internet connection’ is becoming increasingly as  quaint as a 56K modem.

More on this to come.

I downloaded the release candidate here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/get/download.aspx

It will be available until August 20, 2009, so if you are considering it, time is short.

Microsoft cautions you:

The RC will expire June 1, 2010, and the bi-hourly shutdowns will begin on March 1, 2010. In both cases, you’ll need to rebuild your test PC to replace the OS and reinstall all your programs and data.

None of this scared me as bi-hourly shutdowns were pretty much the experience I was having with my paid copy of Vista, and March is a ways away.

The rebuilding part is a pain, so I thought I would try to take an approach that embodies the thinking behind the Less Project.

Back to Windows 7 for a moment, though. Before starting, I backed up the machine (with no confidence that the restore would work), then backed up my files and documents to an external hard drive.

Then I pulled the trigger – fresh install. No going back.

The experience was memorable because of how uneventful it was – it was simple, easy, and fast. It found my wireless printer itself, and I only needed my wireless password to connect to my home network, get on the Internet, and start working. It was even nice enough to make a backup copy of my important files and put them in a directory C:\Windows.old. How thoughtful.

I have been installing Windows since version 3.0, and this was the least traumatic install yet.

While it is still ‘Windows’, there is a different sensibility to the software. I use the term ‘sensibility’ because I recently got a Mac in the house and noticed the odd difference between the two:

The Mac just works. Oh, believe me, coming off a 15-year journey with just Windows, the interface does need some getting used to, but I realized that the price difference between a PC laptop and a Mac, while real, is also not real in one sense: the built -in software that come standard with a Mac is so good, that you would pay hundreds of dollars to upgrade your PC with software to work as well as the Mac does straight from the store.

When you get a Mac, you realize that all the software that comes with a Windows machine was somebody’s side project – it’s all crap that just barely does what it claim to do. There is no comparison between the iPhoto and iMovie software that comes with the OS and anything MS dumps into their OS to manage the photos and movies.

Anyway, back to the new Windows ‘sensibility’. With Windows, I didn’t expect thing to ‘just work’. That’s not what I think of when I think of Windows. Then I had a print job that didn’t print, and Windows asked me if I would like it to fix the problem.

Yeah, right. I have never seen Windows able to fix it’s own problems – every time I ever clicked on one of these offers (most recently the ‘Diagnose Connection Issue’ with my Vista machine), it was a tease – a waste of my time as I would  watch a progress bar move slowly across a dialog box – or an endlessly spinning circle that generated an even more despair than the old hour glass – then it would come back and proudly announce: Can’t fix it, pal – don’t have a clue what going on.

Or the even better: Looks good to me.

Now here, in Windows 7, it was asking me if I wanted it to fix the printer problem.

I felt like the I was part of the running gag from the classic Peanuts cartoon: Charlie Brown, Lucy, and that football – and how Charlie Brown was convinced that maybe this time Lucy wouldn’t pull the football away at the last minute and Charlie Brown wouldn’t once again end up lying on his back – the fool once again.

Like Charlie Brown, I gave in to some optimism hidden somewhere inside of me and told Window: yeah, sure – fix it for me.

And the darn thing fixed it.

It helpfully explained (for a geek like me) what it did as well: It check the print queue and found my print job corrupted. It then deleted the corrupted print job, stopped the print spooler service, started it again, then resent the print job.

That is not the Windows I’ve known in the past. This is a smarter, friendlier version with more of that Mac sensibility. It’s no Mac, certainly – but God knows it ain’t the Hell that was Vista.

As my work ties me to Windows – my clients use it and compatibility is critical – I can’t switch entirely.

But Windows 7, at least the Release Candidate I downloaded, is ‘Less’ – and in a good way.

As to the rebuilding of my Windows machine with a ‘Less’ attitude, I’ll cover that in a future post.

He wrote 27 books in his lifetime, and He loved to talk, and he talked mostly of philosophy, of different religions, and of his own observations on life and it’s significance. It sounds a bit boring, and perhaps some of them were if lectures aren’t your cup of tea, but he spoke with a warm and certain English accent that almost always had a hint of a smile in the voice, and he had an entertaining way of presenting his topic, veering off into small eddies of interest here and there, yet never losing his main point.

He spoke in the heyday of the drug culture, and as he was heavily into Zen, would often appear in robes and other traditional Japanese garb, which made it easy to confuse him with just another hippy philosopher running some sort of scam on the flower children of the time.

Careful listening of his lectures shows this to be a shallow take on the man and his work. One of his lectures was to a group of IBM engineers commissioned by IBM in the 1960s, and his understanding of technology, as well as it’s implications on man and culture, was top-notch and still resonates to this day.

Almost 40 years after his death, some of his word usage seems anachronistic – it was the 60s, and he was well aware of his different audiences, and would change his delivery to suit his audience. While you might hear the word ‘groovy’ in one lecture, at another, given in a church, you won’t.

He called himself a ‘metaphysical entertainer’, and in most of his talks, you can’t help but to imagine a mischievous gleam in his eye as he spoke.

I first heard of him when a northern New Jersey college radio station, WFMU, used to play half hour experts of his lectures each week. I was a stupid kid then, and as I grew up and the work-a-day world began to consume me, I forgot about Alan Watts.

20 years passed, and I began thinking again about the fellow. WFMU had stopped playing his lectures long ago, so I had to go on eBay to scrounge up creaky old cassettes of his lectures.

When I began to listen to these, I realized what an impact the fellow had on those previous 20 years. I had lifted so many of his observations, and his sense of humor regarding the seriousness of life, and his sense of absurdity.

It served me well in the real world, because if you listen beyond the anachronisms and somtimes even the content itself, there was just one message he delivered in all of his work:

Don’t take yourself too seriously.

This always allowed me to keep the drama down in sometimes stressful work situations, and even occasionally get the person who was about to blow a gasket to calm down a bit – or even chuckle.

As I described in my Ebay adventure, access to his work used to be difficult – his tapes were as scarce as hen’s teeth. But now his eldest son, Mark Watts, has put together a website where you can listen to Alan Watts, buy some lectures at very reasonable prices, donate, and even sign up for a weekly free excerpt that, after a few weeks, gives you a complete lecture.

The site is Alanwattspodcast.com and is well worth exploring.

If you don’t feel all that interested in the man after my description, I ask you only to watch this tiny movie – a short 3-4 minute excerpt from one of his lectures with an accompanying cartoon, which was put together by the creators of South Park, the snarky cartoon.

In 4 minutes you will get a taste of the kind of man Alan Watts was, and learn a lesson about life that I have kept with me over the years, and probably be delighted as well, as it is a wonderfully entertaining video.

http://freshminds.com/animation/alan_watts_life.html

While the Less project is partly about reducing the number of moving parts in life, I did leave an exception open for gifts to others. Perhaps its a way of weaning myself of purchasing an endless stream of stuff for myself.

To a fellow who works for me, I gave a bottle of liquor to thank him for the hard work he had put against a particular project. I had found a very unusual bottle, and I thought it distinctive, and fitting his personality. He thanked me and accepted it, saying that the job wasn’t done yet. I told him it wasn’t for what he was going to do – it was for what was already done, so no strings were attached.

On the same trip, I picked up a small dharma – a Japanese doll – for an intern who has worked with me this summer. She’s a talented young woman, and a dharma is not ordinary doll: in Japanese culture, you buy these at a temple. They are really not dolls but little heads with huge white eyes – and no pupils.

The Japanese use these as lucky talismans for big projects. At the beginning of  a project, they color in one pupil, and at the end of the project, they fill in the other.

I thought it appropriate for this young woman, who is so talented and full of potential, as I see her being handed some great project some day.

Perhaps the dharma could come in handy – not that I believe it has any powers – but just as a means of helping her to focus on the project, give it a clear beginning and ending point, and act as a reminder of promises made to oneself – which might be exactly how the Japanese think of them, really.

Soon after, a person I know, in the midst of a conversation about something completely different, just happened to go into a detailed discussion of her childhood, and described some personal details that apparently – almost 40 years later – she just couldn’t let go of.

I told her of a book that I had read – ‘Mistakes Were Made, but Not by Me‘ – a book into why people around us, can do such horrible and stupid things, yet be completely oblivious of this – that we can be the perpetrator of horrible deeds, yet through cognitive dissonance, trick ourselves into believing otherwise.

The book by turns, illuminating, entertaining, insightful, angry, funny, and finally mortifying as you see yourself in the pages. It was a book that, for me, brought about forgiveness to myself and for others.

It was almost if this conversation occurred because it as supposed to occur – she needed an answer to a question that had plagued her for almost four decades – and I firmly believed that she might find some peace, and maybe forgiveness, in the pages of this particular book.

My copy is beloved and I put it on that particular shelf for only those books I expect to refer to the rest of my life.

I gave it to her.

A little while later, I got an email thanking me for letting me borrow the book.

I wrote back saying I didn’t want it back.

The later wrote briefly to thank me, but I didn’t respond – it would have been too much about my own ego – that my thinking was: when you lend someone a book, you place a burden upon them and yourself: they have to take care of it and remember to return it. You are finding yourself, after a time, wondering: Is that person ever going to return the thing?!?

This prevented all of that. She has no obligation to me – and I have nothing to remember. Maybe without the obligation, this very busy person will find the time to read a book that I just think might let her put down this stone she’s been carrying for so many years.

So perhaps in some small way, I’ve made the world just a little bit better? That’s just ego talking again – and it’s not that important.

What is important is that these small, meaningful gifts – gifts with great thought behind them – bring to life a greater connection to the people around us.

I don’t think that this is a ‘guy thing’ – and it is something that escaped me until now.

It’s long, and it seems to almost contradict the notion of ‘simple’, but that’s because so many of us lead unbelievably complicated lives. Some of the items on the list might seem trivial. I don’t think so – sometimes it’s the little thing, the drip-drip-drip of messy drawers and searching the house for some doo-dad that been misplaced amid the piles of crud that can turn us into lunatics.

Perhaps it’s that we realize the impact of the big things and can better prepare for them, but it’s the small things that creep in on cat’s feet that really put the icing on the cake and tip us into overwhelm.

I’m thinking of printing this out and using it as a checklist – there’s too much here to read and take in.

Actually, on second thought, I won’t print it – I’ll save it as a Google Doc and link to it on my iPhone – this way, I can edit it and mark it up, it’s always with me – and no paper!

(I actually bought my iPhone 3GS with the Less project in mind, but more on that in another post.)

Anyway – here’s the link:

http://zenhabits.net/2007/09/simple-living-manifesto-72-ideas-to-simplify-your-life/

So why are Facebook and Twitter just so darn popular? Is the iPhone not only a phone, but an entirely new way of communication for people that transforms the way people interact with each other and the world? Is email dead as a mass communications medium? Are there times that doing things on paper rather than computer actually a better means of connecting with people?

These questions can change week to week. I can’t go to the proverbial mountaintop, contemplate my navel, and have the insights I need to follow my career.

And I love my career – that is not the problem here. Balance is the problem here.

In a 24/7/365 world, it never stops – the change just keeps coming, washing over you so that at times I feel almost consumed in this giant wave of digital, cultural, and psychological information – and sometimes it feels great. I sometimes feel plugged in to some great generator, the ideas, the insights, and the energy just comes from this naturally, effortlessly, and the products and campaigns that I collaborate on are just that much better put-together, better architected, more beautiful things than they might have been if I just did my job, listened to Howard Stern in the car, then came home, ate dinner, and watched whatever the Reality Show De Jeur is.

But again…that balance thing. Just how ‘connected’ must I be? I watch the trends, and if I see cultural trends involving technology, I need to investigate, wrap my head around them, and understand what is so compelling, and learn what they can – and cannot – do.  I get paid to know these things.

So what can I tune out if this is the case? It seems contradictory to think that I can somehow take in less when there is so much new and exciting information that I need to know in order to make a living and pay my bills.

The approach I’ve taken so far on this, day 5, is to continue to ‘smoke the crack’ that is my career. The metaphor is fitting (though I’ve never smoked crack): I love it, but at times it comes close to killing me.

There are two other big aspects of my life that consume me besides my career.

The first is my family. I have a wife I love and two beautiful daughters. They are sacrosanct. I once heard the sad statistic that the average parent spends less than 15 minutes a day with their kids.

I can’t imagine missing them – letting twenty years slip by and finding I’ve missed it all – and sorry, there’s no rewind pal – it’s all gone, the chance was missed, and this was your only chance – this wasn’t some warm-up – some ‘practice life’ where you could figure everything out, then get handed your real life, and do it all again better.

My kids get my attention in the evenings. Not scheduled, scripted playdates, but just being there for them, like a Dad should, talking about nothings, listening to their stories of their day, giving them hugs out of the blue because while they don’t know it, time is screaming by and they won’t be there all that much longer to grab and hug – they’ll be grown and out and about.

My wife is also sacrosanct, but she suffers from the same malady as I. We sometimes get so lost in the details – the minutiae of life, the administrivia of work, of running a home, and maintaining our collection of stuff that needs filter replacement, oil changes, and all the other demands our possessions place on us, that we seem to lose one another in the swirl.

Yesterday, however, we gave ourselves the opportunity to get connected.

While both of us sometimes work through lunch, on this day, she sent an email asking if I’d like to go to lunch. Usually our schedules don’t jibe – and I actually had a meeting – but it wasn’t mandatory that I go, so with some trepidation, I blew it off and went.

I made a point over lunch of not talking about work, and not talking about all the things on our to-do list to maintain the household. Sometimes it feels as if it always devolves to this.

She did talk of her job some, and I listened – perhaps I should practice this skill more. We also talked of the meal, and the weather, and lingered perhaps a bit too long over the dishes.

The meal was good, and perhaps it was good that we didn’t come away with a series of ‘action items’ about all the stuff we need to do.

My afternoon at work passed and on the way home I listened to a streaming podcast of Marketplace, which I feel is an entertaining and insightful digest of the day’s financial news, then turned on the iPod part of the iPhone and listened to some of the free music I downloaded from Amazon.com (more on this in another post).

I sometimes listen to the same old stuff I’ve listened to for 20 years, and there’s a certain meditative quality to that – perhaps it’s the closest many people come to meditation in their lives. But this time I wanted something new – I’m rattling my own cage, and wanted something different. There was much I didn’t care for, but I found a few gems.

Pulling into my neighborhood, I had a novel idea: how about the wife and I take a walk? It was a nice evening. But this was just something we don’t normally do. In fact, I don’t remember the last time we did.

When I came in, she was on the couch with my younger daughter – my older girl was out on her bike, with her cel phone in tow – visiting friends. As I kissed them both and sat down next to her, she said: “Would you like to go for a walk?”

I think I surprised her when I said yes.

We took my younger daughter in her stroller and our dog on her leash and went on a long, aimless walk. We almost seemed to be avoiding the administivia, the to-do lists of our lives as we walked, and talked about life.

We talked of time passing, of our older daughter and how fast she is growing, and how we both feel more overwhelmed by all the stuff coming at us in our respective jobs.

She told me how she doesn’t feel ‘put together’ anymore, how at one time she felt on top of her life, and had all the pieces in place, but now it was a struggle to keep up.

I told her I was feeling the same way, and decided to take the month of August to try to answer the question: since we can’t go to some mountain top and ‘drop out’, what can we do?

She told me the answer was more love.

I told her I didn’t think the problem was love, as much as it is love drowned out by the avalanche of all the other things that consume us. The kind of love that comes from a relationship of a dozen years is a quieter thing than new love, and perhaps it’s our lives that are drowning it out.

It’s not missing, it’s just hard to pick out sometimes in our Jackson Pollack lives.

The conversation meandered elsewhere, and I had mentioned to her how I was following her in to the restaurant that afternoon – she apparently arrived only moments before me. I told her how I enjoyed watching her walk – she always had a beautiful way of striding, sort of like a runway model, without the exaggerated affectation – it was a natural, unconscious thing.

It was a genuine comment, and I think she enjoyed hearing it.

When we came in, the chaos of the evening ritual began. My younger daughter was cranky and ready for bed. My older daughter was sulking because of the behavior of some friends and was in need of attention. I sat with her and gave her the time that she needed and the conversation soon veered off her insult regarding her friends and onto other topics, and soon she was smiling again.

I went to my bedroom to change and laid on the bed, tired from the day. My older daughter came in and asked me if I could listen to her practice playing the piano. I told her I was sorry, as she had asked the day before, but it never happened.

“Give me a minute to change, Love.” I said. “Then I’ll come down and listen.”

When I came down, her younger sister, just turned 3, came in, cranky and tired and spoiling for a fight. As my daughter began to play, the younger one pushed my older daughter demanding a spot on the seat. I knew this was going to end badly, and it did: my younger one fell, my older one cried and ran upstairs.

I took the younger one to my wife and asked her if she could calm her down while I give the older on the attention she needs. I then got the older one, who had a hurt and sad face, to come down and play the piano while I listened. After a little playing, she brightened considerably.

She got a good half-hour of my time, and then it was 10pm and I told her it was time to get going to bed. I grabbed a snack my waistline didn’t need while she told me of her brainstorming of a new online game she was designing with her friend and grabbed a chocolate milk to bring to bed with her.

We turned out the downstairs lights and went up. I gave her a kiss, and she told me: “Good night, Daddy. Love you.”

“Good night, Love. Love you too.”

Sorry if this all sounds incredibly boring – there were no great television dramas, no blockbuster movies in HD on our big screen TV. Just a simple evening, with no events, other than it having a heart to it.

An iPhone – especially the 32 gb version – brings with it a need to fill it. iTunes would be happy to fill this need, at 99 cents a song, or applications that run from useless to anyone except a cretin (the iFart applications come to mind here) to very useful and beautiful Naturespace application, which you can read more about on their website.

After long protesting it, my wife won the war of TV in the bedroom, as she likes to fall asleep with voices babbling in her head. It was a struggle at first, but I grew used to it (rather than enjoying it – I always feel guilty watching TV). The Naturespace app takes the place of the TV for me as I set the alarm in the iPhone to wake me up at 4am, set the timer to put the iPhone to sleep in an hour or so, then choose one of the 4 free soundscapes in Naturespace and fall asleep to that rather than the soul-draining blather of the TV.

The content is somewhat reminiscent of those ambient sound CDs of rainforests or oceans – the white noise of the real world, except that these people have added some sort of dimensionality to the music that is little short of amazing. I remember as a kid listening to some rock (it was a Doobie Brothers album, I believe) and the fellow who mixed it thought it an awesome effect to just swing the fader from left to right real fast. I guess in those days, with all that pot and the limits of sound technology, that was a pretty good head trip at the time.

Thirty years and a lot less prevalent marijuana (unless you live in California and have a prescription), the masses need something better. Naturescape does it with what they call ‘holographic audio’ which somehow allows the sounds to not only move back and forth from earbud to earbud, but also to move diagonal as well as provide sensations of the sounds moving in height and just about any other direction as well.

The first time really creeped me out – the ocean waves provide an illusion of the ocean that doesn’t quite recreate the feeling of sitting alone in the sand at the beach, but because the ocean noises appear to be coming from multiple directions, it feels like you are somehow floating in a raft some distance from the shore, which rotates so that the waves crashing always seem to be coming from different directions.

The initial creepiness dissipates quickly once you get used to the effect, and has not, so far, descended into ‘annoying’. The effect is very soothing and has been my sleeping companion for close to 2 weeks now.

They have a number of different sounds in their free program, but I typically listen to the ocean. That’s not because the rest of them are bad – all of them are very good.

And from the perspective of ‘less’, falling asleep to the ocean is preferable to listening to Larry King toss softball questions at some third-rate celebrity.

So I’ve swapped out one noise – TV – that pecks at my brain like a hungry crow – with one much more satisfying.

The darn thing is free on iTunes, so if you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, it is well worth checking out for all the time and cost (2 minutes and zero dollars) it would take to try it.

But me – I’m merely a whim away from it.

I ditched the cream in my coffee this morning, and brought some coffee in an insulated cup which was the remainder of my coffee for the day.  I could have drank the free coffee at work, but that would be cheating in a way – this isn’t an exercise in mooching – it’s an exercise in less.

So I didn’t take that walk in the mall to clear my head.

I didn’t go out and get coffee.

I did turn in a recently found lottery ticket for the Mega Millions that I won on – $3. I bout 3 new tickets with the return, somehow how justifying to myself that it was a zero-sum deal of sorts – found money – and didn’t count.

Even at this short span of 3 days, it feels like some sort of withdrawal.

And it’s not like I’ve devoid of things to entertain me.

I have an iPhone and this little device, while being in name a phone, is really a pocket computer that connects you so deeply to so much content, that I can never claim for a second to be without some sort of mental stimulation. I want music? Got it. Videos? Got them too. Want to listen to a University course from MIT? Learn French? Read a classic novel? I have French podcasts that will teach you the language, free courses from MIT, and hundreds of classic novels on the phone – all for free. Want to call someone, or chat, or Twitter, or check out Facebook? I can do it all at a red light in my car if I want – I’m not a second away from nearly anything.

But again, this isn’t supposed to be about getting free stuff (though I have a lot of neat tricks for exactly that that I probably will share as this blog continues) – it’s about less.

The old saying goes: less is more.

But right now it feels more like: less is less.