Week 206, Jobs, good, bad, indifferent

This is the book that I've read this week. Bullshit Jobs.

It's been reviewed thousands of times so I'll only make a couple of points. It contains some interesting ideas, it goes on for far too long (I reckon he could have boiled it down to 40 pages), and there's a lot of anecdote, a lot of which is from self-selected and not very critically assessed sources. I wouldn't dispute that jobs of this nature exist, however there is little counter-argument and the nature of the information is pretty insubstantial. An example which was included, presumably to add a little colour, was of the author's own experience at a British university. The example is where the author has a broken bookshelf which has deposited books all over the floor. The author appears to expect the person who has turned up to repair the broken bookshelf to also tidy up his books for him so that it doesn't present a risk during the repair process, this is the behaviour of an entitled prick, which may not be what he intended to be the case - it also may be due to the way he presented the anecdote, so perhaps I'm doing him an injustice.

The final chapter includes a great deal more social history and is much more interesting, however for me I didn't feel it represented the world of work from outside a male perspective particularly well and was woolly throughout. I understand that it was possibly meant to be taking a lighthearted view, in which case I would have appreciated more jokes.

I did read it from beginning to end, barring the copious footnotes, so it obviously held my attention.

Week 205, Time off for good behaviour

After a setback during September, October and November 2022 it's time to get back on the running bike. "Mixing metaphors already" I hear you say, well let's move swiftly on.

Running provides a number of benefits. It can improve fitness, it helps create a greater resilience to stress, it is an opportunity to get outside and spend quality time in an environment that you like and above all it is an excuse to use modern technological gadgetry under the pretext that it makes all the difference in performance for the aging runner. Of course you don't need the gadgets but they can be useful in keeping track of activities, and can give a non-subjective insight into various aspects of your running performance.

My main guidance however is a physical, paper book, which contains various running plans^[1] even though I may spend time looking at the techno-stats that are created after each run. The book (The Rough Guide to Running) discusses keeping a record of your training activities and provides handy suggestions for how you may organise these in notebooks, but of course given that we have the world of techno-gadgetry at our fingertips we can let that do the heavy lifting for us.

Here's a tiny, and not really representative, view into that world of data gathering. There is much more in-depth information to view but what I can tell from the performance information is that I've done too much in a short space of time and it has had a negative effect.

1 The Rough Guide to Running

A PDF copy that may or may not exist on the internet.