inseparable anymore that over the course of my entire lifetime as a thirty-something, I have only held a single job—my very first—that didn’t amount to sitting in front of a computer using software and networks.

I’ve been an administrative assistant, a salesperson, a designer, a consultant, a coder, a research analyst, an author, a managing editor, a fraud investigations officer, and now I’m working to become an academic. I’ve just spent seven hours working on various “tasks” and checking them off of my “to do list.”

Everything, all of it, the roles, the tasks, the task list, despite the different functions and titles and requirements and instances, was using software and networks and little, if anything at all, else.

I think I decided to become an academic simply because it grants me the luxury, rare in today’s world, of standing up for a while every now and then, away from the screen. It’s either that or go back to my first job on an appliance delivery crew if I want a little freedom from the screen.

all definitions need to be a matter of relative thresholds rather than of discursive exhaustions. Or, to put it another way, perfectionism is unavoidably paralysis in any typical urban, informational, or postindustrial context.

There is a difference between the meaningful Zen-completeness of spending a lifetime trying to write the perfect haiku when one aspires to be a haiku master utter wastefulness that inheres in spending entire days on single mundane to-do list tasks trying to make each one a work of normatively-measured perfection.

“If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing right,” they say.

“The good is the enemy of the great,” they say.

“If you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself,” they also say.

But who gives a shit about the right or the great any longer? Do it wrong! Delegate it to random associates! It doesn’t matter! This is a dense world of essentially infinite connections. We have moved from the model of the doubly linked list to arbitrarily complex recursion and distribution structures. All critical effects are a matter of quantity because quantity effects are no longer logarithmic or linear (subjective) as a matter of operational orders of magnitude, but exponential (external).

There is no “right” any longer in the unitary sense. There is only quantity, multiplication, iteration. If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly a million times over. The good is more productive than the great. If you want something done right, toss its minima into the system and then iterate the delegation—connect, connect, connect.

—

In other words: if I want to get anywhere relevant in the world in which I actually live, I have to stop being such a perfectionist and start tossing as much garbage as possible that points back to myself into the system.

“Quality” is of no relevance, or rather, quality now inheres in visibility, not in objectivity.

—

Also: I have wasted far too much time on this blog post. Case in point.

A certain amount of discipline is required today to achieve just the right tenor of undisciplinedness. It is hard work to let go of a certain conception of hard work.

Therefore, the watchwords of the evening are:

Discpline*

Perspective*

* The use of these terms in this instance is meant to specifically undermine and at the same time to iterate their practical operational identities.