A little extra what? A little extra ANYTHING.
How to trade 10 currencies for a boost in your human capacity.
Spare change in your pocket?
MAKE LUNCHES
Okay, let’s math this out: say you end up with about two dollars in coins at the end of every week, so, about $104 a year. Let’s go big on this and throw it into an account earns a moderate rate of return of 6% for 40 years. The calculator on my desktop says that in 40 years you’ll have over $16,000—which, in 40 years, might buy you a sandwich. Still! Turn this into a hobby where you scour the world for investment ideas, get better than the rate of inflation, and your grandchildren might be able to get REALLY tasty sandwiches. Or you hit upon the next-big-thing and your grandchildren AND ALL OF THEIR FRIENDS can eat magnificent sandwiches AND get chips on the side for the rest of their natural lives. You won’t know until you tinker.
Extra tasks on your list?
SAVE LIVES
Imagine you’re an assassin. You’ve got six people to kill today, and they’re all over the place. No way are you going to be able to end them all—not today, at least. And then tomorrow? Well, your boss has set these greedily impossible quotas, and there are going to be six more people to kill at the end of this business day. What to do? The simplest answer is to kill your boss. End the pile up of tasks. Save on paperwork. The next simplest answer is to outsource the work. Delegate. It’s what your boss did to you, after all. And the most complicated but most rewarding? Tell all the doomed people you won’t hurt them if they start working for you, and enjoy a lifetime of magnificent sandwiches. Everyone lives!
And to continue to stretch this parable beyond its natural shape: All of the people you were to supposed to kill? They were all forms of you. And your boss? That’s your internalized and joy-neutering Protestant work ethic. You don’t have to do everything. You can’t possibly. Stop killing yourself. Be free. Have some lunch. The world will not end and nobody will die.
Many books to be read?
MAKE SOME TEA
You have a stack. They’ve become a piece of furniture. A hopeful sculpture. And there is only one thing to do with this monument to both your best, most curious intentions and to your worst time-and-cash-management abilities: Take your vacation days and slowly dismantle the stack, page by page, while in your comfiest outfit. There’s no such thing as too many books, unless the stack is so large that it topples and kills you. In that case, you need to start donating stories, but promise that you’ll read them first.
Spare minutes of free time?
TAKE NOTES
You ever get ideas? Thoughts? Got a case of the mind-worms? Do you ever and get REALLY weird and SKETCH? You naughty beast! You DO! Well, if you have a notebook, and enough optimism to carry around a pen, then you’re in luck! You can devise plans and systems for your own flavor of world domination in the time it takes you to boil a cup of tea.
A few jottings a day will give you the scaffolding you need to do whatever it is your meat computer wants. You’ll be amazed at all of the wild ideas you FORGOT you even HAD until you trap them in the zoo of your notebook. Just imagine the magnificent sandwiches or underground bunkers these ideas can build for your grandchildren!
Heartbeats per minute due to anxiety?
FIND SAFETY
Willy Wonka voice: Come with me, and you’ll flee, from a world of constant agitation.
If you know you’re feeling off, rattled, jittery, and unwell, admitting it is the first step to feeling NOT that way. And now that you have your heartrate as proof of your emotional state, you can begin to unravel the knot of WHY you feel the way you do. You can figure out how to step away from the danger your heart knows you’re in. Be warned: you just might become a yoga master, a hermit, a political activist, or divorced.
Extra metric tons of guilt?
DO A PUZZLE
Do your recycle? Enough? In the right way? Do you look good? Like, smaller and younger than is medically healthy? Do you even try to? Did you send a thank you note? A contribution? Are you at least AWARE of all the causes being campaigned for today? Yeah. So here’s what you can do with all that guilt, floating above your head like so much incinerated carbon: compress it into one thing you CAN and WILL and WANT TO do.
You can’t save the entire world but you can move single bits of small puzzles. On the Washington State Ferries, before this COVID thing happened, people shared puzzles.
Somebody would start a 200 or 500-piece puzzle on a table near the galley, and as the boats sailed back and forth, other passengers would put pieces in place. If you saw just an outline in the morning, by the afternoon (if you caught the same boat) a puzzle might be practically solved. There would usually be at least three puzzles in progress on any given boat. Rarely would pieces go missing. Rarely would people mess up the puzzles. The collective generosity of the passengers put those puzzles together—barn-raising on a miniature scale. Choose your puzzle. Do a few pieces. And then continue on with your own, precarious survival.
Skills nobody will pay you to practice?
BE VALUABLE ANYWAY
There’s so much waste in our systems. Food rots because it’s not where the hungry people are. Effort is spent making money instead of progress. Millions of years of profound education are transmuted into the forced smiles of underpaid and overworked humans. And so here you find yourself: being more capable than hirable, more useful than used, more willing than able, more human than efficient.Revel in that.
Practice your carpentry, your algebra, your chess, your animal tending, your friend-making and your happiness-inducing skills as you like. Play whatever instruments of joy you have. Not everything has to become a dollar. Including your soul. Define yourself by more than your economic output and it won’t feel so heavy on your shoulders. You are not waste in the system. It’s the systems that are wasting you.
Opinions nobody wants to hear?
MAKE PEACE
As people become themselves, sometimes their senses of right and wrong and true and false and possible and impossible congeal into opinions that SUCK AND ARE MEAN. So if nobody likes what you have to say, if you find yourself on the receiving end of many harsh looks but not any invitations, it may be time for you to ask yourself one very hard question.
Are you a font of wisdom or just an asshole? If you consider, even for a fraction of a second, that you MIGHT be an asshole, it’s time to stop making anonymous comments on the pages of your local news media and begin to make amends for all the hurt you’ve caused. Stop advocating for the devil and consider defending the people you want to be close to again.
Nasty kitchen build up?
CLEANSE AND BE FREE
Every open the fridge and recoil? What IS all that? How many decades ago did it expire? Why did I ever even WANT that? While this disgusting response is easy enough to ignore (hence the years of build-up), eventually, you will say to yourself, “Enough is enough. It’s time to clean this out.” And you will discover strange things! The fruits of your apathy. The remains of your appetites. Proof of your neglect. You will feel proud for tackling the wreckage and horrified it ever existed in your home.
This is a form of self-care, an act of radical cleansing. It is adulting distilled. Once you do this to the fridge, you will see that you must also clean the gunk out of your career, your habits, your hobbies, your feelings, your media, and the trunk of your car. It feels good to be rid of what’s rotten.
Worries you can’t put down?
WORK YOUR EXCESSES
Why look, if it isn’t a perfect conclusion to this little newsletter.
The extra stuff you have contains the antidotes to your concern. When it comes to worry, the extraneous can be fundamental. If you’re worried, you can focus instead on investing your spare change, dropping tasks from your list, reading a book, doodling in your notebook, interrogating the causes of your distress, doing one small and good thing, indulging in your proudest skill, calling a friend, or cleaning your fridge.
Doing ANYTHING shoves worry from the top of your mind and you end up with extra human capacity.