Don't quite recall, but I think it was from a book about cathedral builders or something. But I'll admit my knowledge of medieval guilds is largely superficial and drawn from books where it was a side issue rather than the main topic. Your description sounds like you know what you're talking about. Got any good references (books, not articles) worth reading to get a clearer idea of how guild economies worked?
If you had your own iPhone app and knew how to market it properly, you wouldn't be at the mercy of Groupon's well-known strong-arm tactics in dealing with small businesses for instance. Or some other alternative tech-savvy way to market your business so you aren't killed by a few bad Yelp reviews or discounts from the social commerce/coupon startups that you don't know can hurt you till you try them. Many of the more prosperous small businesses are already starting to vie for control over their customer acquisition channels.
In political science, a fairly well-known basic idea is that the two ways to dissent are exit and voice. Exit means you leave and go somewhere else, and was common in early political eras when most civilizations were small and surrounded by plenty of nomadic/lawless regions to retreat to. As populations increased, voice (i.e. protest, class warfare etc.) became increasingly common. The classic reference on this is "Exit, Voice and Loyalty" by Albert O. Hirschman. It's been on my reading list for a while.
For developers, it is swinging back towards exit, since the Internet can be considered a kind of virtual equivalent of the nomad regions to retreat to.
"Center-periphery" dynamics is the common term in geopolitics for dissent dynamics driven by movement inside/outside a core. Class warfare is the better known kind of dissent involving unionization etc. and involves fighting up and down a class structure.
Guilds, historically, were a medieval kind of institution that had characteristics of both exit and voice. The classic guild professions (weaving, masonry and in more recent times, things like typesetting in pre-lithography days) used their portable skills to leave kingdoms/cities and move elsewhere if they didn't like their current situation. This option was not really available to laborers tied to the land, and was essentially an urban phenomenon. This is the origin of the term "journeyman" for instance... apprentices who would follow master craftsmen around until they became masters in their own right.
It isn't an old guard thing. It is a personality and strengths thing. I am not particularly old guard (I am 37), and while I am about average in the technologies I do know, I suck at learning new platforms/technologies. It's like pulling teeth.
Those who are good at it just don't get how hard it can be for those are not quick learners in this sense. This is part of not knowing their own value -- claiming that learning new languages is "easy." It is. For them.
That's the gist of it, with one correction. The 10,000 hours bit is fine, the missing detail is how you count to 10,000 when there are no convenient external reference points. The true extrinsic variables are things like a named discipline or degrees as indicators of experience.
True. That's why I took care to separate out the clinical cases as carefully as I could. The reverse is also true: people who can be helped by cognitive reframings may not find medication useful. In fact, it can make things worse. A significant proportion of patients on depression and bipolar meds get worse, not better.
I have no problem admitting that I have been on medication a couple of times, for brief periods. It was a long time ago, and so ineffective/counterproductive for me that it was the kick in the pants I needed to decide to take control of my life at a more cognitive level. It convinced me that meds are vastly overprescribed for what might be called "existential" illnesses. That experience did inform my post.
But there is an aspect of this stuff that is perhaps even bigger than the mild/severe distinction and the pop-psych/clinical psych distinction.
This is the fact that professional or amateur, anybody who thinks they actually understand more than 10% of this sort of thing is a liar. I wouldn't trust any professional who refused to admit that we just don't understand 90% of what's going on, at either a cognitive or biochemical level. There is as much bs spouted by the supposed "professionals" about serotonin as there is by amateurs like me opining about how to climb out of slumps.
Not that I think my stuff is bs, but my kind of writing belongs in a category with more than its fair share of bs :)
The short answer is: you get used to it, but it is not ideal or a particularly healthy work lifestyle. It has many of the same problems as solitary confinement within a prison.
Since the pattern is increasing all around, more social support structures are emerging around work-from-home lifestyles, but frankly, the current state is very primitive.
Though I do that kind of cliffhanger stuff on occasion, that isn't the reason here. My "theory of Toby" merely requires a good deal of groundwork to be laid. And you're right on both counts... he's not in the hierarchy, and Zen/transcending have a role in the explanation.
It just won't be the kind of feel-good Zen/transcending you are probably thinking of (which you should expect, since Toby displays too much misery to be a traditional Enlightened One).
If you are really curious about how I am developing this thread, read Nietzsche's 'Thus Spake Zarathustra'
ah, I stand corrected. this is a hazy memory from a Reader's Digest condensed book I read 20 years ago titled "I captured Adolf Eichmann" ... can't seem to find a ref to it anywhere online now.
Actually, I did spend a year (and parts of 2 summers) in Austin. I used to go for late night walks near my apartment, which was just off 183, well north, in strip-mall land.
If you walk slowly enough, you won't sweat. Or maybe that's just Austin.
I think that nails it. There is an urge to demonstrate your success in everything you do, and some activities just aren't good mediums for showcasing how awesome you are.
I am pretty darn surprised that THIS post has gotten vastly more discussion than just about any of my ribbonfarm posts that's gotten on HN.
A few quick adds, since I seem to have mildly offended some of you.
0. The tangent on "having a life" here is fascinating. Nothing to add, but I am now seriously curious about the ethnography of that phrase.
1. Is this anti-American? I don't really think so. There is research (see Robert Levine, "The Geography of Time") that shows that cultures have characteristic tempos, down to typical walking speeds. Yes, the vastness of America has something to do with it, but I think 80% of the dynamics are social, not physical, and also relatively recent (cellphones etc. have helped Americans express this preference a lot more clearly). Back before Thoreau's time, I think this wasn't so characteristic of America. There are no better celebrations of idleness than the works of that uber-American writer, Mark Twain. The disease is fairly new.
2. "If you are thinking about blogging about your judgments of how others are not taking a walk, then YOU are not taking a walk." Very fair and Godelian critique, but I am talking about idle foot-and-mind wandering here, not meditation. I'll leave that kind of walking to the Zen monks. My model isn't a Zen monk, it is Tom Sawyer walking along kicking a can or something. The xkcd Bored with the Internet strip http://xkcd.com/77/ is sort of my point as well, except that I still take walks anyway, despite the irony.
3. If I came across as judgmental or telling people how to actually take walks... sorry. Meant to be mostly tongue-in-cheek :) Poor writing execution, not intent.
That's one of the drivers, certainly, but there's many more forces. Check out Dan Pink's "Free Agent Nation" for more. It's a few years old by now, but still the best view of the overall trend.