Three New Ideas for Monday, June 14
I’m going to try out a new newsletter format. Twice a month, I am going to share three new ideas or questions that I’ve come across in books, articles, documentaries, and such. I hope you enjoy it.
#1 - Tilling the soil is actually killing the soil. I recently watched the documentary Kiss the Ground on Netflix. It shows the importance of soil health to our agriculture system and our planet. Tilling the soil leads to the degradation of the soil and death of the various organisms living in it soil that help make it fertile. Tilling, combined with monoculture (growing the same crop over and over) is leading to desertification of our soil (think dust bowl) and it requires lots of synthetic fertilizers and other chemicals. As the organisms and plant roots die the soil is prevented from capturing carbon from the atmosphere, helping exacerbate climate change. Ultimately, the film is optimistic that we can reverse course. There are people working to help educate farmers about the benefits of rotating crops, increasing biodiversity on farms and ranches, and ultimately helping improve the quality of the soil while improving their financial situation.
#2 - Maybe a job that is interesting is better than a job you’re passionate about. I finished reading the book Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry by Jason Schreier. It tells the story of numerous video game studio closures and what happens next for the people involved. The video game industry is volatile, to say the least, and in many studios, it takes advantage of the passion people have for video games to lead them to working long hours for little pay while executives continue to make ridiculous sums of money. That very passion can create a real imbalance in the lives of the employees. As one interviewee in the book mentioned after taking a job outside of the video game industry, “It’s engaging and interesting, but not the thing I dreamed of as a kid… So it’s not the thing that’s occupying my mind at all times.” This helped him create a better balance between his work and his family. “He’d leave the office every day and have dinner with his family. He’d play with his kids every night before they went to bed. Slowly but surely, [he] was able to separate his work life from his home life, training himself out of the bad habits he had picked up over eighteen years of game development.” (p. 157) This has helped me open up my perspective about my own career in local government.
#3 - People can be convinced to believe some pretty weird things. I recently watched the documentary Behind the Curve on Netflix. The film focuses on people who believe the Earth is flat. In 2018. Yes. At first, it was pretty hard to not laugh a lot, but as I started to see, many of the people featured in the documentary are inquisitive, wanting to do research and perform experiments to prove that the Earth is flat. The problem is that when some of the people in the documentary performed experiments and the results showed that the Earth was a sphere spinning in space, they were unwilling to update their beliefs. I feel it’s important to be open to the possibility that you could be wrong. And when experiments show that you are, it’s an opportunity to correct. I’ve also been watching an HBO documentary series about the QAnon conspiracy theorists called Q: Into the Storm. It shows that people will believe some pretty weird stuff (Democrats and other “global elite” are trafficking children to extract their adrenochrome and drink it). It shows that some people want to believe they are smarter than everyone else and can see hidden patterns. It’s the same mindset that leads some to believe the Earth is flat, but in this context (think the January 6th insurrection at the US Capitol) it’s much, much more dangerous.
Hope you enjoyed this newsletter. Please let me know what you think, or if you have ideas for future issues. Have a great week!