That’s a strange photo for a blog post to be written around, but I’ll try my best to describe it’s importance. It’s a still taken from an unreleased video I made the summer before last which is just me longboarding around my hometown and visiting old places of interest and nostalgia. It really wasn’t very good, but I’ve always enjoyed filming the footage more than actually making something out of it.

But it was a common sight that summer, looking over the passenger seat and seeing a faithful piece of bamboo reflect the warm sun around the dark grey interior. This shot in it’s video form shows the shadows of leaves in the trees lining old streets as they stream in, gently waving. The sound is sort of like a waterful or TV static. That white noise of wind. I sat in my car listening to bands I hadn’t heard since high school and staring out the window. It’s an understated activity, really. People see people staring out of windows and describe them as ‘doing nothing’ but it’s hardly a fair observation of what’s actually happening; in that moment I was simply being. I was parked across the street from a perpendicular road (think a large T that I was at the top intersection of) that has a perfect hill for cruising. Just steep enough that you can get some good speed and work into deeper carving, but not so steep that you fear for your ability to stop or bail. It’s a road that is lined with large, old trees and is in the general area of a small indoor pool we used to take swimming lessons at as kids. Beyond it is my elementary school where we were sometimes picked up in the very car I was sitting in then.

Cars as an interior space are an interesting thing because all of my memories come from the same viewpoint: my driver’s seat. With exception to a few from when I was a kid sitting in the back, most of what I know in that car is from the exact same vantage. The result of that is sort of a timelapse, where the time can be sped up to show the surroundings without confusion, because of the fixed angle. Most other spaces – interiors of buildings, for example – would speed up like a movie would, with cuts and scenes that happen all over. They’re all in the same space, but they can’t be compressed or played back in the same way.

And not that my nostalgia would be interesting to anyone but me, but it’s weird to think about all the people who’ve sat in that other seat. Or things, like the longboard or cameras or pizza. The handful of chairs I’ve managed to stuff into the tiny car and bring home. Lumber that’s stretched from the very front of the dash to the very back of the hatch (exactly 8′). My computer tower, seatbelted in and surrounded by blankets and pillows that time I came home for Christmas month school break. Guys and girls, conversations both heavy and giggled. The awkward silence of giving someone you don’t know very well a ride home. The acceleration-challenged rides with four guys crammed in and dancing to some ridiculous song on the radio. The hours spent parked in usual spots just talking and watching the sun set. The time spent alone, or talking to the car herself. Space exists in relation to the people occupying it, and in a lot of ways the car interior is the ultimate space for holding memories, simply because it’s there in so many contexts.

I bought a new car. I’m deeply excited, of course, but there’s a lot of me that’s bitter-sweet about giving up what amounts to one of my longest standing loves. It’s not to say I don’t have good friends but these past years have been filled with new cities, new people and new places – the physical thread that’s always been there has been this one car.

I’ve never made proper resolutions. I’ve never understood why January first is any different than, say, July 14th or March 27th as far as “I’m going to do starting on ” statements. If you have a goal, do it. The dates relative to the year’s beginning or end aren’t really important.

With that said, some observations of the past few years:

My love of photography peaked in 2009, I can’t really deny it. There’s 65.2 GB of photos from that year alone and 5 GB from 2011 and 2012 combined. This past Christmas marks the first time I’ve gone on any sort of roadtrip and left it at home. It’s just fading out of my life and that’s not good or bad or happy or sad, it’s just something that happens. I’ve always wanted to get into video but frankly, it’s a mess. Every time I shoot something there’s some issue with codecs or encoding or RAM or rendering and it’s tiresome. I spent countless hours last year trying to get film that I’d already shot into something usable and in the end never released it because the image quality took such a hit working around the technical limitations. Art – at least in that context – shouldn’t be frustrating. I shouldn’t spend more time fighting with the canvas than painting.

Blender experiments will continue, but I’ve reached my classic impasse where my ambitions outweigh my patience. I simply don’t care enough about a scene to spend the time setting it all up, even if my skills are entirely adequate to do so. There’s a certain excitement when you first start that says “This’ll be so cool when I’m done!” and I’ve lost it. I just don’t care enough about what I make. It’s message-less and bland.

So. This upcoming year. Next week:

I want to finish a comic. I’ve written a handful of scripts and some of them might even have legs enough to go somewhere, but I always make the first page and stop. Again with the patience thing: my ambition quickly outruns my ability to make them and I get frustrated. On every front, in every medium, I’d like to learn past this limitation and start truly shipping work.

On a personal note, I’d like to take up running and biking again. I did both a lot as a kid and just sort of lost them. Last summer I logged a lot of hours on the longboard, which is awesome, but something a bit more cardio might be nice too. Spend more warm, sunset evenings reading in the park. Maybe it’s just the winter blues right now, but I really should have done even more of that than I already did. Similarly; more hiking and camping. More log splitting and fire making.

I’d like to try paragliding in spring.

The odds are good that if you’ve ever spoken at length with me, you’ve encountered debate on some level from me. Know that while the medium is socially unusual, it’s actually me caring about you. Here’s the breakdown, as best as I understand myself right now:

My mind in it’s analytically monstrous state is at best a prodding machine, I find a topic or an issue or a conversation and dissect it at great, great lengths from every angle. Sometimes this is over time, and we call this “obsession” – which I revel in – and sometimes it’s instantaneous within the conversation, a talent which is used for humor; most comedy is about absurd connections between things. I am a dot connector. I am a spectrum analyzer.

We have in our everyday encounters these topics, these issues, that exist at their most basic on a spectrum. Most issues have more dimensions than a simple position on a line, more positions than simply shades of grey. Some people think only in black and white and these are usually insufferable people to talk to, best left ignored. Some people recognize the gradient but fail to see it’s connections to all of the other gradients and these are at least somewhat interesting, and usually at least willing to look at the bigger pictures and connections. The people I truly love to talk to recognize the abstractness of the ideas and are willing to dive into them fully. The people I truly love to talk to are the ones who are not only willing to debate from positions on said spectrums but willing to debate from any position, fluidly. My ideal conversations are ones in which we have no fixed sides but instead dance around to figure out the terrain via prodding at each other’s relative positions as we move over them.

The medium of debate is how I understand where something exists and, more importantly, where it does not. Occasionally words and ideas are shots in the dark that produce an echo – a sign of some wall or structure. We can continue firing in a variety of ways in order to map the surface of the object, the issue at hand. The end result of this, although it looks like arguing, is people coming to a conclusion of not who is “right” and “wrong” but what the issue at hand actually is. I don’t actually care if I’m right or wrong, and I don’t ever intend to imply the other person is right or wrong, my intentions (and hopefully those of who I’m talking to) are to simply understand.

If I don’t care about you personally, or about the terrain from which you preach (a word which here means I assume you are inflexible to your position (and might lightly poke to find out)) then I won’t engage you. There’s very little to learn about a subject if the sonar pings from the same direction every time. A flat view reveals so little of what could be a rich topic, I’ll simply find someone else to explore it with.

If I care about learning your position and want to understand it, I will try to find out what exactly it is. The best way I’ve found to do that is to disagree with it. But know that it’s a devil’s advocate thing; I don’t have to personally believe anything I say, I simply use thoughts and ideas to understand where you lay. It’s a game of Battleship where I can learn about the issues at hand and also about you personally, since most people won’t stray far from their actual, honest personal belief.

As a side note, this is why I write: to prod at myself. There are many examples in this blog where I start of with one thesis and close with the opposite. I’ve changed my mind halfway through laying out the evidence and since I don’t go back or edit, it stays that way. The famous aphorism: “Write to know thyself”

TL;DR I debate to prod at a topic in order to understand it. If I question you, it means I hold you in high enough regard to help me learn.

I had a post all queued up for today relating the Polish army’s trained bear to modern day robots but honestly, it was pretty lame. I liked the trivia but it made for a terrible article.

This is the part where if this were a live presentation, I would sit on the edge of the stage with my legs dangling into the darkness and my tone of voice would change into something more like a coffee shop conversation.

I’m frustrated.

The immediate next adjective that comes to mind is “tired” but that’s not quite true – I’m simultaneously agitated and restless. I’m proverbially chomping at the bit to sink my teeth into some big project. They say a happy creative’s life is being able to move from one obsession to the next and I’ve been fortunate to have had that basically as long as I can remember. I’ve always had some obsession and some multitude of projects to work on. I’m slowing down, and it’s upsetting.

The second part of this is a logic loop of lies: IF I can truly learn nothing more (and this is never true) then I should be able to make the things I want with the skills I have. It’s problematic because I equate knowing enough to finish the project and having enough patience and stamina to finish a project, which isn’t fair. I can, with the skills I have, execute a large portion of the things in my head. I break down when I devote an evening to it and get roughly nowhere and then give up. I feel inadequate with my skills, but they aren’t the issue.

And, persistence is a skill like any other – I consciously know that – but I’m struggling to learn it. It’s the mental equivalent of doing five push ups and going “Well, that was a good workout”

There’s a layer of guilt as far as this blog goes. I genuinely love it, but I feel like it’s served it’s purpose for me already. Frankly, I can’t stand critiquing things anymore, I simply don’t believe the same things I used to believe. I’m not sure there is a such thing as right and wrong art or design. There’s certain styles and forms and things that I like more than others, but I can’t condemn people for trying. There is a lot of objectively terrible design out there, it’s true, but I don’t care enough for outcry. There will always be terrible things and some guy writing some column isn’t going to change them. You get what you pay for.

On the flip side, there’s good design that’s worth sharing but I’m growing past that too. Last year, when my posting average was more than one per day, I was really, really up to date in that world. I lived and breathed it. Now I’m spending that time reading fiction and studying mythology. I’d love to start a blog or podcast about other things, and I probably will, but they will be just that: other things.

So what does that leave a design blog? Design philosophy I don’t feel strongly about and a message for people to get out there and make things as I sit in hypocrisy?

It’s scary and confusing. Am I being lazy? Is this merely a relative thing because I maintained superhuman levels for so long before?

In effect, my obsession energy is shifting from good, productive obsessions into ones of self doubt and the wrong kind of introspection. The energy is going into perfectionism and not into producing better work, which is self defeating.

Another post on the more hypothetical side.

Things. Stuff. Gadgets and doodads. Old and new, handmade and made by sweatshop hands. We associate a value with all of the things around us based on the object itself – say, it’s market price – and a combination of our personal feelings towards it: a favorite photograph might be worth a lot even if it’s just ink and paper. A hard drive isn’t just a spinning disk after a few years of use.

A question: You’re in a restaurant with a friend and you bought them lunch at some previous date worth the same amount as the lunch he’s going to buy you today. Now, this whole thing is a non-issue depending on your level of friendship and I’ve been fortunate to have never run into it, but nonetheless. He pulls out a coupon for 50% off, say, and proceeds to pay less than it would have normally cost. So the value of the food in both cases is the same – you both had your hamburgers each time, or whatever – but the monetary worth changes; he paid less than you did. Does he still owe you?

Of course, as I stressed before, ‘owing’ is a concept nebulous at best between friends. Forget that for a second.

When we say “owe” as far as the value of things, is it about what you get or what it cost the other person? It cost you $20, say, and you both got your food. It cost him $10 and you both got the same food. If you call value the end results, you’re even; you both got equal amounts in the end. If you call value about cost, you’re still unbalanced; he owes you another $10 worth of cost against himself.

I’ve become fascinated lately by the values people attach to things. I bought an iPad Mini recently, as a lot of people did and it replaced my 1 generation iPad, which I bought on the day they came out two and a half years ago. For me, that original iPad has every bit of value left in it. Sure, it’s slowly dying and the hardware is incredibly clunky (now that I’m getting used to what seems mind-blowingly fast) but it’s ability to do what I want is still inherent. That is, the value I see in it boils down to: “Does it do what I like?” and as long as I keep answering yes, it’s valuable. If I were to sell it at a garage sale, with it’s spraypainted black back and it’s crushed corner and worn patina there probably wouldn’t be much interest, even from the very desperate. It’s simply not worth very much to other people. They compare it at a money level, because they have the potential to take that money and spend it elsewhere. Since I spent my money long ago, it’s continuing value is based on different principles.

And so everyday life comes back to a set of priorities remarkably similar to those found on the design room floor: what are we looking for in a product, and does our design meet it?

Value, then, could be described as how much a thing does what it’s supposed to do multiplied by how much you want / need a thing to do it.

A blender could either be very good or very poor at making smoothies, but if you don’t want / need smoothies in the first place it’s value (to you) remains low.

So when we value ebooks and digital content (which is unique in that it can be made once and sold infinitely) it’s not really about how much the paper and glue costs (or: doesn’t), it’s about how much we want the information or story contained. The old supply and demand doesn’t really work here, because supply never ends. Demand, then, approaches the opposite asymptote. Value needs another driver. A thing done well. A good story x how much you want a good story.

There’s an idea that’s been in my head for a while now for an Alternate Calgary but I haven’t written it yet – here’s the real-world spin off of it:

Cars are a space, a volume, that moves between two other spaces, say, your house and work. They’re relatively permanent in state – the seats move forward and back but the car’s architecture, so to speak, is generally unaffected – while their position is not. They are a very brief tunnel, essentially. Imagining that all the air around you was a thin pink mist that you could dig away as you moved through it, walking down the street would essentially create a vacuum behind you, right? A tunnel. Now drive through that same volume in your car and we see the same thing but slightly wider. A car is a tunnel that only exists in a certain place at a certain time. A true tunnel is a space that exists between two points all the time.

The neat thing, of course, is this is a tunnel you get to control. You can drive it anywhere you want! This is a room between a room and a nearly infinite supply of other rooms. Not instantaneously, of course, but nonetheless. So when we talk about architecture as a volume, as a space that exists separated from all the other space in the world it’s really just a bubble in our imaginary pink cloud. It’s a bubble that doesn’t move, usually. Buildings, typically, hold their bubble still and contained; trapped inside their walls and ceilings. Cars are a smaller bubble that goes between them. As such, cars are architecture.

Now – and this is where we venture into Alternate Calgary’s worlds – what would a city look like if we took that pink mist pocketed by bubbles and lifted it up, removed all the actual infrastructure? Are there patterns in the tunnels that we could map and re-network? Yes, we could. Now, let’s look at the human interactions:

Say there’s a family of four. The two parents work in different places and the two children go to school in different places. What if the house they lived in broke into chunks and were transported by some means, say, a crane, when required. Let’s say that the chunks could be transported into other areas and re appropriated into other uses. If you put enough children’s bedrooms together you could make a classroom. If you picked up dad’s room (or study or whatever) and moved it to connect with another room containing machines he could work…

You get the idea.

So the tunnels between bubbles aren’t other, smaller, mobile bubbles (cars) as much as they contain the space themselves and are reconfigured. Because that’s the goal of cars, really: to rearrange humans on the planet.

This idea has been developing in the back of my mind for a few months now and I’ve briefly alluded to it before. Nonetheless, it seems to warrant further exploration.

What if we measured design’s goodness in smiles brought to users – a concept I called “delight” in previous columns – instead of, say, profit or ownership. Ultimately, this is one side to the overarching question of “What should we design?” and it’s basis “What deserves to be in existence?”

Throughout school and my early career I was a very utilitarian designer, very minimal and very essential. There wasn’t much room for whimsy or self-possession in the design, it should be quiet and unobtrusive. In a perfect world there wouldn’t be anything but we would be able to complete any task we wanted. Since this was impossible, it was design’s job to get as close as possible. It was a Rams world moreso than an Eames one, and I say this in the philosophical sense more than the aesthetic one. The Eames couple made toys and had colourful windmills and fun, whereas Dieter was German and stark. It was a Japanese zen approach: the space should not be filled with things but people, and those people will mold the neutral space to their own preference. I still believe these things and will continue to fill my own world with these things, but my argument here is on behalf of the rest of the world.

Unlike physical sales where something is either sold or isn’t we have to extend the metaphor for smiles as a currency. We can think of debt as the opposite of money but anti-smiles are a more complex absence. There are three states: delight, neutral and frustration. The best designed things we marvel at, we delight in, the rest either elicits no response or actively gets in our way. Ideally, of course, we should be designing for the first, but a large majority of objects are the second: they exist and they serve – often well – our needs but we probably don’t really notice them in the positive sense either.

The reason I love this abstraction is it’s broad moral questions that relate humans to design. Questions that bring up, for only one example, things like guns. Not inherently bad and in fact smile granting when used in a range but when used against other people definitely rack up the anti-smile cost pretty quickly. Should they, then, exist as objects? There’d have to be a net balance of smiles gained v. smiles destroyed in every object that either justifies or damns it’s being. Granted, for most things it’d be obviously skewed: the existence of ice cream cones is something that – I’m assuming, at least – would be far closer to the delight end of the spectrum. A water bottle might not be an actively exciting thing, but nor are they actively destroying delight either. So then, there must be other, external factors to finally decide.

Usefulness has always been weighted heavily for me, as mentioned above, I’m an inherently practical person and an inherently practical designer. Water bottles, we can easily agree, are useful. The reductio ad absurdum being holding water in your cupped hands until you need a drink. This would be annoying at best and tragically difficult in reality. Driving and typing become impossible, as would basically everything else we do throughout the day. How many smiles do water bottles destroy? We could point to the life cycle analysis – the energy used to make them, the shipping costs, the stores that sell them, the re-usability, the recycling efficiency / landfill cost and so forth, but in the end we need a metric that correlates those things with humans’ actual lives and their delight level.

Now, this is all good in hypothetical thought. It’s good for imaginative philosophy in both design and humanist circles but in practice becomes impossibly complex to work out. Who’s to say there aren’t families living in landfills who’d delight in finding a good thrown out water bottle? What about the people in the town next to the landfill who anti-delight in seeing it grow closer to their house? Where do those things stack up and cancel out?

But maybe, just maybe, it’s another thing to think about when designing something. Not just cost analysis or profit margins, marketability or sustainability, something so simple as “Will this thing make more smiles than it breaks?”

The year is 1937, a utilitarian loft with creaky floorboards houses rows upon rows of desks upon which rest an inbox an outbox and a typewriter rest. The large windows allow light to stream in, visible in the ambient dust. The clack of hundreds of mechanical keys reverberate the room’s hard surfaces. Women make social security cards by the thousand, manually adding the numbers and information.

It’s hard to argue that we should go back to this as a way of life.

It’s now 2012 and I sit in a comfortable pub with a handful of designer and engineer friends eating greasy chicken and drinking varying shades of amber. We lament the loss of simple mechanical knowledge in people; “Really, people don’t know how to change their own oil? Woah.” but I see both sides of the argument. Why should the common person understand the internal combustion engine? It’s practical, sure, for self diagnosis of developing noises or vibrations and usually more cost effective to fix things yourself but there’s little necessity to these reasons. You can, as many do, live your entire life comfortably without such knowledge.

There’s a good pile of essential design philosophy literature that insists that the world is collapsing because we’re moving into an information age, an age that doesn’t value physical trades like motorcycle repair. That we’re collectively dumber because our German-made cars have plastic covers over the engines with very little insight as to the magic underneath. Shop Class as Soulcraft author Matthew Crawford describes this as a “hood under the hood” with only a few caps for filling fluids, should the consumer be daring enough to even fill those themselves. This is a valid point, and one that we agree on – it makes sense to learn to do minor things yourself for the independence, know-how and often for the simple cost savings of not paying labour. But I disagree on the lamenting of society. Rather, I focus my lament direction slightly elsewhere:

These are books that suggest that a lack of knowledge is a problem, and that people who lack knowledge are dumb and shameful blights on good society. I’m hardly arguing in favor of ignorance, but I want to shift the blame to the cause, not the effect: a lack of curiosity. We in the pub are, as a former mechanical design class, a collection of intensely curious people. People who yearn to know what this bit of metal does or how it works. We’re the people who grew up on How it Works books and videos and absorb it with sponge-like minds because curiosity drives us. Do I know how everything in the world works? Hardly. Are they – the people who know such things – to lament and shame me for not knowing? In their eyes, yes. But I’d argue that my eagerness to learn it is the defining factor.

So instead of writing books about how society is going down the drain because the average person can’t change their own oil we should be writing books about how awesome learning how to do these things can be. About how to be driven and led by natural curiosity for the betterment of oneself. It’s not about the information age, the jobs that get cut will get cut because there simply isn’t a reason to keep menial tasks around explicitly to fill chairs with people; we’ve got grander things to do! It’s not about mechanical programs being cut from schools or a lack of teachers to teach them – try learning to code in high school; same problem – it’s about having nearly infinite access to such topics and having students who realize they can simply learn whatever they’re truly driven towards.

TL;DR A person’s knowledge doesn’t define them as much as their willingness to learn does.

Title photo via.

There was an essay that came out last year (which I won’t mention directly) about how the modern school system is entirely wrong in it’s current form and should drop basically everything that it is now and start again. I was, when I read it, furious at it’s apparent blasphemy but since then internalizing and digesting it and have come full circle though perhaps not to quite the same extent as it’s brash denouncements. There are still these kinds of people who are, frankly, crazy but there are also studies like these that provide at least interesting alternatives.

The design of math

Today I went to the bank to deposit a paycheque and witnessed an event that stuck me as odd. Now, I’m somewhat unusual in how early I’ve achieved what I have but please take this anecdote as example of the public, not of me personally being a braggart. He was a well dressed kid and I noticed him initially because he actually seemed very similar to me, standing in line a few people up. Because of the way the queue snakes around I happened to be standing next to him facing the other direction but couldn’t help but overhear who I assumed was his mother standing beside him outside of the line: “You’re 18 now, you’re going to have to do this on your own” – he seemed nervous. He had his wallet, a cheque and his bank card at the ready, a sign of non-practice and underconfidence. As the line moved we shifted and I ended up farther away, effectively ending this story.

What hits me, here, is that I’ve been there. I’ve been that guy who nervously prepares all essential items before the kind lady motions ‘next, please’ and you prepare your speech as to what you want done. In fact (and I’ve done this out of experimentation) you can actually get through the entire process of depositing a cheque without talking at all. The nervousness is entirely internal. But I was that guy when I was ~13. I’m 19 now and have been living on my own for over two years in the big city to go to school. It strikes me as odd that he seemingly hadn’t done this before. “Where was he when they taught that in schools?” I thought “Oh. Wait. They don’t, do they? I learnt that from my parents too, just earlier”

So it occurs to me, as much as I disagree with anti-intellectualism, why are we teaching kids how to factor variables and not how to budget? This statement is a nervous one for me because it looks like a slippery slope. I really like math. Honestly, it’s a love language. It’s beautiful and flowing and works and can be used to do all sorts of things that English can’t. I wouldn’t be far to say “Well, we don’t factor variables anymore, maybe we should just drop variables altogether” which is alarming. Algebra, as much as people hate it, is actually one of the most useful things ever. A fictional subtraction statement: I make $20 a week and spend $15 on living expenses – how much do I have left? Third graders could figure that out. But let’s rewrite it: I make $20 a week and want to keep $5 for free money after living expenses – what’s the maximum I can spend on living? The interesting thing is it’s the exact same but uses a variable. For some reason we take until grade 8 to get the “you can move it across the equals sign and just solve normally” thing. We can make it more complicated. Maybe ‘living expenses’ is actually five different things adding up. Suddenly we’ve got brackets for organization. BEDMAS. We can learn to balance expenses and incomes. Real world things. We can see how banks work and instead of doing boom-bust cycle global economics, we can focus on the economics of how the root levels actually work. What’s interest? How do banks make money? It’s amazing how many people don’t know these things.

Conclusion: I’m not sure it’s about more or less math as much as reworking math and taking it from a beautiful abstraction (which, let’s face it, is only beautiful to a handful of us) and making it into a comfortable, practical thing.

The psychology of math

People brag about being bad at math. This blows my mind. There’s an XKCD for everything, and it doesn’t disappoint:

I’m terrible at playing guitar. It’s hard and doesn’t come naturally to me. Fortunately, I also don’t need it to live a functional life. It’s certainly not a bragging point to bring up.

There was, when I was in school, a sort of popularity complex in response to that fact. If you were good at math you must have been a nerd and therefore uncool, so it sort of was in your best interest to be bad at math. This is a shame.

Like science (which will be addressed in another part), the goal here is to foster genuine interest. The famous Antoine de Saint-Exupery quote:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

It’s really not about rote memorization of multiplication tables. It’s really not about the discipline of not using calculators (this comes back to why that link in the first paragraph is insane) because we have computers now to do the heavy lifting. Wolfram Alpha is a gorgeous machine. Anyone can begrudgingly do 100 problems out of a textbook. The joy, the usefulness of math is seeing what you want to accomplish and then making up a method for getting there. It’s about problem solving by using a language that English can’t help you with, about distilling things down into known and unknown values and then massaging them until they spit out what you’d like. Teach them to long for the endless immensity of math itself.

They don’t allow permalinks to comments, but allow me to quote “disqusplaya” via The Atlantic:

…who cares if you can “only” bring in a couple hundred K a year. It keeps you and your 4 friends out of a “real job”, thrills 10s of millions of customers… not a bad gig.

The scale doesn’t really matter – it doesn’t have to be 10s of millions of people. I’m thrilled just to write to you readers, my mere 10s of thousands. It’s a non-money payment: delight. I get paid in the cool comments I get to read of yours and the conversations we have.

I’ve had the thought myself: why not start companies with the express goal of simply breaking even and just doing it because your idea is awesome or because you want to make cool stuff for others? Of course, there’s time and effort involved but if you truly love your product you’d probably already be working on it anyway and entirely willing and happy to share it. I would, anyway. I do, in a sense. It’s a bizarre thing I never would have guessed or planned to happen, but somehow there are people directly and indirectly giving me money for things I made one evening just for fun. You could look at it as loss if you assign a numeric value for my time spent as dollars per hour but if I did it for myself anyway, it’s sort of literally free money.

So we stand way back and think larger: what’s the point of existence? How do we live? Is this whole bitter 9-5 job economy actually the only way?

And we see people who argue for the collection of things. Massive tangible riches via long hours and hard work. That’s “success” – the American Dream.

Maybe I’m just more of the altruist artist than I’d like to admit, but I look at that and wonder why? As long as I have enough to live, why wouldn’t I start collecting in the currency of delight?

But it works in both directions (and this is more of a change in me personally) – paying for delight. I’m famously frugal because I measure things in purely time terms. $50 concert? That’s way too much. I could see a $14 movie for those same two hours. Or, I could get a $5 game and play it for 50 hours. I’ve written about this before. Something that needs to be learned is that $50 for a 30 second bungee jump can be worth it based on the experience itself, not the time taken to experience it. The delight currency, coming full circle.

Let’s face it, hard work =/= money. If that were true there’s a lot of single mothers working two jobs who want their cheques, please. But even without money we can make their lives better. It’s not about the rich or poor, though, if I started a t-shirt line I don’t really care who buys or wears them; I just want to know that whoever does enjoys what I’ve created. It’s a selfish act with a selfless result, I suppose, but I’m still not sure how I feel about Ayn Rand.