#58: how to design a life
a three-space model of moving in, all the books I've ever linked
Good morning!
I turned 33 last week and it felt like an arrival. The older I get, the less enchanted I feel by the future, and the more grateful I feel for what has lead me to today. That and I’m also more settled in San Francisco (4 weeks in) so I’m finally back at my desk. The writing community in this city is wonderful.
New beginnings are an amazing chance to throw out old systems. I relish the opportunity to design life anew, so today I’m sharing some observations from the last few weeks of settling in. A great big design prompt, if you will.
I want to start with this beautiful take on care work as an anticipatory act from Rachel Colidcutt, inspired by a piece by Meg Conley:
..care work is often characterised as a bundle of physical acts and emotional feelings, but in reality it involves predicting eventualities, mitigating the mitigatable, and softening the blows of the unavoidable.
Care work is the anticipation of grief is a beautiful articulation of care as a thoughtful and a thinking practice; a constant loop of recognising and managing risk. Taking care involves noticing and remembering, writing lists and prioritising; doing the right things in the right order to get to the best outcomes in the circumstance.
And:
Routine, anticipatory acts of care are often invisible. They might involve doing sums in your head in the supermarket, prioritising which bills to pay and/or which meals to skip. Maybe it’s getting a cab you can’t afford because you don’t want to walk home in the dark, or because you’re saving your spoons to get through the week. Whether it’s always carrying your ID in case you get stopped – or never carrying it for the same reason; keeping period products and a pack of painkillers in your bag at all times; getting the bus before the one that gets there on time because you’ll get the sack if you’re late; avoiding eye contact so strangers don’t speak to you in the street. One way or another, most people have a lot on their mind. Most people are taking care of a great deal of business just to get through the day.
It’s the first description of care work that I’ve deeply resonated with, and the framework I realized I’ve been applying to my own care work and media care work based mostly on intuition.
After reading the above, I decided to reflect on my own “settling in” as an effort of anticipatory care work. Here’s what I’ve learned.
What makes you feel at home?
Change is hard. Whether it’s a new city, a new job, a new family member, or the loss of any of the above, feeling at home can take a while. I’ve been observing all the moments in which I’ve found myself starting to feel at home. For example:
doing my morning writing on the floor at the coffee table
getting lost in a book while getting lost on a very long walk
completing my September memo (I’ve been keeping monthly digital memos of news and media clippings for 20 months now)
negotiating with myself to rest instead of work when I knew it was needed but I felt behind on the “to do list”
spotting a pretty unknown tiktoker at a cafe whose #sftok content helped me acclimate to the idea of moving here
meeting a new neighbor and learning about the wild world of local politics
Essentially, moments of deep presence where my inner self and outer self together enjoyed an experience instead of fighting over it (i.e.: inner self enjoying something when outer self interrupts to capture a photo, text or post about it, or outer self enjoying the moment and inner self interrupting to edit or evaluate the experience).
So I started thinking about how to design spaces to optimize for these moments of harmony, or feeling at home in myself and my surroundings. And I kept coming up with three. From the most personal to the most shared, they are: 1) home spaces, 2) third spaces, 3) media spaces. And they all require “moving in.”
Home Spaces
These are the little corners in your home that everyone has to set up. But why most Americans follow the exact same layout in their homes has always been strange to me. Does everyone need a dining table? What if you prefer eating on the floor? Does the couch have to center on the TV? What if the living room was a series of nooks?
So I thought about all the care work I like to do, and found myself setting things up by activity:
A corner of the kitchen dedicated to one’s morning tea ritual
A table reserved for home administration (lists, appointments, bank calls)
A chair for when you need a time out with the best view out the window
A work space limited to 4 hours a day because no one should be in the same 4x4 feet for more hours than that
A bench to dump all the messes and junk on to never be cleaned
A dining table on the floor because it fosters a completely different kind of conversation than the kind that happen in chairs
Essentially, activity-based nooks that add up to a home.
Third Spaces
A few years ago, the idea of “third spaces” became very popular as an antidote to the loneliness so many young Americans feel. Here’s a definition:
Urban planners seeking to stabilize neighborhoods are focusing on the critical role that “third places” can play in strengthening our sense of community. Third places is a term coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg and refers to places where people spend time between home (‘first’ place) and work (‘second’ place). They are locations where we exchange ideas, have a good time, and build relationships.
I’m grateful to have had many of these in NYC, perhaps the biggest loss of moving. But I’ve dived headfirst into several promising ones so far, one literally being designed on the premise of fostering third spaces and others centering on reading, writing, Buddhism and getting to know the neighborhood. These are important avenues of contribution too, and learning the best ways to contribute to one’s community.
Media Spaces
And finally, the most important: media spaces. The thing I’ve been most excited about with the move was the chance to delete my media diet and start over, which has felt fantastic.
Here’s a rundown on where I’ve started:
News Diet: Subscribed to the local paper and public radio. Have been reading it via a daily newsletter on weekdays and cover-to-cover in print on Saturdays. That’s 10 minutes per weekday and 50 minutes per weekend. I’ll do a deeper dive on this soon!
Civic Education: Decided not to leave it to just the journalists to inform me this time around, so I’ve been researching local organizations to follow and attend events by.
Social Media: This is an off month for me, but last month TikTok helped me explore SF, decorate my home, and find better routines. Twitter politics dive is up next. I can’t handle more than one platform at a time.
People: An essential part of any media diet are places to digest, debate and co-investigate. So I’ve just been asking everyone I know for reccs and explainers on all my information needs, ranging from an “I need more fiction” book club, to “walk me through the history here” friends who have been around for a while.
It’s all a work in progress, but I think I’m into this 3-space model of “moving in.”
Other news!
All the books I’ve ever linked are now available on my bookshop page, thanks to the help of SUA student Akemi Terukina—thank you, Akemi!). Check it out.
“One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance). The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.”
—Charles Van Doren, Mortimer J. Adler in How to Read a Book
Time Spent is an entirely free resource on media/culture and a public part of my writing practice. Spreading the word is immensely helpful as I test out some of this thinking. If you enjoy it, please consider sending to a friend :)
Looking forward to being back in your inboxes weekly!
Happy Tuesday,
Jihii